“And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
Beloved on the Earth.”
—Raymond Carver
“I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with unfailing kindness.”
—Jeremiah 31:3
“Truly religious people are ambitious. They want to live lives overflowing with significance… to retain their peace and serenity in the midst of their pain… to live generously, large-heartedly… to transform themselves into a beautiful ritual vessel brimful of the sanctity that they are learning to see in life.”
—Karen Armstrong, The Case for God
Learning how to nurture the bonds of love is an urgent task. Loving connection provides the dependable web of intimacy that allows us to cope with life and to live life well. And that is what gives our life its meaning. For most of us, on our deathbeds, it is the quality of our connection with our precious ones that will matter most.
Instinctively, we know that those who grasp the imperatives of attachment live better lives. Yet our culture encourages us to compete rather than connect. Even though we are created by God to relentlessly seek out belonging and intimate connection, we persist in defining healthy people as those who do not need others. This is especially dangerous at a time when our sense of community is daily being eroded by an endless preoccupation with getting more done in less time and filling our lives with more and more goods. This erosion squeezes out our quality time with God, loved ones, and our church family.
We are building a culture of separateness that is at odds with our own God-given nature. We know, as Thomas Lewis and his colleagues state so well in their book A General Theory of Love, that if we “feed and clothe a human infant but deprive him of emotional contact he will die.” But we have been taught to believe that adults are different. However did we get here?
Psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, in his book on the trauma of combat, Odysseus in America, reminds us that there are “two momentous human universals”: that we are all born helpless and dependent, and that we are all mortal and we know it. For a Christian, the only healthy way to deal with this vulnerability is to reach out and be held by both Him and each other. Then, calmed and strengthened, we can walk out into the world.
The attachment perspective recognizes that our need for emotional connection with others is absolute. Thousands of studies in developmental psychology with mother and child, research on adult bonding, and the investigations of modern neuroscience confirm that when we are in close relationships, we are truly interdependent. We are not like separate little planets revolving around each other.
This healthy dependence is the essence of romantic love. The bodies of lovers are linked in a “neural duet.” One person sends out signals that alter the hormone levels, cardiovascular function, body rhythms, and even immune system of the other. In loving connection, the cuddle hormone oxytocin floods lovers’ bodies, bringing a calm joy and the sense that everything is right with the world. Our bodies are set up for this kind of connection. In Mark 10:7–8 we read, “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.”
Even our identity is a kind of duet with those closest to us. A loving relationship expands our sense of who we are and our confidence in ourselves. You wouldn’t be reading this book had I not found a way to plug into my husband’s belief that I could write it, and my ability to hold on to his reassuring words kept me writing rather than walking away. Our loved ones do indeed come into our hearts and minds, and when they do, they transform us.
The quality of the love we receive puts us on a certain track. Assess how safely connected to Mom one-year-olds are when put in the Strange Situation, and you can predict how socially competent these children will be in elementary school and how close their friendships will be in adolescence, according to Jeff Simpson of the University of Minnesota. A secure connection to Mom and the closeness of these early friendships also forecast the quality of these individuals’ love relationships at age twenty-five. We are our relationship history.
To achieve a lasting loving bond, we have to be able to tune in to our deepest needs and longings and translate them into clear signals that help our lover respond to us. We have to be able to accept love and to reciprocate. Above all, we have to recognize and accept the predesigned code of attachment rather than attempting to dismiss and bypass it. In many love relationships, attachment needs and fears are hidden agendas, directing the action but never being acknowledged. It is time to acknowledge these agendas so that we can actively shape the love we so badly need.
To shape love, we have to be open and responsive, emotionally as well as physically. We can see what love encompasses in studies of the fluffy little titi monkey conducted by Bill Mason and Sally Mendoza of the University of California. Females nurse their babies but don’t offer any other maternal responses. They do not groom or touch their infants. The true nurturer is the male, who assumes 80 percent of the infant care. It’s the male who holds and carries the baby, who is emotionally engaged and is the safe haven. Baby titis don’t seem to mind at all when the mother is removed from the family for a while, but when the father is taken away, the infants’ levels of the stress hormone cortisol soar.
In my office, more emotionally distant partners sometimes tell me, “I do all kinds of things to show I care. I mow the lawn, bring in a good salary, solve problems, and I don’t play around. Why is it that, in the end, these things don’t seem to matter, and all that counts with my wife is that we don’t ‘talk about emotional stuff and cuddle’?” I tell them, “Because that’s just the way we are made. We need someone to pay real attention, to hold us tight, to come very close sometimes and respond to us in an emotional way that moves us, connects with us. Nothing compares with that. You need that, too. Have you forgotten?” Connection is sweet, holding is deeply calming and satisfying, whether we are receiving or giving. Most of us love to hold a baby. It feels so good, just as it feels good to hold our lover.
But is attachment and bonding the whole ball of wax? Adult love also involves sexuality and caretaking, or serving the other’s needs. Attachment is the bottom line, the scaffold on which these other elements are built. The interconnections are obvious. Sexuality is best when there is safe connection. The risk that is essential to eroticism does not come from constant superficial novelty, but from the ability to stay open to your partner in the moment.
Caretaking and pragmatic support come naturally when we feel close and connected. “When you love, you wish to do things for,” Ernest Hemingway wrote. “You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.” We know from research that secure partners are more sensitive to each other’s needs for care.
Rose and Bill, a grad-school couple, fought about everything, but especially emotional connection and pragmatic supportiveness. Even at the conclusion of therapy, after they’ve made considerable progress, they get into a fight about the fact that he doesn’t keep the pediatrician’s number on his cell phone although she has asked him to do just that. When the baby gets ill, she can’t use his phone to call the doctor. They finally find a way to step out of the argument. “When I can’t find that number, I get scared,” Rose says to Bill. “I need you to listen when I ask for stuff like that.” Bill now offers support. “I hear you,” he says. “It’s like you are saying to me, ‘Do you have my back?’ You need to depend on me here. And you are a great mother to our kids. I have put the number on my phone and ordered you your own cell phone so this won’t happen again. Maybe there are other ways I can support you here.” In a later session, Rose tells Bill that she no longer resents taking care of the kids in the evenings when he needs to study. Now that she feels closer to him, she actually enjoys bringing him coffee and listening to how he is doing with his courses. Being able to create a more secure bond frees up our attention so that we can tune in to and actively support our loved one.
In a romantic relationship, secure attachment, sexuality, and supportiveness all come together. Partners create a positive loop of closeness, responsiveness, caring, and desire. In his first counseling session, Charlie solemnly announced that, although he didn’t believe in divorce, he had decided to contact a divorce lawyer. Now, a few months later, he tells me, as his wife, Sharon, nods happily in agreement, “We are a lot closer. I don’t think we have ever been this close. Somehow I just don’t get so uptight and jealous anymore. I trust her. I can tell her when I need her help to set my mind at ease, and she can turn to me, too. We feel closer in bed. Sex is so much easier. I think we both feel desired and that we can ask for what we want. When we feel close like this, I like taking care of her. I like helping when her back hurts. I went and found her a little heating pad. And she is helping me with my weight-loss plan. This is like a whole new relationship here.”
But making love work is also accepting that, even when it’s good, it is always a work in progress. Just when you get it right, one of you changes! Ursula Le Guin, the novelist, reminds us that love “does not sit there like a stone. It has to be made like bread, remade all the time, made new.” The intention behind EFT is to offer couples a way to do just that.
Thirty years of research tells us that we have helped many different kinds of couples “make” their love, newlyweds and long-married folks, the basically happy and the seriously distressed, traditional and unconventional, highly educated and blue-collar, reticent and effusive. We have found that the bonding moments in EFT not only help heal relationships, they create relationships that heal. Partners who are depressed and anxious benefit enormously from the experience of supportive connection that a more loving relationship offers.
If I had to summarize the lessons I’ve learned from all these couples, they would look like this:
• Our need for others to come close when we call—to offer us safe haven—is absolute.
• Emotional starvation is a reality. Feeling emotionally deserted, rejected, or abandoned sparks physical and emotional pain and panic.
• There are very few ways to cope with our pain when our primary needs for connection are not met.
• Emotional balance, calm, and vibrant joy are the rewards of love. Sentimental infatuation is the booby prize.
• There is no perfect performance in love or sex. Obsession with performance is a dead end. It is emotional presence that matters.
• In relationships there is no simple cause and effect, no straight lines, only circles that partners create together. We pull each other into loops and spirals of connection and disconnection.
• Emotion tells us exactly what we need, if we can listen to it and use it as a guide.
• We all hit the panic button at times. We lose our balance and slip into anxious controlling or numbing and avoiding modes. The secret is to not stay in these positions. It’s too hard for your lover to meet you there.
• Key moments of bonding, when one person reaches for another and the other responds, take courage but they are magical and transforming.
• Forgiving injuries is essential and only happens when partners can make sense of their own hurt and know that their lover connects and feels that hurt with them.
• Lasting passion is entirely possible in love. The erratic heat of infatuation is just the prelude; an attuned loving bond is the symphony. Emotional safety enhances erotic exploration and relaxed absorption in lovemaking.
• Neglect will kill love. Love needs attention. Knowing your attachment needs and responding to those of your lover can make a bond last until “death us do part.”
• All the clichés about love—when people feel loved they are freer, more alive, and more powerful—are truer than we ever imagined.
Knowing all this, I still have to relearn these lessons every time I lose connection with a loved one. I still have to face that nanosecond of choice: to blame, to try to grab control, to dismiss, to get revenge, to shut down and shut out, or to breathe deep and tune in to my own and my loved one’s emotions, to risk, to reach, to confide, to hold.
Working with Christian couples, I have also learned how, as mentioned in the last chapter, Christian faith and loving bonds with others come together to form a sacred circle in which faith shapes love for another and love for a precious other enhances faith. More specifically, these couples have taught me that:
• When we are secure and connected with God, we worry less about who is in control. Flexibility prevails. Both partners can lead and follow because God is at the helm.
• Partners who can turn to God as “the comforter” and find safe haven are more able to turn to their loved one from an open and vulnerable place.
• Acknowledging our human vulnerability with our partner frees us up to turn to God with more open hearts.
• Knowing we are precious in the sight of God neutralizes our shame so we can more easily reveal ourselves to our loved ones.
• Rituals such as praying together and sharing daily devotions bring us closer to our partner by enhancing our spiritual and emotional intimacy.
• The sense of connection with a loving God calms us and helps us tune in to our partner’s world so that we can respond more compassionately and sensitively to his or her needs.
• Bonding moments with loved ones seem to generally enhance our faith in the goodness of creation and the Creator.
When lovers are united in a strong and secure bond, it does more than enhance their connection to each other. The circle of loving responsiveness widens like the ripple from a stone dropped in a pool. Being in a loving relationship augments our caring and compassion for others, in our family, our churches, and our community. Loving relationships offer a model of the service to others that has always been an inherent part of the Christian faith, as exemplified by Christ Himself.
In the early research on attachment, Mary Ainsworth found that as early as three years of age, kids who are secure with their moms show more empathy to others. When we don’t have to worry about safety with our loved ones, we naturally have more energy to give to others. We see others more positively and are more willing to emotionally engage with them. Feeling loved and secure makes us kinder and more tolerant people.
Psychologists Phil Shaver and Mario Mikulincer have shown in their studies that simply pausing and recalling times when someone cared for you instantly reduces your hostility to people who are different from you, if only for a brief period. Christians have always known this, though. Father Anthony Storey, a Catholic priest and one of my life mentors whom I spoke about in the introduction, always reminded me that meditating on religious images or sayings was not simply a religious ritual but also a way of connecting with the best part of ourselves—the part that naturally believes in and resonates with the best in others.
We have known for decades that happy families start with happy relationships between partners. When we are stressed-out and constantly fighting with our partner, it spills over into our relationships with our children. It is clear beyond all doubt that conflict between parents is bad for kids. When we are frustrated and anxious, the way we discipline our kids suffers. Mostly we become harsher and more inconsistent. But it is more than just an issue of discipline. If we are struggling in an unhappy relationship, we are often off balance emotionally and find it harder to be open and really tuned in to our youngsters. Because we are not emotionally present for them, they miss out on our nurturing and guidance. Alice tells me, “I am turning into this irritable, harsh person. I am so drained by what Frank and I are going through, I just don’t have the energy for the kids. When my youngest started to cry about being scared to go to school, I shouted at him. I feel awful about this. I’ve become a harridan, and Frank is distant with everyone. We have to solve this, for everyone’s sake.”
High levels of conflict in a marriage often precipitate behavioral and emotional problems in children, including depression. But conflict is not the only factor affecting youngsters. Partners’ emotional distancing from each other also frequently leads to distancing from the kids. Psychologist Melissa Sturge-Apple of the University of Rochester confirms this is especially true of fathers and their offspring. Her studies find that when men withdraw from their wives, they also often become unavailable to their children.
If we think in positive terms, when we feel securely attached to our partner, we tend to find it easier to be good parents, to provide a safe haven and secure base for our youngsters. Our kids then learn positive ways to deal with their emotions and move into constructive dependency with others. There is a mountain of scientific evidence that securely attached children are happier, more socially competent, and more resilient in the face of stress. The idea that one of the best things you can do for your child is to create a loving relationship with your partner is not sentimental, it’s a scientific fact.
But then therapists have been telling us for years that if we want to be really good parents, we must either have had secure, loving childhoods or counseling to deal with less-than-loving childhoods. My experience is that even if we have childhoods that have left us with lots of emotional difficulties and we never go to see a therapist, creating a better marriage can turn us into better parents. Psychologist Deborah Cohn from the University of Virginia agrees. She finds that moms who are anxious and insecure about closeness, if they are married to responsive men who provide them with a safe connection, are able to be positive and loving with their kids. When we love each other well, we help each other parent well.
When you have a safe connection in your relationship, you can pass that quality on, not just to your kid but to your kid’s future partners. Psychologist Rand Conger and colleagues from Iowa State University observed 193 families with adolescent children over a period of four years and found that the degree of warmth and supportiveness between parents and the quality of their parenting predicted how the children would relate to romantic partners five years later. The children of warmer and more supportive parents were warmer and more supportive with their partners, and their relationships were happier. When we love our partner well, we offer a blueprint for a loving relationship to our children and their partners.
Better relationships between love partners are not just a personal preference, they are a social good. Better love relationships mean better families. And better, more loving families mean better, more responsive communities.
Loving families are the basis of a humane society. As the poet Roberto Sosa writes, “Blessed are the lovers, for theirs is the grain of sand that sustains the center of the seas.” The widening circle of engagement with and responsiveness to others does not stop with our immediate loved ones or even with the future families they create. It continues to spread out, to help create more caring communities and, ultimately, a more caring world. The great commission found in Matthew 28:16–20, where he tells Christians to take the Word out into the world, is surely not just about spreading a set of beliefs; it’s also about spreading the essence of Christianity, which is that God so loved the world that He gave His son to mankind to teach us to love each other (John 3:16).
Understanding our longing for love and how love works is crucial if we want to shape a world that allows those longings to be answered and reflects the best of our nature. A human being longs for, is wired for, connection with others. Our nature is to bond intimately with a precious few, but then, having learned the lessons of belonging, to connect with others, our friends and colleagues, our tribe, and our communities of faith. When we are at our best, we offer support and caring to others because we recognize that they are just like us, human and vulnerable. In fact, we rejoice in the fellowship that takes us out of our own small world and makes us part of the greater whole.
I grew up in a small, less-than-affluent British town after World War II, where the sense that we all needed to pull together to survive was tangible. Everyone came to my parents’ pub—the clergyman, the commodore, the paper seller, the judge, the doctor, the clerk, the housewife, and the whore. Elderly villagers would spend all evening in one corner playing cards and discussing politics. Tramps who wandered from town to town would be given shelter, a beer, and a huge plate of my mother’s bacon and eggs before they wandered on. Soldiers who broke down, overwhelmed with the memories of war, were taken into a back room, held, and comforted. Mourners were given a hug, a whiskey, and maybe a cheery out-of-tune song on the piano, courtesy of my grandmother. Of course, there was also fighting and dissension, prejudice and cruelty. But in the end, there was a sense that we all stood together. We knew that we needed each other. And most of the time, there were at least one or two of us who could manage to be compassionate.
Interestingly enough, it is this kind of community that I still long for. This is my understanding of what Christ intended His church to be—a place where everyone is welcomed and accepted, where it is okay to need and be needed, and where uniqueness, rather than uniformity, is celebrated. One opportunity to create this kind of kinship may rest in community groups and home fellowships in our churches.
For centuries poets and prophets have assured us that we would all be better off if we loved each other more and that we should do just that. Most often this message is given as a set of moral rules and abstract ideas. Trouble is that it doesn’t seem to have that much impact unless we are also emotionally touched, that is, unless we personally experience a connection to a loving God and another human being. Then we can tune in to the hurt and sadness of others as if it were our own.
Like many of us, I find myself giving a little money to the relief funds for victims of earthquakes and other disasters. But it is hard to really respond to huge overwhelming problems or to faceless crowds. For me, it is easier and much more satisfying to give money every month to the families of two little girls in India who are registered with the foster parents plan of the international relief agency Plan Canada. I have pictures of them. I know their names and the names of their villages. I know that one family now has a goat and that the other has clean water for the first time. I dream of going to visit them. I feel a connection to the stoic-looking mothers who stand beside these children in the photos that arrive in the mail every few months. Modern technology makes these links possible and allows someone like me, on the other side of the world, to connect and to care. Many of us have had this kind of connection through groups such as Compassion International, World Vision, and other nonprofit mission organizations.
Ten years ago, in a small, picturesque community of old wooden houses on a beautiful river in the hills outside Ottawa, an organization called the Wakefield Grannies sprang up. It started with one person, Rose Letwaba, a South African nurse, giving a Sunday morning talk in the church by the river. She spoke of the grandmothers in a Johannesburg slum who are raising their grandchildren, all AIDS orphans, in poverty so crippling that the kids’ toothbrushes are always locked up, they are that valuable. A dozen Wakefield grandmothers got together and each connected with one South African granny and began to contribute money to that family. There are now more than 150 Grandmother-to-Grandmother groups in Canada and the U.S.
A large nondenominational church in Nashville, Tennessee, has adopted a small, poverty-stricken Appalachian community. For over a decade, groups of seventy-five to a hundred church members have visited the community two or three times each year, deepening their relationships with the people there. They provide typical ministry aid, such as school supplies, medical and dental services, and gifts and food at Christmas. But what sets them apart is the focus on getting to know the people on an individual basis and coming alongside them on their life journey. They’ve provided prom dresses, hairstylists, and manicurists in the spring, allowing teenage girls to experience a special occasion that they ordinarily would not be able to. When church members became aware of a woman with Stage IV cancer who wanted to get married, they purchased a beautiful dress, shoes, and jewelry for her wedding day. There are no hidden agendas here—just a ministry and outpouring of Christ’s love.
These stories of love in action give me hope that we can learn about love, nurture it with our partners and family, and then, with the empathy and courage it teaches us, find ways to take it out into the world and make a difference. Writer Judith Campbell suggests, “When your heart speaks, take good notes.” These stories began with people being open and responding from their heart to the plight of others. They speak to the power of emotional responsiveness and personal connection to shape our world for the better.
It seems to me that if we, as a species, are to not only survive but thrive together on this fragile blue and green planet, we have to learn to step past the illusion of separateness and grasp the depth of our need for secure connection with others. We must learn how to shape the constructive dependency that offers us not only an emotional home but the promise of a safe and collaborative world. The wisdom found in our own souls, in Scripture, and in science is now coming together to guide us forward. We are created for connection—something Christians have always known. Much of the Bible is, in essence, a love story. It is all about the restoration of loving connection with God. At last, we are finding our way to shape the story of secure and lasting love with life partners. Christians have always known that we are Homo vinculum —the one who bonds—and that we are all the stronger for it. As is written in John 15:9–17, the most priceless and pertinent commandment of all is “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”