The Empire State Building Engagement: What "Skywalkers" Ivan Beerkus and Angela Nikolau Reveal About Adrenaline as an Attachment Strategy
On Wednesday, two figures in black clothing scaled the outside of the Empire State Building. At the top, one of them appears to have proposed. The couple was later identified as Ivan "Vanya" Beerkus and Angela Nikolau, the Russian rooftoppers whose relationship was documented in Netflix's 2024 film "Skywalkers: A Love Story." According to a recent Variety piece, the pair have made a career of dangling off the tallest structures on Earth, and now they have done it above midtown Manhattan with a ring involved.
The internet is calling it the most romantic proposal of the year. A grand gesture. Evidence of a love that laughs in the face of death.
I want to offer a different reading. Not because I have met either of them. I have not. I will not diagnose two people I have never sat with. But I have spent seventeen years in a therapy room with couples who use spectacle as a language, and I want to say something about what a body is often doing when it chooses a 100-story ledge over a kitchen table.
Because here is the quiet truth underneath the awe. For a defended body, hanging off the Empire State Building is often easier than sitting across from your partner on an ordinary Tuesday and saying, "I am terrified you will stop choosing me."
Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.
From The Moment To The Thread
Grand romantic gestures are not the problem. Rings on mountaintops are not the problem. People have always reached for beauty and altitude to mark the moments that matter.
The problem is when the altitude becomes the whole vocabulary. When your bond can only speak in ledges. When the only way you know how to answer "do we still matter to each other" is to strap yourselves to a spire above a city and hope the wind confirms it.
That is a thread worth pulling. Because plenty of people who will never scale a skyscraper are running the same pattern in miniature. Booking the trip instead of having the conversation. Planning the wedding instead of learning the partner. Producing the highlight reel instead of tasting the mango.
The Penthouse, Taken Literally
I use a metaphor with high-achieving couples that I think applies with unusual precision here.
Imagine your emotional life as a building. At the top is the Penthouse. It is clean, strategic, controlled. This is where you analyze and execute and manage. Almost every high performer I have ever worked with lives up there. It is comfortable. You can see everything. You are in control.
At the bottom is the Basement. It is dark and messy and disorganized. This is where your raw vulnerability lives. Your shame. Your fear of not being enough. Your loneliness. Your grief about whatever conditions shaped you into someone who needed to become this competent.
High achievers are brilliant in the Penthouse. They can describe a mango in exquisite detail. They can analyze their relationship problems with McKinsey precision. They can tell you what is wrong and propose three solutions. What they cannot do is walk down the stairs and taste the actual experience of being with their partner in the present moment. Because tasting it means going to the Basement. And the Basement is where they have kept everything they have spent their lives running from.
Now look at what Beerkus and Nikolau, in the public record of what they do, appear to be doing. They are climbing to the literal Penthouse of the tallest buildings on the planet. This is not a criticism. It is a description. Something in the choice is worth noticing. Scaling to the highest point in New York is a spectacular, moving, physically astonishing way of refusing to come down into the ordinary rooms where the harder question lives.
The Penthouse is where you describe the mango. The Basement is where you taste it. Everything worth having in a bond happens in the Basement.
Adrenaline As A Protector Part
The word "workaholic" is a lazy word, and the word "adrenaline junkie" is worse. Both treat a compulsion as a personality trait. Neither of them is.
In my office, I treat these patterns as protector parts. A protector part is a strategy the body built, usually very early, to keep a small person safe inside conditions that were not safe. It is not a flaw. It is not a conscious choice. It is a brilliant, loyal adaptation that once saved you and is now running your life.
For some people the protector is achievement. Be indispensable and no one can leave you. For others it is caretaking. Be needed and no one can leave you. For others it is adrenaline. Stay in states of controllable, external emergency and you never have to sit still long enough to feel the internal, uncontrollable emergency underneath.
A body that is dangling off a building is a body that is very busy. There is no room in that physiology for the quieter, harder frequency of "will you still love me when I am not spectacular." The physical danger drowns out the attachment danger. And here is the thing I want to be careful with. That is not weakness. That is not cowardice. Protecting is not the same as connecting, but protection got you here. Protection kept a scared kid alive. Protection is not the enemy. It just cannot build a bond by itself.
I have written more about this in a piece on workaholism and the protector parts that run the show. The particulars of the costume change. The mechanism does not.
The Two Questions Underneath Every Ledge
Underneath every bonded relationship, the body is only ever asking two questions. Are you a priority to me. Do I fully have you. Every fight, every silence, every grand gesture is a variation on those two questions.
The mistake most couples make is confusing the content with the system. Couples fight about dishes instead of abandonment. They fight about tone instead of shame. They plan proposals on the Empire State Building instead of asking, on a normal night in a normal apartment, "am I enough for you."
Both are attempts to get an answer. The kitchen fight and the skyscraper climb are, at the level of the survival response, the same behavior. Both are the body reaching for confirmation that the bond is still alive. One just has better lighting.
The problem is that the answer you get on the ledge does not travel home. Adrenaline is not intimacy. The dopamine of survival is not the slow, boring nutrition of being known. You can propose to someone on top of the tallest building in New York and still, three months later, be sitting at breakfast unable to say the thing that actually needs saying.
If you want to name your own version of this pattern before you do anything else, you can take the free Figs Quiz.
Orphan Sovereignty Dressed Up As Romance
There is a particular story the culture loves about couples like this. Two lone wolves. Two renegades. Two people who need no one and found each other. Rugged self-sufficiency plus love equals the ultimate partnership.
I want to push on that.
There is a version of self-reliance I call orphan sovereignty. It is the belief that I am an island, that I do not need anyone, that dependence is weakness. That is not sovereignty. That is self-protection wearing sovereignty as a costume. Real sovereignty is not the refusal of need. It is the capacity to hold your own ground while staying available to be affected by another person.
The couple who scales buildings together looks, from the outside, like the ultimate in mutual sovereignty. Two independent bodies choosing each other in the sky. But sovereignty tested against gravity is not the same test as sovereignty tested against ordinary intimacy. It is easier, for a certain kind of body, to trust your partner with your literal life than to trust them with the softest, most humiliated parts of you. Falling from a building is a clean death. Being seen and found wanting is not.
The goal I work toward with couples is what I call a Sovereign Us. Two people staying present without disappearing into each other and without overpowering each other. A shared emotional system that holds both people with compassion and truth. That is not built on ledges. It is built in the boring, patient labor of returning to each other after a rupture in an ordinary room.
Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.
Fiat Love And The Real Labor Of The Bond
I have been writing for a while about what I call Fiat Love. The idea is borrowed from money. Fiat money is money issued by decree, unbacked by anything real. It looks like money. It spends like money. But its value can collapse the moment collective belief in it collapses.
The same dynamic shows up in couples. Love issued by decree looks like love. It has the aesthetics of love. Rings, proposals, documentaries, viral moments, matching outfits, joint Instagram accounts. But it is not backed by the substance underneath. It has not been tested against rupture. It has not been forged in the quiet, unglamorous work of repair. And the moment the collective belief in the spectacle wobbles, the value collapses.
Real love, the kind that actually holds, is Proof of Work. The Work is repair. It is the continuous expenditure of emotional energy that goes into turning back toward a partner after you have hurt them, after they have hurt you, after the small daily failures of two people trying to find ground together inside conditions no one ever prepared you for.
The actual repeated effort is not photogenic. It is not scalable. You cannot compress it into a Netflix cut. It happens in the two minutes after a fight where you take a breath and say, "I am sorry. That was my hurt talking. Come back." It happens in the twenty seconds where you register that your partner has gone quiet and instead of doubling down you soften and ask, "did I lose you just now." It happens in the hundred small returns that no one is filming.
The forthcoming book I have been working on has a lot to say about this. The short version is that any relationship worth being in has to be backed by something real, and the only thing that can back a bond is the accumulated evidence of repair.
The Volatility Is The Point
Bitcoiners like to say that volatility is a feature, not a bug. It tests conviction. It matures the holder. The same is true inside a bond. Emotional volatility is not a sign the relationship is broken. It is your body saying, we matter to each other.
The couple who never fights is often the couple who has stopped reaching. The couple who fights and returns, fights and returns, fights and returns, is the couple whose bond is being tempered.
You do not need to manufacture external volatility to prove your love is real. Life will supply the volatility. A job loss will supply it. A miscarriage will supply it. An illness, an in-law, a betrayal, a middle-of-the-night fear you cannot name. The question is not whether the ground will shake. The ground will shake. The question is whether you have practiced returning to each other on ordinary days so that, when the ground shakes, your hands know how to find each other in the dark.
I have written about this in the context of couples navigating betrayal after an affair, and in the context of couples trying to have the prenup talk without collapsing the bond. Different content. Same underlying architecture. The bond is built or broken not by the size of the rupture but by the depth of the repair.
The Application, For You
You are not going to climb the Empire State Building. Probably. But you are almost certainly running some smaller version of this pattern.
Notice where you reach for spectacle when what is asked of you is presence. Notice where you plan the big trip instead of having the small conversation. Notice where you propose the elaborate solution instead of sitting in the mess with the person you love. Notice where you climb, in your own way, to your own Penthouse, because the Basement feels unsurvivable.
The gesture is not the enemy. Beauty is not the enemy. Grand moments have their place. But if the gesture is a substitute for the conversation, the gesture is a form of avoidance no matter how spectacular it looks from below.
Come down from the ledge. Not the literal one. The one inside you. The one where you have been performing love instead of practicing it. The Basement is not as dangerous as your activation has told you it is. The person you love is standing at the bottom of the stairs, and they have been waiting a long time for you to walk down.
Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.
The ledge will not answer the question your body is actually asking. Only the person across the kitchen from you can. Go find them.
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