Hi CMS -- I interpret "clingyy" to be a behavior that crosses a boundary of what is appropriate. Clingy is that point where giving attention is not emotionally healthy for one or both people.

Different people have different boundaries where this is concerned. If two people enjoy being together so much that they do everything together and love it, they are well suited for each other and the amount of attention is appropriate for both -- even though people on the outside might call it "clingy." It may, however, create a rather small world for those two people, if they don't invest enough time in relationships with family, friends, and other activities. The French have a name for extreme manifestations of this phenomenon: folie a deux. Meaning -- a craziness that involves two people. It is not a positive descriptor. It means that the two people buy into a mutual fantasy so deep that they may lose track of the outside world. For example, there are cases of siblings who develop a private written language code for communicating with each other. And become cut off from almost everyone else. I believe that the current phrase that covers unhealthy manifestations of clingyness is "get a life."

Sometimes people in a relationship have different boundaries. Part of sustaining the relationnship involves figuring out what these are and adapting to the other, so long as it doesn't mean cutting off a vital part of your own identity. Relationships involve compromise as well as receiving emotional gifts. You are right -- if Kayleigh needs to give more attention than bf can tolerate, it may be time to get a new bf who also that much attention.

However, I stand by what I previously wrote, because I see this phenomenon of clingyness in my students, and I have studied emotional development, insofar as it concerns the young adults I teach. This period of development involves a process of "individuation," or achieving a personal identity separate from your parents. That's why it involves rebellion for so many young people. For these, rebelliousness is the only way that they can express the boundary they are setting between "me" and "you parents." Setting the boundary is a process, an activity, of experimentation for many young adults. Who am I? How am I different and how am I the same as my parents? Do I enjoy different activities than they did? Do I want to change values, assumptions, and beliefs that I inherited from them? From my church? From my schools? This process continues throughout life for most of us, as we experience new things, change and grow. It is typically at its most intense in young adulthood, as we confront the vista of the opportunities and responsibilities of being on our own, and in middle age, as we confront the diminution of our physical and earning powers -- and prospect of death.

Young people who try to fill up that space in their identity -- the vacuum left by emotional dependency on parents -- with a boy- or girlfriend are depriving themselves of a vitally important opportunity to learn what it is to be truly oneself. To inhabit that identity fully and gloriously. Reaching that place is not always comfortable. It can involve loneliness, confusion, frustration, fear -- as well as delight, joy, feelings of achievement, satisfaction, and pleasure. Unwillingness to confront the process of individuation courageously can result in using another person -- the bf or gf -- to avoid creating one's own identity by absorbing oneself into the other's life -- and may result in clingyness.

Sorry to be so long-winded. I struggle with issues of identity and self in creating my middle-aged beingness.