The True Nature of Love and Understanding Emotional Logic

One way to understand love is to understand what it is not. Love is not a commitment. Love is not a relationship. Love is not a responsibility. You may choose to make a commitment based on feelings of love, but you cannot commit yourself to feel love for another person. Love is a feeling. All feelings, including love, wax and wane. The only promise we can make and keep is to create an atmosphere that allows feelings of love to flow between us.

Since love is just one of a wide range of emotions, we need to understand how emotions work—what they tell us, how they influence our behavior, and how they can and cannot be controlled—before we can learn about sustaining intimacy in long-term relationships. We can understand the logic of love if we understand the logic of emotion. The logic of emotion is actually very simple: It is the logic of pleasure and pain. We are drawn to what gives us pleasure and tend to avoid what gives us pain. At its simplest level, pleasure comes from having our needs met, while unfulfilled needs give us pain.

Beyond our most rudimentary survival needs, such as air, food, water, and shelter (the needs the reptilian brain looks out for), there exists another level of “creature needs”—the more subtle but no less demanding needs for closeness, communication, nurturing, safety, and emotional warmth that are required by the emotional or creature part of the brain. Experts have relatively recently recognized that among the most powerful of these creature needs is the need for bonding—a combination of physical closeness and emotional openness. While it has long been known that consistent bonding is necessary for infants and children to thrive, it is only more recently that we have started to understand that the need for bonding extends throughout our lifetime.

There is growing evidence that bonding is built into the human species as a biologically based need. And as with other biological needs, the inability to fulfill this need easily and comfortably often gives rise to symptoms. Instead of feeling hunger pangs or thirst, we feel unsettled, anxious, or even depressed.

As children, we depend upon other people to fulfill many of our needs. A child needs to be cared for, protected, nurtured, and guided. While growing up, we develop a series of attitudes and beliefs about people shaped by whether and how those needs were met and whether they were met at a cost. If you were raised in an unstable family, you might have difficulty trusting anyone to provide for your needs. You may have learned that the surest way not to get your needs met was to ask, or you might believe that you have to appear perfect to have your needs met. Or you might think that needing another person for anything is dangerous, wrong, or weak.

Now that you are an adult, however, you can fulfill all of your needs yourself—except the need for bonding. You have the ability to earn a living, keep a roof over your head, keep your body fit, feed yourself, and dress yourself. You can learn what you choose. You can even have sex by yourself. But you can’t bond with yourself. So all of the feelings, attitudes, and beliefs about how your needs were responded to by other people become attached to the one need that you still have of others, that of bonding.

Understanding the importance of bonding and recognizing it as a biological need is crucial for sustaining intimacy in long-term relationships. By acknowledging the natural fluctuations of love and the fundamental need for emotional and physical closeness, we can create an environment where love can thrive. Recognizing and addressing the lingering effects of childhood experiences on our ability to bond can help us form healthier, more fulfilling relationships.

The challenge is to shift our focus from controlling emotions to understanding and managing them in a way that fosters connection. By doing so, we can create the conditions for love to flourish, fulfilling our deepest desires and achieving a sense of wholeness in our relationships.

Excerpted from Instructions for Intimacy by Lori Heyman Gordon and Seth Eisenberg.