Chapter 1
So, what is love anyway, and why do you need it?
"My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep; The more I give to thee the more I have, for both are infinite.” - Juliet declares her deep unyielding and eternal love for her dear Romeo on one of their famous balcony scenes in the play Romeo and Juliet.
"I define love thus: The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth."M. Scott Peck
"Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell." Joan Crawford
"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage." Lao Tzu
Most of this book had been written when it occurred to us that we needed to plug in a new first chapter, reordering the chapters we had already written. We needed to address the two most basic questions: What is love anyway, and why do we need it? These are tough questions and need to be approached from multiple perspectives.
Let's start by defining what kind of love we're talking about. Yes, there are different kinds of love, but in Western society we tend to use only one word to describe our most intimate feeling.
Is one word enough for our most basic human quality?
Eskimos of North America have between 50 and 100 words for snow. Many so-called primitive societies have incredibly nuanced terms to describe specific aspects of their environment such as a leaf, a cloud, or a tree, greatly facilitating their understanding of the complex world they live in.
However, in our "advanced" society we tend to use one umbrella word– Love – even though we clearly know all love is not the same. You might “love your in-laws and you love your “soul-mate,” but you probably agree these are different feelings. So, let's get specific and start by looking at the ancient Greek philosophers’ conception of love.
The Greeks had four types of love: eros, phillia, storge, and agape.
Eros refers to sexual or romantic love. This is the topic we are exploring in this chapter and subsequent chapters, although we will separate sexual attraction and desire from romantic love, and we will place strong emphasis on Agape, or unconditional love.
Philia is the love of friends or brotherly love. This is the love shared by close friends and mentors, and close-knit neighborhoods and communities. It is dispassionate and not romantic.
Storge is familial love. While Philia is freely chosen, Storge is the love of family members simply because "they’re family." Having your family members tell you they love you doesn’t necessarily make you feel lovable. As one of our clients struggling with the belief she was unlovable put it: "Qf course my mother loves me, but then she has to. She's my mother!"
Most of us have family members that we would never in a million years associate with if they weren't family, but because they are family, we feel compelled to love them anyway. Storge is not discriminating and is not something won, earned, or freely chosen, yet it’s deeply emotional because of shared family traits.
Finally, there is Agape, thought of as the highest form of love because it is unconditional. Agape is unconditional love for self and all others. Yes, that includes love of self and unconditional self-acceptance is central to our therapy and vital for a healthy relationship.
Agape is what we are striving for in our couple’s therapy. We want your relationship to feel fully safe with each of you feeling fully acceptable to your partner, despite human imperfections. We want you to be open to learning about your partner, non-judging of your partner’s shortcomings, and readily forgiving him or her for simply being human. It’s not easy!
Modern psychologists have distinguished between fatuous, romantic, compassionate, and consummate love.
Fatuous love is sexual attraction without significant emotional closeness. It’s casual, and if there is commitment, it’s often a very temporary and changeable commitment. There is not necessarily emotional closeness and if sexual attraction leads to a full-blown sexual encounter, it may be nothing more than “casual sex,” a “one-night-stand” or "hooking up," in the vernacular of many teens and young adults.
With a deepening of interest, respect, and attachment, fatuous love can become romantic love. Now it's not just sexual interest and arousal, purely sexual physical love, but also comfort with one another, mutual respect, and a sense of trust and security.
Think of it as a spectrum. Modern relationships exist somewhere along a continuum from fatuous love to romantic love, and possibly leading to Consummate love.
Companionate love is equivalent to phelia, and to some extent storge. This is the love and respect between friends and teammates, built through respect and action.
Consummate love equates to agape. It's all-consuming and unconditional. It's freely given. It's the ultimate goal for romantic relationships, although unreachable for many.
Here we're focusing on romantic love and consummate love, the kinds of love that are central in a healthy couple relationship, love that ideally comes with a commitment to a life together.
It's not "one-size-fits-all." We experience love differently. People fall in love differently. We vary greatly in our skill at being good relationship partners. We stay in love or don't stay in love depending upon many variables.
Think back on the first realization you had that you were "in love" with your partner. Did you heat up quickly like a microwave, or slowly like a convection oven? Do you believe in love at first sight? Is there really such a thing?
Bill is a believer in love at first sight. Robin's not so sure and thinks it's unusually strong attraction, or perhaps "lust at first sight." Here is Bill's account of their first meeting:
I’m a perpetual student, I already had a doctorate in psychology but I was looking around for a complementary graduate degree, ultimately choosing to work on a Master’s in Public Health at Loma Linda University.
However, in my first interview I hit a snag.
The University insisted I take a basic statistics class as I hadn't had a statistics class in over five years. I threw a fit, protesting that I had over 30 units in statistics as part of my doctoral program, and I had in fact taught statistics to graduate students. Surely I wouldn't be required to take a basic course again. That would be totally unreasonable.
The University wouldn't budge. If I wanted to do the program, I had to take basic statistics. After a time, I grudgingly agreed to do it, but with a definite attitude. I wasn't happy.
Arriving at the first class, I sat in the back of the room angrily sulking at the unfairness of having to be there. In a moment, everything would change.
As other students came filing into the class and taking their seats, I was suddenly transfixed, hypnotized like Gene Wilder in the 1984 movie Woman in Red. Suddenly I forgot all about the statistics class. I was captivated by a gorgeous woman with curly red hair and I couldn't take my eyes off her. I still remember a distinct thought – I think I'd like to be married to her. Where did that come from? I was a confirmed bachelor who felt no need for marriage or even a permanent relationship. Suddenly, my thinking and my feelings were transformed. I felt catapulted 180° in the opposite direction.
I knew what I wanted and it was totally different than five minutes earlier. We were married less than a year later. I've never had any regrets.
But what was that? Was it literally love at first sight? What happened?
For Robin it was different. It took at least two months before she knew, and before we were both using the words. Sometimes you're a microwave. Sometimes you're a convection oven.
So, what is love anyway and why do you need it? Why be part of a couple? Why be in a long-term relationship?
These are not simple questions. During the writing of this chapter Bill asked a graduate class on marital therapy the same questions. His students quickly discovered that answering the questions led them in many directions, with answers that only led in turn to more questions.
For our answers we explored a variety of disciplines from philosophy to neuroscience research from the new brain scanning technology of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We also looked at evolutionary psychology, attachment theory, anthropology, and numerous other disciplines.
Additional answers were found in Harville Hendrix's Imago Relationship Therapy and Susan Johnson's Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy.
Disciplines are merging when it comes to understanding relationships. Anthropologist Helen Fisher, a foremost authority on the biology of romantic love, talks about three different systems in the brain, each identified by fMRI's as being associated with specific brain structures.
Fisher has concluded that romantic love is not an emotion at all, but a drive, a brain system, along with two other systems, each having specific brain locations. The first system, the sex drive is like a scanner looking for someone special out of all the possibilities. Romantic love is focusing on one particular person. Finally, there's the attachment drive which keeps people together long enough to raise children — and beyond.
Fisher is currently conducting research to answer the question of why you fall in love with one particular person rather than many others who meet all the qualifications you might have for the perfect partner, like similarity in culture, ethnicity, intelligence, education, spirituality, etc. As of the writing of this book, her research is still underway, and producing fascinating results.
Psychologists Susan Johnson and Harville Hendrix, although not using the rigorous brain science methodology as Fisher, do have a lot to say about why you pick a particular person over all the other possibilities.
Susan Johnson bases her work on attachment theory, the work of Englishman John Bowlby in the mid 20th century. We consider this work so important that much of the book references attachment theory and what it means for your couple relationship. In subsequent chapters we will complete our attempt to answer the questions: what is love anyway and why do you need it?
In the remainder of this chapter we will be discussing the work of Harville Hendrix, who, together with his wife Helen Hunt, created a couple’s therapy known as Imago Relationship Therapy.
Both of us were trained in Imago Relationship Therapy in the late 1980s. Although we have since evolved our own approach, Mindful Choices Therapy, we still find much valuable insight and usefulness in the concepts of Imago Relationship Therapy.
Hendrix maintains that our modern notion of romantic love as being central to marriage has probably been around only since 18th-century Europe with the radical new idea that everyone is entitled to personal freedom, including the freedom to marry whomever you choose rather than the person your family chooses for you. With this thought revolution, marriage was seen as something that was supposed to meet personal and psychological needs, rather than needs that were primarily social or economic. Romantic love is now the norm, at least in Western societies.
At the end of the 19th century Sigmund Freud discovered the unconscious and psychotherapy had its beginning. This idea of unconscious forces and motivation is vitally important to our understanding of romantic love. We now generally accept that our unconscious minds are involved in our personal choices, and our past relationships all the way back to birth impact adult relationships in the present. According to Hendrix:
"The discovery that this was so led to the awareness that our choice of a partner, if it is romantic, is influenced by our unconscious minds more than our rational preferences. The partner we unconsciously choose is hauntingly similar – warts and all, and especially the warts — to the caretakers who reared us. Thus, the needs we want met in our adult intimate relationship — those that were not met in childhood – are presented to persons who are woefully similar to the persons who did not meet those needs when we were children."
Bill remembers his first encounter with Robin, and distinctly feeling that something way out of the ordinary was happening, something that seemed somehow familiar.
It was the strangest thing. There I was with no thoughts about being in a relationship. In fact, I'd been loudly proclaiming to friends that it just wasn't something I was interested in. The next moment upon seeing Robin I had a strange sense of familiarity, as if I already knew her. I wanted her in my life and felt totally surprised that such a thought had entered my head. Where did that come from? How could I go from having great control over my life one moment to being swept away by a tsunami of thoughts and feelings the next. What was happening?
It was a strange sense of recognition as if encountering something that had been lost, something very special.
George Bernard Shaw once said that "Love consists of overestimating the difference between one woman and another." Bill remembers being spellbound, having thoughts of no one else, convinced he had found the most special woman on the planet.
To a large extent, romantic attraction which gives rise to romantic love, is largely an illusion. You ask yourself – how could I be so lucky? You tell yourself that you’ve found the one person in a world of over 7 billion that is just right for you. You’re sure it's a perfect match, but it is partly an illusion. Hendrix maintains that romantic attraction is nature's anesthetic. You see only the good and you idealize your new relationship. Although your partner may have qualities similar to the less positive qualities of your earliest caretakers, these things are obscured.
Your brain is reacting very similarly to a brain on cocaine. The difference of course is that with cocaine you come down. The high of romantic love goes on for quite a while. In your mind, you have found the perfect person, different from all others. Lucky you!
Sooner or later however, you’re destined to discover significant differences and a power struggle develops. Couples find themselves bickering over rather unimportant things. You might find yourself saying things like: "You don't like vanilla ice cream. How can that be? I like vanilla ice cream. I can't believe you don't like it." In the inevitable power struggle many feel they've been deceived. Your partner is not who you thought they were.
For some the power struggle is never resolved. Nearly half who marry will divorce. Some make adjustments and stay together. Many will live in perpetual gridlock, with arguments that are never resolved, simply recycled. Some will avoid conflict at all costs and settle for a superficial relationship where relationship growth is severely limited.
Some who work through the power struggle and find themselves in a safe, committed relationship will experience perhaps the ultimate purpose of marriage beyond childrearing. In the context of a relationship where they feel truly acceptable to one another, while valuing individual differences, they may have the ultimate opportunity to heal childhood wounds and maximize their personal growth.
We all get wounded in childhood but a safe, committed relationship may be the best opportunity we’re going to get for healing. The relationship itself becomes therapeutic.
There will be power struggles. There will be difficulties. As Stan Tatkin, author of several great books on relationships states: “All people are by nature annoying. There’s no getting around that…When we are in a primary attachment relationship with someone, we’re going to find that at some point they’re annoying and they’re going to find us annoying too.”
Let’s get back to our questions: what is love anyway and why do we need it?
How experts answer these questions can depend on their professional and theoretical orientations. Biologists may see a “bio-logic” in mate selection. Men may unconsciously be drawn to women who seem ideal for having children. Women may be drawn to "alpha males" who can dominate other males, provide well, and protect their families.
Social psychologists may subscribe to the “exchange theory” of mate selection where we select mates who are in many respects our equals and who possess desirable characteristics. This theory goes beyond the biological model and considers the whole person.
Then there is the "Persona" model. Each of us has a persona or mask that we present to the world, a conceptualization of who we think we are and how we want to be seen. In the persona model we are drawn to people who enhance our sense of self. Certainly, we have had clients who were preoccupied with how they looked when seen with their partner. Did their partner make them look good, or were they embarrassed?
Although these theories are useful in providing some of the answers to our questions, for the most part they simply lead to more questions and fail to account for dramatic exceptions.
They don't explain Bill being entirely captivated upon first seeing Robin, an experience that was about a 7+ on Bill's Richter scale. They don't explain why people can be so overwhelmed and devastated with the loss of a love. They don't explain why some people may consistently make poor choices. For example, consider the daughter of an alcoholic, an intelligent professional woman, who goes on to have failed marriages to two alcoholics.
Also, the bio-logic, exchange, and persona theories fail to explain why we are so strongly drawn to a particular person. Something else seems to be going on.
In our case, we had dated others. We had encountered healthy and attractive people. We each had potential partners who had impressive whole person characteristics. We each felt secure enough that we were not searching for someone to enhance our sense of self, yet we were powerfully attracted to one another. Love blossomed where nothing even got started with others who might have met all of our “logical“ criteria. Why were we so powerfully drawn to one another? Perhaps there’s a hidden set of criteria, Perhaps it’s not conscious at all.
Harville Hendrix has stated in Getting the Love You Want:
“It appears that each of us is compulsively searching for a mate with a very particular set of positive and negative personality traits."
That’s right! Hendrix said: “…and negative personality traits.” Hendrix maintains that choosing a partner has more to do with your old brain, your "reptilian" brain composed of brainstem and limbic system, than with your conscious awareness. According to Hendrix:
"You fell in love because your old brain had your partner confused with your parents! Your old brain believed that it had finally found the ideal candidate to make up for the psychological and emotional damage you experienced in childhood."
Hendrix maintains that we all get wounded in childhood simply because no parent can meet all of our needs, needs that are ever changing.
As newborns, we have no sense of separateness. We know only our needs and the serenity that comes from those needs being met and our being soothed by our caretakers. We feel blissfully connected to the world, but sooner or later we come face-to-face with reality. Again quoting Hendrix:
But what does this have to do with marriage? For some reason, we enter marriage with the expectation that our partners will magically restore this feeling of wholeness... Their failure to do so is one of the main reasons for our eventual unhappiness.”
As a primitive sense of self develops, a baby makes the discovery that mother is not always there, that needs are not always readily met. Yet, there is a yearning for connection, something that developmental psychologists refer to as a drive for attachment.
As a child progresses through infancy and beyond, he or she is increasingly able to meet their own needs. However, Hendrix maintains that our old brains are still trapped in an infantile perspective, continuing to expect that the outside world will take care of us. Later when our partners are angry or neglectful, an automatic alarm system is triggered.
Early parent-child interaction shapes our character and how we handle relationships. Overly protective parents operating out of their own insecurity increase their child's inner drive for autonomy. These children may become "isolators" as adults with the fear of being engulfed and losing their identity to their partner. On the other hand, parents who push their children away tend to produce children who feel emotionally abandoned. Hendrix refers to them as "fusers ," people who have an insatiable need for closeness with their partners. According to Hendrix:
"They crave physical affection and reassurance, and they often need to stay in constant verbal contact. Underneath all this clinging behavior is a young child who needed more time on a parent's lap."
Hendrix maintains that fusers and isolators tend to grow up and marry one another. In other sections of this book, we will refer to this pattern as the pursuer/withdrawer cycle, or the "magpie/mole syndrome." A knowledge of attachment theory is vital to understanding why these cycles exist and why they are so common.
What we find most intriguing about Imago Relationship Therapy is the idea of a hidden unconscious world influencing our relationships, something that Hendrix calls the "unconscious partnership." We're largely unaware of the influence of needs unmet in childhood, frustrations over not having been sufficiently nurtured or protected, or not having had sufficient freedom to develop our autonomy. Also, there's the substantial socialization process we all go through, incorporating countless messages from caretakers, educators, peers, and society at large. These are things we bring to our relationship, sometimes with disastrous consequences.
Imago Relationship Therapy not only addresses what love is, but also has a lot to say about why we choose the person we choose, and how love is expressed as an adult. Such understanding can be valuable. As couple therapists, we are always looking for patterns and we see our job as helping our clients understand those patterns and come together as a team in building a healthier relationship. It needs to be “us against the problem,” rather than: “us against each other.”
Imago Relationship Therapy provides a highly useful framework for helping our clients understand their "unconscious relationship," and join forces in growing toward health and well-being.
So, understanding love isn't a simple matter. Taking a reductionist view and looking at love in terms of neurons, hormones, and early learning doesn't seem to do it justice. We may get more of a sense of the true meaning of love from poets and songwriters. Consider "Love Is a Many Splendored Thing" by Frank Sinatra in 1955:
Love is a many-splendored thing, It's the April rose that only grows in the early spring, Love is nature's way of giving, a reason to be living, The golden crown that makes a man a king.
Once on a high and windy hill, In the morning mist two lovers kissed and the world stood still, Then our fingers touched my silent heart and taught it how to sing, Yes, true love's a many-splendored thing.
So, in this chapter we have begun a discussion to answer the questions: what is love and why do we need it. These are incredibly complicated questions that we will explore further in subsequent chapters. We will discuss the neurobiology of your relationship. We will look at what's happening in your brain when you love.
We will look at an evolutionary perspective. Human infants require parents who will stay together long enough for the child to mature to the point of taking care of himself or herself. We will discuss the "mammalian caregiver response," and how that response generates oxytocin, the "feel-good hormone."
We will discuss adult attachment as being influenced by the quality of past relationships, particularly early caretakers. We will look at avoidant, insecure, and secure emotional attachment, and we will discuss how in -spite of past wounding, you can grow toward secure attachment.
We will further answer the question of why love is so vital to our well-being. More importantly, this entire book is geared toward guiding you toward being truly masterful in your love relationship.
Further Reading
Fisher, H. (2009), Why Him? Why Her?: Finding Real Love by Understanding Your Personality Type. New York, NY, Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
Fisher, H. (2004), Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love. New York, NY, Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
Hendrix, H. and H. Hunt (2001), Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples, 20th Anniversary Edition. New York, NY, Henry Holt and Company.
Johnson, S. (2004). The Practice of Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy: Creating Connection (2nd ed.). Basic Principles into Practice Series. New York: Routledge.
Tatkin, S. (2011), Wired for Love: How Understanding Your Partner’s Brain and Attachment Style can Help You Defuse Conflict and Build a Secure Relationship. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications, Inc.
Wile, D. (2008), After the Honeymoon: How Conflict Can Improve Your Relationship. Oakland, CA: Collaborative Couple Therapy Books.