Chapter Excerpt

“We live in the shelter of each other.”

Love may be the most used and the most potent word in the English language. We write tomes about it, pen poems about it. We sing about it and pray for it. We fight wars for it (see Helen of Troy) and build monuments to it (see the Taj Mahal). We soar on its declaration — “I love you!” — and plummet at its dissolution — “I don’t love you anymore!” We think about it and talk about it — endlessly.

But what is it really?

Scholars and practitioners have wrestled with definitions and understanding for centuries. To some cold-blooded observers, love is a mutually beneficial alliance based on trading favors, a give-get bargain. Others, more historically inclined, regard it as a sentimental social custom created by the minstrels of thirteenth-century France. Biologists and anthropologists view it as a strategy to ensure the transmission of genes and rearing of offspring.

But to most people love has been and remains still a mystical elusive emotion, open to description but defying definition. Back in the 1700s, Benjamin Franklin, an astute student in so many areas, could only attest to love as “changeable, transient and accidental.” More recently, Marilyn Yalom, in her scholarly book on the history of the wife, admitted defeat and called love an “intoxicating mixture of sex and sentiment that no one can define.” My English barmaid mother’s description of love as a “funny five minutes” is just as apt, if a little more cynical.

Today, though, we can no longer afford to define love as a mysterious force beyond our ken. It has become too important. For better or worse, in the twenty-first century, a love relationship has become the central emotional relationship in most people’s lives.

One reason is that we are increasingly living in social isolation. Writers like Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone point out that we suffer from a dangerous loss of “social capital.” (This term was coined in 1916 by a Virginia educator, who noted the continuous help, sympathy, and fellowship that neighbors offered each other.) Most of us no longer live in supportive communities with our birth families or childhood friends close at hand. We work longer and longer hours, commute farther and farther distances, and thus have fewer and fewer opportunities to develop close relationships.

Most often, the couples I see in my practice live in a community of two. The majority of folks in a 2006 National Science Foundation survey reported that the number of people in their circle of confidants was dropping, and a growing number stated that they had no one at all to confide in. As the Irish poet John O’Donohue puts it, “There is a huge and leaden loneliness settling like a frozen winter on so many humans.”

Inevitably, we now ask our lovers for the emotional connection and sense of belonging that my grandmother could get from a whole village. Compounding this is the celebration of romantic love fostered by our popular culture. Movies as well as television soap operas and dramas saturate us with images of romantic love as the be-all and end-all of relationships, while newspapers, magazines, and TV news avidly report on the never-ending search for romance and love among actors and celebrities. So it should come as no surprise that people recently surveyed in the U.S. and Canada rate a satisfying love relationship as their number-one goal, ahead of financial success and satisfying career.

It is, then, imperative that we comprehend what love is, how to make it, and how to make it last. Thankfully, during the past two decades, an exciting and revolutionary new understanding of love has been emerging.

We now know that love is, in actuality, the pinnacle of evolution, the most compelling survival mechanism of the human species. Not because it induces us to mate and reproduce. We do manage to mate without love! But because love drives us to bond emotionally with a precious few others who offer us safe haven from the storms of life. Love is our bulwark, designed to provide emotional protection so we can cope with the ups and downs of existence.

This drive to emotionally attach — to find someone to whom we can turn and say “Hold me tight” — is wired into our genes and our bodies. It is as basic to life, health, and happiness as the drives for food, shelter, or sex. We need emotional attachments with a few irreplaceable others to be physically and mentally healthy — to survive.

Clues to love’s true purpose have been circulating for a long time. Back in 1760, a Spanish bishop writing to his superiors in Rome noted that children in foundling homes, though they were sheltered and fed, regularly “die from sadness.” In the 1930s and 1940s, in the halls of American hospitals, orphan children, deprived only of touch and emotional contact, died in droves. Psychiatrists also began identifying children who were physically healthy but who seemed indifferent, callous, and unable to relate to others. David Levy, reporting his observations in a 1937 article in the American Journal of Psychiatry, attributed such youngsters’ behavior to “emotional starvation.” In the 1940s American analyst René Spitz coined the term “failure to thrive” for children separated from their parents and caught in debilitating grief.

But it remained for John Bowlby, a British psychiatrist, to figure out exactly what was going on. Let me be honest. As a psychologist and as a human being, if I had to give an award for the single best set of ideas anyone had ever had, I’d give it to John Bowlby hands down over Freud or anyone else in the business of understanding people. He grabbed the threads of observations and reports and wove them into a coherent and masterful theory of attachment.

Born in 1907, Bowlby, the son of a baronet, was raised, in the fashion of the upper class, primarily by nannies and governesses. His parents allowed him to join them at the dinner table after he turned twelve, and then only for dessert. He was sent off to boarding school and then attended Trinity College, Cambridge. Bowlby’s life departed from tradition when he volunteered to work in the innovative residential schools for emotionally maladjusted children being started by visionaries like A. S. Neill. These schools focused on offering emotional support rather than the usual stern discipline.

Intrigued by his experiences, Bowlby went on to medical school and then took psychiatric training, which included undergoing seven years of psychoanalysis. His analyst apparently found him a difficult patient. Influenced by mentors like Ronald Fairbairn, who argued that Freud had underestimated the need for other people, Bowlby rebelled against the professional dictum that the crux of patients’ problems lay in their internal conflicts and unconscious fantasies. Bowlby insisted the problems were mostly external, rooted in real relationships with real people.

Working with disturbed youngsters at the Child Guidance Clinics in London, he began to believe that blighted relationships with parents had left them with only a few, negative ways to deal with basic feelings and needs. Later, in 1938, as a beginning clinician under the supervision of the noted analyst Melanie Klein, Bowlby was assigned a young hyperactive boy who had an extremely anxious mother. He was not allowed to talk to the mother, however, since only the child’s projections and fantasies were deemed of interest. That infuriated Bowlby. His experience spurred him to formulate his own idea, namely that the quality of the connection to loved ones and early emotional deprivation is key to the development of personality and to an individual’s habitual way of connecting with others.

In 1944, Bowlby published the very first paper on family therapy, Forty-four Juvenile Thieves, in which he noted that “behind the mask of indifference is bottomless misery and behind apparent callousness, despair.” Bowlby’s young charges were frozen in the attitude “I will never be hurt again” and paralyzed in desperation and rage.

Following World War II, Bowlby was asked by the World Health Organization to do a study of European children left homeless and orphaned by the conflict. His findings confirmed his belief in the reality of emotional starvation and his conviction that loving contact is as important as physical nutrition. Along with his studies and observations, Bowlby was impressed by Charles Darwin’s ideas of how natural selection favors responses that help survival. Bowlby came to the conclusion that keeping precious others close is a brilliant survival technique wired in by evolution.

Bowlby’s theory was radical and noisily rejected. Indeed, it almost got him thrown out of the British Psychoanalytic Society. Conventional wisdom held that coddling by mothers and other family members created clingy, overdependent youngsters who grew up into incompetent adults. Keeping an antiseptic rational distance was the proper way to rear children. That objective stance held even when youngsters were distressed and physically ill. In Bowlby’s era, parents were not allowed to stay in the hospital with their sick sons and daughters; they had to drop the children off at the door.

In 1951, Bowlby and a young social worker, James Robertson, made a movie called A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital, graphically showing a little girl’s angry protest, terror, and despair at being left alone in a hospital. Robertson showed the film to the Royal Society of Medicine in London in the hope that physicians would comprehend a child’s stress at separation from loved ones and need for connection and comfort. It was dismissed as a fraud and almost banned. Well into the 1960s in Britain and the United States, parents still typically were allowed to visit their hospitalized offspring for only one hour a week.

Bowlby needed to find another way to prove to the world what he knew in his heart. A Canadian researcher, Mary Ainsworth, who became his assistant, showed him how to do that. She devised a very simple experiment to look at the four behaviors that Bowlby and she believed were basic to attachment: that we monitor and maintain emotional and physical closeness with our beloved; that we reach out for this person when we are unsure, upset, or feeling down; that we miss this person when we are apart; and that we count on this person to be there for us when we go out into the world and explore.

The experiment was called the Strange Situation and has generated literally thousands of scientific studies and revolutionized developmental psychology. A researcher invites a mother and child into an unfamiliar room. After a few minutes, the mother leaves the child alone with the researcher, who tries to offer comfort if needed. Three minutes later, the mother comes back. The separation and reunion are repeated once more.

The majority of children are upset when their mothers walk out; they rock themselves, cry, throw toys. But some prove more emotionally resilient. They calm themselves quickly and effectively, reconnect easily with their mothers on their return, and rapidly resume playing while checking to make sure that their moms are still around. They seem confident that their mothers will be there if needed. Less resilient youngsters, however, are anxious and aggressive or detached and distant on their mothers’ return. The kids who can calm themselves usually have warmer, more responsive mothers, while the moms of the angry kids are unpredictable in their behavior and the moms of detached kids are colder and dismissive. In these simple studies of disconnection and reconnection, Bowlby saw love in action and began to code its patterns.

Bowlby’s theory gained still greater currency a few years later when he produced a famed trilogy on human attachment, separation, and loss. His colleague Harry Harlow, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, also drew attention to the power of what he called “contact comfort” by reporting his own dramatic research with young monkeys separated from their mothers at birth. He discovered that the isolated infants were so hungry for connection that when given the choice between a “mother” made out of wire who dispensed food and a soft-cloth mother without food, they would choose the squashy rag mother almost every time. Generally, Harlow’s experiments showed the toxicity of early isolation: physically healthy infant primates who were separated from their mothers during the first year of life grew into socially crippled adults. The monkeys failed to develop the ability to solve problems or understand the social cues of others. They became depressed, self-destructive, and unable to mate.

Attachment theory, at first ridiculed and despised, eventually revolutionized child-rearing methods in North America. (Now when I get to sleep beside my child’s bed as he recovers from an appendicitis operation, I thank John Bowlby.) Today it is widely accepted that children have an absolute requirement for safe, ongoing physical and emotional closeness, and that we ignore this only at great cost.

Bowlby died in 1990. He did not live to see the second revolution sparked by his work: the application of attachment theory to adult love. Bowlby himself had maintained that adults have the same need for attachment — he had studied World War II widows and discovered they exhibited behavior patterns similar to those of homeless youngsters — and that this need is the force that shapes adult relationships. But again his ideas were rejected. No one expected a reserved upper-class conservative Englishman to solve the riddle of romantic love! And anyway, we thought we already knew all there was to know about love. Love is simply short-lived, disguised sexual infatuation, Freud’s basic instinct dressed up. Or a kind of immature need to rely on others. Or, love is a moral stance — a selfless sacrifice that is all about giving rather than needing or getting.

Most important, however, the attachment view of love was, and perhaps still is, radically out of line with our culture’s established social and psychological ideas of adulthood: that maturity means being independent and self-sufficient. The notion of the invulnerable warrior who faces life and danger alone is long ingrained in our culture. Consider James Bond, the iconic impervious man, still going strong after four decades. Psychologists use words like undifferentiated, codependent, symbiotic, or even fused to describe people who seem unable to be self-sufficient or definitively assert themselves with others. In contrast, Bowlby talked about “effective dependency” and how being able, from “the cradle to the grave,” to turn to others for emotional support is a sign and source of strength.

Research documenting adult attachment began just before Bowlby’s death. Social psychologists Phil Shaver and Cindy Hazan, then at the University of Denver, decided to ask men and women questions about their love relationships to see if they exhibited the same responses and patterns as mothers and children. They wrote up a love quiz that was published in the local Rocky Mountain News. In their answers, adults spoke of needing emotional closeness from their lover, wanting assurance that their lover would respond when they were upset, being distressed when they felt separate and distant from their loved one, and feeling more confident about exploring the world when they knew that their lover had their back. They also indicated different ways of dealing with their partners. When they felt secure with their lover, they could reach out and connect easily; when they felt insecure, they either became anxious, angry, and controlling, or they avoided contact altogether and stayed distant. Just what Bowlby and Ainsworth had found with mothers and children.

Hazan and Shaver followed up with serious formal studies that reinforced the quiz’s findings and Bowlby’s theories. Their work set off an avalanche of research. Hundreds of studies now validate Bowlby’s predictions about adult attachment, and you will find them cited throughout this book. The overall conclusion: a sense of secure connection between romantic partners is key in positive loving relationships and a huge source of strength for the individuals in those relationships. Among the more significant findings:

When we feel generally secure, that is, we are comfortable with closeness and confident about depending on loved ones, we are better at seeking support — and better at giving it. In a study by psychologist Jeff Simpson of the University of Minnesota, each of eighty-three dating couples filled out questionnaires about their relationship and then sat in a room. The female partner had been warned she would soon be participating in an activity that made most people very anxious (the activity wasn’t spelled out). The women who described themselves as feeling secure in love relationships on the questionnaires were able to share their unhappiness about the upcoming task openly and ask for support from their partners. Women who generally denied their attachment needs and avoided closeness withdrew more at these moments. Men responded to their partners in two ways: when they described themselves as secure with relationships, they became even more supportive than usual, touching and smiling at their partners and offering comfort; if they described themselves as uncomfortable with attachment needs, they became markedly less sympathetic when their partners expressed their needs, downplaying their partners’ distress, showing less warmth, and touching less.  When we feel safely linked to our partners, we more easily roll with the hurts they inevitably inflict, and we are less likely to be aggressively hostile when we get mad at them. Mario Mikulincer of Bar-Ilan University in Israel conducted a series of studies asking participants questions about how connected they felt in relationships and how they dealt with anger when conflicts arose. Their heart rates were monitored as they responded to scenarios of couples in conflict. Those who felt close to and could depend on partners reported feeling less angry with and attributing less malicious intent to their partners. They described themselves as expressing anger in a more controlled way, and expressed more positive goals, such as solving the problems and reconnecting with their partners. Secure connection to a loved one is empowering. In a group of studies Mikulincer showed that when we feel safely connected to others we understand ourselves better and like ourselves more. When given a list of adjectives to describe themselves, the more secure folks picked out positive traits. And when asked about their weak points, they readily said they fell short of their own ideals but still felt good about themselves.

Mikulincer also found, as Bowlby predicted, that securely bonded adults were more curious and more open to new information. They were comfortable with ambiguity, saying they liked questions that could be answered in many different ways. In one task, a person’s behavior was described to them and they were asked to evaluate this person’s negative and positive traits. Connected participants more easily absorbed new information about the person and revised their assessments. Openness to new experience and flexibility of belief seems to be easier when we feel safe and connected to others. Curiosity comes out of a sense of safety; rigidity out of being vigilant to threats.

The more we can reach out to our partners, the more separate and independent we can be. Although this flies in the face of our culture’s creed of self-sufficiency, psychologist Brooke Feeney of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh found exactly that in observations of 280 couples. Those who felt that their needs were accepted by their partners were more confident about solving problems on their own and were more likely to successfully achieve their own goals.

Science from all fields is telling us very clearly that we are not only social animals, but animals who need a special kind of close connection with others, and we deny this at our peril. Indeed, historians long ago observed that in the death camps of World War II, the unit of survival was the pair, not the solitary individual. It’s long been known, too, that married men and women generally live longer than do their single peers.

Having close ties with others is vital to every aspect of our health — mental, emotional, and physical. Louise Hawkley, of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, calculates that loneliness raises blood pressure to the point where the risk of heart attack and stroke is doubled. Sociologist James House of the University of Michigan declares that emotional isolation is a more dangerous health risk than smoking or high blood pressure, and we now warn everyone about these two! Perhaps these findings reflect the time-honored saying “Suffering is a given; suffering alone is intolerable.”

But it’s not just whether or not we have close relationships in our lives — the quality of these relationships matters, too. Negative relationships undermine our health. In Cleveland, researchers at Case Western Reserve University asked men with a history of angina and high blood pressure, “Does your wife show her love?” Those who answered “No” suffered almost twice as many angina episodes during the next five years as did those who replied “Yes.” Women’s hearts are affected, too. Women who view their marriages as strained and have regular hostile interactions with their partners are more likely to have significantly elevated blood pressure and higher levels of stress hormones compared with women in happy marriages. Yet another study found that women who had had a heart attack stood a threefold higher risk of having another if there was discord in their marriage.

In men and women with congestive heart failure, the state of the patient’s marriage is as good a predictor of survival after four years as the severity of the symptoms and degree of impairment, concludes Jim Coyne, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. The poets who made the heart the symbol of love would surely smile at scientists’ conclusion that the strength of people’s hearts cannot be separated from the strength of their love relationships.

Distress in a relationship adversely affects our immune and hormonal systems, and even our ability to heal. In one fascinating experiment, psychologist Janice Kiecolt-Glaser of Ohio State University had newlyweds fight, then took blood samples over the next several hours. She found that the more belligerent and contemptuous the partners were, the higher the level of stress hormones and the more depressed the immune system. The effects persisted for up to twenty-four hours. In an even more astounding study, Kiecolt-Glaser used a vacuum pump to produce small blisters on the hands of women volunteers, then had them fight with their husbands. The nastier the fight, the longer it took for the women’s skin to heal.

The quality of our love relationships is also a big factor in how mentally and emotionally healthy we are. We have an epidemic of anxiety and depression in our most affluent societies. Conflict with and hostile criticism from loved ones increase our self-doubts and create a sense of helplessness, classic triggers for depression. We need validation from our loved ones. Researchers say that marital distress raises the risk for depression tenfold!

That’s the bad news — but there is good news, too.

Hundreds of studies now show that positive loving connections with others protect us from stress and help us cope better with life’s challenges and traumas. Israeli researchers report that couples with a secure emotional attachment are much more able to deal with dangers such as Scud missile attacks than other less-connected couples. They are less anxious and have fewer physical problems after attacks.

Simply holding the hand of a loving partner can affect us profoundly, literally calming jittery neurons in the brain. Psychologist Jim Coan of the University of Virginia told women patients having an MRI brain scan that when a little red light on the machine came on, they might receive a small electrical shock on their feet — or they might not. This information lit up the stress centers in patients’ brains. But when partners held their hands, the patients registered less stress. When they were shocked, they experienced less pain. This effect was noticeably stronger in the happiest relationships, the ones where partners scored high on measures of satisfaction and that the researchers called the Supercouples. Contact with a loving partner literally acts as a buffer against shock, stress, and pain.

The people we love, asserts Coan, are the hidden regulators of our bodily processes and our emotional lives. When love doesn’t work, we hurt. Indeed, “hurt feelings” is a precisely accurate phrase, according to psychologist Naomi Eisenberger of the University of California. Her brain imaging studies show that rejection and exclusion trigger the same circuits in the same part of the brain, the anterior cingulate, as physical pain. In fact, this part of the brain turns on anytime we are emotionally separated from those who are close to us. When I read this study, I remembered being shocked by my own physical experience of grief. After hearing that my mother had died, I felt battered, like I had literally been hit by a truck. And when we are close to, hold, or make love with our partners, we are flooded with the “cuddle hormones” oxytocin and vasopressin. These hormones seem to turn on “reward” centers in the brain, flooding us with calm and happiness chemicals like dopamine, and turning off stress hormones like cortisol.

We’ve come a long way in our understanding of love and its importance. In 1939, women ranked love fifth as a factor in choosing a mate. By the 1990s, it topped the list for both women and men. And college students now say that their key expectation from marriage is “emotional security.”

Love is not the icing on the cake of life. It is a basic primary need, like oxygen or water. Once we understand and accept this, we can more easily get to the heart of relationship problems.

Copyright © 2008 by Susan Johnson