Why Do We Love?

Why do we love? What is love? Is it really that hard to define? Perhaps not. Perhaps the obvious has been staring us in the face for millennia. We are creatures of the bond. We’re not the only ones. Nature/The Creator has been developing variations on bonding for a long time. Some birds mate for life. Many mammals do. Bonding, attaching, entwining with another in such a way that we reciprocally provide safety, nurturance and love serves our survival. Doing the same, to a lesser degree, with a circle of other people does the same, meaning that positive community also serves our survival. There is greater security in union than in division.

Aren't we lucky?! Nature/The Creator endowed us with the capacity to experience all these incredible physical, emotional and mental experiences because Intimacy with our beloved serves our survival and thrival. When we are aligned with that design, in flow with it, we are not only happier than people who lack this bond or than people in whom it is regularly being tortured and tested. We are also healthier than them.

When John Lennon wrote, “Love is touch, touch is love; love is feeling, feeling love, love is asking to be loved” he went a long way toward describing the essence of this bond. Love is bound through touch, not just sexual touch, but caressing, hugging, massaging, playfully interacting…and also through proximity without touch. You are near to me. I can reach you. I can hear you. You can hear me. I can look deep in your eyes and you in mine. We are close. We know each other’s moods and needs. Our hearts are bound one to the other. Serving your life and your happiness are matters of supreme importance to me…and that includes my embracing the love you offer…for how can you be happy, no matter how much you are given, if your love is not received? We are wired to want to give love as well as receive it. There is really no distinction in the purest moment. The language to describe it is the problem, not the experience itself.

From birth, the nature of the attachment need transforms as we develop, but it doesn’t vanish. We don’t outgrow it. As adults, we don’t need someone to hold and touch us constantly, but we do need someone to hold and touch us frequently, consistently. We don’t need someone to toss us in the air in delight over every tiny aspect of our being or every tiny accomplishment, but we do need someone to delight in our presence, in our way of being us, and to recognize and celebrate our accomplishments, even the small ones. We don’t any longer need someone to feed us, but we do need someone who cares enough about us that he or she will choose to do that for us from time to time, especially when we are ill. We don’t any longer need someone to dress us, but we do need someone who notices when we put on a new shirt or blouse. We don’t any longer need someone to come running when we cry out for stimulation, but we all need someone who will regularly come forward to play with us as adults play, to enjoy just hanging out with us doing nothing in particular.

Grownup humans need attachment in different ways than babies, but we need it nonetheless if we are to fully become ourselves. We are social creatures. We attach, bond, entwine. We need to give and receive affection, attention, appreciation, validation, compassion. Yes, these are needs, not just wants.

My grandmother (mother's side) died when I was in my early teens. I will never forget the drive away from the cemetery. My grandfather, a big, boisterous personality who could fill a room all by himself, was in the backseat sobbing like a little boy. All the way home, he repeated the same phrase over and over again: "I have no companion now. I have no companion now." The primal truth was resonating through him. His soul was a cymbal that had been given a mighty blow and could not stop trembling. Poetry and evolution were one in him.

We are wired for companionship. It's interesting to me when people object to merging poetry and science. They are both ways of understanding and being in the world. For me, there is nothing taken from the lyricism of life by knowing that Nature/The Creator designed us very carefully for this bond...and yet, with all the care, it is a fragile capacity. It is both the intense nature of connection and our tenuous ability to sustain it that I find poetic in every aspect. Perhaps Nature/The Creator isn't done with us. Perhaps we are still on the drawing board. To go further, perhaps we are the one creature fashioned to complete its own design while living on the drawing board.

What is incomplete? Most of us have not been well taught to just ask in a calm clear manner for what we need from our partners to feel secure in our bond. So when they somehow detune, we experience "attachment distress" as Sue Johnson has called it. Then we tend to attack or withdraw instead of just telling them in a straight and clean manner “Honey, I really needed you to notice me at that moment.” We play out scenarios learned in our preconscious moments of childhood, scenarios in which we blame or shame, criticize, defend, deny, go silent, walk out. We come into this world with an innate Language of Union but quickly learn a new Language of Division. For my best explanation as to why this happens, see my first book, The Superman Syndrome (available on amazon.com). For today's discussion, what is critical to know is that it is possible to reclaim the Language of Union.

Our first step in that quest is an gradually undoing what have become our default reactions one by one. We practice letting go of the impulse to act out with sarcasm, indignation or the big freeze by choosing a different language that is the essence of what we're feeling: “I’m feeling vulnerable or fragile right now” or “I miss you. I need your attention right now. I want to be connected” or “I want really want to hear you and I’m here for you” or “Could you tell me about what’s going on with you? I love you. I want to know.” Learning to give up the Language of Division for the Language of Union is not easy…but it can be done. Each of us begins by acknowledging our vulnerability, our needs and asking ourselves each day, “What am I doing to block myself from being close? How can I alter my way of speaking so that I will be heard? How do I alter my way of listening so that I can hear in return?” Yes, we gradually learn to give up blaming our partner as if “fixing” them would “fix” our issues. Blaming, criticizing, withdrawing—these are all things we do to block ourselves from loving and being loved. As long as we make it about our partner, we don’t have to own and feel how deeply we hurt and need and are confused about what to do. So step number one is becoming conscious that from the smallest spat to the biggest relationship blowout, we are at least 50% responsible because something is living in us that causes us to sabotage our own longing to be close.

People with big voices often shout their needs as demands, as if they can yell their partners into loving them. They must learn to speak of normal needs in normal voices. People who tend to withdraw, go silent, also know this does not draw their partners near. They must learn to step forward and speak simple truths without defensiveness or artifice. Turning a vicious cycle into a virtuous one. We step into the virtue by speaking these simple truths. “I'm sad when we're not close. I want to be close. I need you. I need you to see me. I need your support. I need your understanding. I just need you to listen. I need your affection. I need you to receive all of who I am. I need to know you want me as your true companion. When I doubt those things, I really hurt.” How we feel is of ultimate importance in a relationship, not how we think. As Jill Bolte Taylor has written, "We are feeling creatures who think, not thinking creatures who feel." So learning to speak our feelings without defensiveness or denial...that is the path back. Most of us have been subtly ripped off of our capacity to feel. What we experience as feeling on a day to day basis is a paltry version of what we were endowed with at birth. We have a withered capacity for feeling. The good news is, that capacity is not dead in most of us. It only needs some gentle, steady watering to flower once again.

The golden rule returns over and over in different variations. In this case, love your partner as you would have him or her love you…or as Gandhi said, “We must become the change we wish to see.” This serves our survival and our flourishing. We are creatures of the bond. This is no less true in a relationship than in the politics of a nation. We are creatures of community. And it is no less true in science than it is in poetry.
C Bob Kamm 2011