here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
—e. e. cummings
All of us as parents hope to keep that sweet sense of connection we feel when our child struggles to toddle toward us, eyes wide with the delight of reaching our outstretched hands. So I am ridiculously touched when my daughter, now a beautiful, cool twenty-one-year-old, actually asks me out for coffee. She even picks the small, intimate coffee shop just down the road, where we can, as she puts it, “have a real convo.” I feel smug knowing that in the lingo of the much-younger-than-I-ever-was folks, that last word is short for “conversation.” All right. The coffee is perfect, the little café cheerful, and the frothy lemon cake delicious.
Once the small talk is over, I focus my eyes on the patterns in the foam of my latte, and I confide in her about a small victory in my work life about which I feel ridiculously proud. That’s when the strange sense that I am speaking into a vacuum hits me. I look up, and my daughter’s thumbs are flashing across the small screen in her hand. She is texting one of her friends, and I am talking to myself! I straighten my spine, mentally put on my red-and-blue superhero suit, and in the interest of human connection on planet Earth, I roar, “It’s me or the tiny screen, sweetie. Choose. I won’t talk to you when you’re not here.”
* * *
In these pages, I’ve shown how the quality of our relationships with others is the bedrock on which we build our existence. Our closest love relationships shape who we are and, more than perhaps any other single factor, shape our life story. Happiness experts, such as psychologist Ed Diener of the University of Illinois, tell us that our relationships are the strongest single predictor of human joy and well-being. Ever since social scientists started systematically studying happiness, it has been resoundingly clear that deep and stable relationships make for happy and stable individuals. Positive relationships also make us more resilient, advance our personal growth, and improve our physical health.
But relationships matter on a grander scale as well. The ways we tune in to and engage with others sculpt the very society we live in. Secure connection with loved ones helps us be open, responsive, and flexible, and that, in turn, makes us inclined to perceive the world as kinder, safer, and more malleable. It gives us the capacity to look outward, to see the broader universe, and take a more active role in it. Positive relationships make us more apt to be community builders—creative workers, good leaders, and caring citizens. A civil society depends on connection with and trust in others—on what primatologist Frans de Waal calls the “invisible hand” that reaches out to others.
Yet increasingly, we are not here for each other. Ironically, just as we finally crack the code of love, we seem to be doggedly building a world where such bonds are less valued and harder to make and maintain. As individuals, we are ever more cut off from each other in a fast-paced and socially fragmented world. Historian Ronald Wright has a harsher assessment. Modern civilization, he argues in A Short History of Progress, is a “suicide machine.” Indeed, the “flight recorders in the wreckage of crashed civilizations” indicate that Western industrialized society, with its promulgation of narcissisim and greed, is in free fall.
The only hope for Homo sapiens is to “know itself for what it is.” With such knowledge we can build a society that fits with and complements our most human, most humane, nature. As Aristotle said, “What a society honors will be cultivated.” It is time for us to understand, honor, and cultivate the deepest relational elements in our nature. We must build on the social capital that is at the heart of any civilization that merits the name.
The new science of love indisputably demonstrates that we are united by nature; we are all imbued with the same existential fears and needs. Empathy is our birthright. We see it at the earliest age. One-year-olds, who do not as yet have language, will offer pats and hugs when a loved one cries “ouch” upon stubbing a toe. They will share food and toys with playmates and fetch articles and remove obstacles for adults, even at some cost to themselves.
De Waal argues that we should abandon the idea that humans are inherently selfish and only help others after mentally tallying up costs and benefits. The calculation has been made for us. We naturally favor empathy unless we are consumed by fear or rage. I have seen this with every couple I have worked with in the past thirty years. Once partners are able to let go of their desperate self-protection and engage emotionally, they respond to their mate’s expressions of pain and vulnerability with compassion. This response continually confirms my belief in the basic goodness and generosity of human nature.
When as a society we fail to grasp, honor, and nurture our need for emotional connection, we pay a huge price. Without loving attachment, we lapse into the morass of depression and anxiety that increasingly characterizes affluent Western cultures. In the United States, use of antianxiety drugs is up 30 percent from a decade ago, and one in five American adults takes at least one drug for anxiety or depression. The World Health Organization warns that children, too, are being medicated for depression to a disturbing degree. As John Bowlby noted, out-of-control anxiety and high levels of depression are natural consequences of emotional separation and disconnection.
Our bond with others is our ace in the hole when it comes to survival. It makes sense, then, as loneliness experts such as John Cacioppo suggest, that feelings of isolation and rejection are actually signals designed to move us to repair our social ties. We should heed them and refashion our individual and collective priorities. This means taking a hard look at the choices we make as individuals, as families, as citizens, and as active builders of our cities and civilizations.
On a personal level, perhaps we should think twice (or more) before running out for cosmetic procedures, especially concerning facial rejuvenation. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons notes that between 2011 and 2012, injections of fillers rose 5 percent. Shots of botulinum toxins, such as Botox, rose 8 percent, soaring past six million for the first time. Yes, these procedures can make us look younger, but so often they leave faces immobile and blank, wiped of laugh lines, furrowed brows, and all the other little signposts of emotion. How can we understand another’s feelings when feelings aren’t to be seen? Actress Julia Roberts, who tried Botox once, quickly swore off. “I was permanently surprised for a couple of months,” she said. “It was not a cute look for me. My feeling is, I have three children who should know what emotion I’m feeling at the exact moment I’m feeling it…that is critical.”
“It’s no shock that we can’t tell what the Botoxed are feeling,” remarks David Neal, a psychologist at the University of Southern California. “But it turns out that people with frozen faces have little idea what we’re feeling, either.” In a recent experiment Neal and his colleagues asked women who were injected with fillers or Botox to look at photos of people’s eyes and the area around them and match them with the names of positive or negative feelings. The Botoxed women were significantly less accurate in their assessments than women who had not been injected with the paralytic. The probable reason: their faces can’t move to mimic the expressions they are seeing. Remember those mirror neurons! Botox not only deadens nerves, it deadens communication.
If we stay on the individual level, we could talk endlessly about many issues. Time, for instance. Over the last decades we have increased the hours we spend working, so much so that the line between work and personal time has all but disappeared. Prioritizing is all about assigning time. Discussions of why love dies often seem to miss the obvious: without time and attention all relationships evaporate. I wonder what happened to the idea of sacred (from the Latin, meaning “worthy of devotion”) time that we set aside for our lovers and families? As I stroll the streets of Jerusalem on the Sabbath, the shops are closed and the people are walking to temple, talking with family and friends. In the city I live in, and in most cities in the world, we have decided that commerce and convenience come first: the malls and supermarkets have to be open, and Sunday is now like any other day.
When my children were young, I did no professional work on Sundays; they were reserved for family outings and time to be with my partner. This decision was much easier to make when collectively we reserved this one day out of seven for the things we considered holy. What happened to that? Having no space or time set aside for connection with loved ones and community now seems normal. Now we have to consciously decide to swim against the tide of nonstop multitasking to turn toward those we love. We, as a society, must not just leave this to individual judgment but begin to seriously examine the impact of our laws and broad social policies on the quality of our most important relationships and foster a social structure that actively promotes secure and lasting bonds.
We might begin by looking at the implications of business policies on families, especially at times of stress and transition. We know that relationship breakdown often begins with the birth of a child. If we take this as a warning, what might we do differently? On a family level, we’d do well to follow the lead of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, which are already leaders in “bonding matters” policies. These countries offer between twelve and sixteen months of full paid leave to mothers and fathers, who can decide how to share that time between them. Canada offers almost a year off, but with much less remuneration. The United States has no national law mandating paid time off for new parents, although some states—California, for example—have begun to offer short leaves. Parental leave makes financial, social, and love sense from many angles. It promotes marriage stability, gives mothers who usually shoulder most child care responsibilities some respite, fosters bonding between mother and child, and also promotes infant health, thus getting baby off to a good emotional and physical start. Studies also indicate that the longer the leave a father takes, the more engaged he is with his children and the better the youngsters do in developing mental and social skills. If governments want to support the most basic building block of society—committed couples and their families—offering solid paid leave to partners as they go through this critical transition makes excellent sense.
We also seem intent on building our cities with no regard at all for the social and bonding nature of the human animal. City governments seem to have forgotten how to spell the word community. Despite visionaries, like the late Jane Jacobs, who have written paeans to the merits of small, organic communities, where people know each other and live, work, celebrate, and survive in a web of shared support, governments have been wedded to a “bigger is better” philosophy. This seems to have gathered momentum in the 1960s and 1970s, when old neighborhoods were routinely bulldozed to erect tall new buildings and create superhighways. Now such a philosophy is the norm. While the intention may be good, and old neighborhoods sometimes need razing, the effect on a human and community level is often disastrous. People have spiffier surroundings, but their close relationships with neighbors, the people they see every day and count on for company and help, are completely disrupted. Warehousing people is efficient, but it defeats the human need for belonging and social connection.
This was brought home to me recently in New York City one afternoon in Washington Square Park. All the dog owners brought their pooches out to play, and they sat, chatting away, on the seats in the big-dog and small-dog enclosures. I leaned over the fence and spoke to Mildred as she kept an eye on Doodlebug, her oversexed Chihuahua. She told me she had lived in one of the big apartment blocks near the park for thirty years. I commented, “Oh, you must know the people in your building very well, then.” She looked at me, horrified. “I don’t speak to them,” she protested in a high, squeaky voice. “I just bring Doodlebug here and chat to a few folks I know sometimes is all.” I didn’t know what to say. It seemed to me that the people on the benches were, in fact, keeping their distance, disturbed by Doodlebug’s rampant sexuality, which extended even to beer cans and an elderly gentleman’s left foot. But suddenly I felt sad. The park gave people a common place to walk, talk, and connect, but this apparently did not happen in the buildings these people called home.
How very different from my own upbringing! When I was growing up in a small English town, my life centered around my father’s pub, with its 130 or so regular patrons (we seem designed to flourish in groups about this size; that’s about the same number as in the tribes of hunter-gatherers that we originally evolved from). These patrons drank, flirted, caroused, bartered, worshipped, and cried together. The same people who appeared in the chorus of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta at the town hall argued politics with my father and pinched my mother’s elegant black-clad backside. It was a rich, wild, and almost disreputable environment for a little girl to grow up in, and at every minute I knew I was totally safe and cared for.
There are, of course, a small number of creative modern communities in North America, such as the award-winning Kentlands, outside of Washington, DC, that offer us models of modern habitation that honor our need for connection. As I drove into this town to visit a friend who recently moved from the big city, I thought I was entering an old village. Small parks and squares were dotted everywhere; shops, churches, and a theater popped up on corners. People sat on large porches and called to their neighbors or walked around the small lakes in the center of the town. This, I thought to myself, is made for humans; I knew I could live there. My friend in the town, Kathryn, tells me, “I know my neighbors, and I walk my dog with the same folks every morning. I know that if I need anything when my husband is away, there are people I can call on. The guys in the deli over there know the salami sandwiches I like. They make them for me without the olives. We like it here, and I feel so much calmer than when we lived downtown in DC.”
Our love relationships bear a great weight if the only place we are seen and known and called to is in our own living rooms. We can build relationship-friendly environments made for Homo sapiens and Homo vinculum that do not ignore the imperatives of human connection. If we continue on our present path, dismissing the necessities of our nature, we will find ourselves ever more isolated and, as John Bowlby would put it, ever more in a state of emotional starvation.
Even as we understand how relational we truly are, the basic currency of social connection—face-to-face contact and simple conversation—is becoming marginalized. I was recently in a small neighborhood restaurant in Naples, Italy, and watched a large family claim a table that waiters had scurried to set up. At one end sat the elderly paterfamilias with his four sons and their wives; at the other, nine children. I settled in to watch the rich circus of Latin family life. And indeed, there was much laughing, hugging, arguing, and remonstrating—but only at the adult end of the table. The other end was totally silent. Eight of the children sat engrossed by the small electronic screens they held a few inches from their faces. Not for one moment did they ever speak or look at each other or at the adults, and they completely ignored the only child without an electronic device. Eventually this boy began to bellow in protest and was comforted by his mother, who turned his chair to face the adult group. In spite of the warm Mediterranean night, I felt chilled.
Pamela Eyring, director of the Protocol School of Washington, which teaches social manners to corporate and government clients, has identified four stages—confusion, discomfort, irritation, and, finally, outrage—of what she terms “BlackBerry abandonment”: the feeling a person suffers when trying to connect with a devotee of the electronic gadget. She adds that since personal and business relationships rely on making others feel valued, devices such as iPhones put these relationships at risk. She calls an obsession with iPhones “cell-fishness.” But this is about more than an issue of etiquette or a lack of consideration for others. A survey by the consumer electronics review site Retrevo.com found that 10 percent of people under the age of twenty-five don’t see anything wrong with texting during sex!
Some say that all our electronic gadgetry is keeping us more connected. But while sharing information on a screen has its uses, it is a shallow connection, not the deep emotional engagement needed for any kind of meaningful relationship. Texting and e-mails are set up for volume, velocity, and multitasking—that is, the splitting of attention. They create an illusion of connection. The danger is that they also set up a new way of relating in which we are continually in touch but emotionally detached.
In her book Alone Together, Sherry Turkle, professor at MIT, suggests that, in the last fifteen years, our tools have begun to shape us and our connection with others, so that we now “expect more from technology and less from each other.” Turkle analyzes detailed interviews with technology users and conducts formal studies on the impact of robots on them. Her studies examine a moving target. A 2010 Nielsen survey reported that the average teen sends more than three thousand text messages a month, and this surely will increase.
But this is just the beginning. Parents buy children interactive ZhuZhu robotic pet hamsters who are, according to the ads, “living to feel the love,” or the more sophisticated robot puppy AIBO, from Sony. The adults in Turkle’s book speak of interacting with AIBO in the beginning just for amusement, but admit to later turning to the robot when they are “lonely.” Then there is Paro, the furry baby harp seal robot who holds eye contact and is designed to be “therapeutic” for depressed adults and others. These kinds of substitutions, Turkle argues, have “put the real on the run.” Technology tends to reduce relationships to simple bytes, then the bytes become the accepted norm. To borrow a phrase from the late Daniel Moynihan, noted sociologist and U.S. senator, it’s defining relationships down.
David Levy, in his book Love and Sex with Robots, suggests that soon love with robots will be as accepted as love with human beings. Roxxxy, the first sex robot, or “girlfriend,” is leagues ahead of blow-up dolls. Introduced in 2010, Roxxxy can be customized in terms of her physical attributes and even her personality. And she has electronically warmed skin, internal organs that pulse, and can make programmed conversation—but only about sex or soccer! What more could someone wish for?!
The movement to have small robots take care of our most vulnerable citizens, children and the elderly, is also gaining momentum. Paro, for example, is being touted as the solution for lonely seniors. It understands about five hundred English words, and seniors seem to like it—unless, of course, they can choose to talk to a real person.
To me, robots like Roxxxy and Paro reflect our growing sense of failure and resignation where close relationships are concerned as well as our profound lack of awareness about our need for intimate emotional connection. The one thing that robots cannot do is feel emotion; they offer a counterfeit performance that imitates connection. Just as distressed couples do, when we become lost and desperate, we pick up solutions that seem to offer immediate comfort but further distort our ability to really connect with another person. In a lonely society, a substitute relationship may be better than none at all, but substitution blurs into replacement, and replacement becomes preferred.
Howard, one of the people interviewed by Sherry Turkle about the “artificial companionship” offered by a robot, comments, “Well, people are risky…robots are safe.” People like Howard seem to relate to their robots as though they are sentient and emotional, even though they say that they “know” the robot is a machine. They “attach to” these machines, which mimic listening and concern, unable to resist the idea that the machine “cares.” As Turkle points out, our desire for caring is so absolute that it takes precedence over our knowledge of the machine’s indifference. Substitute pseudo-attachments can be seductive, but in the end they take us farther and farther away from the real thing—a loving, felt sense of connection that requires moments of full, absorbing attention and a tuning in to the nuances of emotion.
What we ask of robots shows us what is missing in our lives. As we turn to technology instead of each other, face-to-face connection is lessening and real ties are weakening. Turkle concludes that “a machine taken as a friend demeans what we mean by friendship; after all, we don’t count on our cyber friends to come by when we are ill or console us in the face of loss.” Indeed, we are wired to count not just on our friends but also on our loved ones to do that.
When I listen to couples describing how they spend their time, it hits me that tapping on the iPad and the computer and watching TV’s ironically termed “reality” shows diminish our opportunities to engage with and care for another person. Technology in general, just like pornography, offers us lousy models for connecting and bonding with other people. We become accustomed to the simplified, the superficial, and the sensational; we turn to the endless stories of celebrity relationships rather than learning to craft our own. As political scientist Robert Putnam notes in his seminal book on the loss of social connection in Western societies, Bowling Alone, “Good socialization is a prerequisite for life online, not an effect of it: without a real world counterpart, Internet contact gets ranty, dishonest and weird.” We communicate more and more and say less and less. In a good love relationship, if we can turn off the screen, we can learn to say what really matters to us in ways that build connection.
There is a chicken-and-egg factor here. Isolation, I am arguing, is an effect of our obsession with technology, but growing social isolation also creates this obsession. More than at any time in human history, we live alone. In 1950, only four million folks in the United States lived on their own; in 2012, more than thirty million did. That’s 28 percent of households—the same percentage as in Canada; in the UK., it’s 34 percent. Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at New York University and the author of Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone, observes that these skyrocketing statistics tell us that “a remarkable social experiment” is occurring.
How does this momentous shift fit into the design of the creature we call a human being? Technology is being touted as the solution to our growing isolation, but in fact it is just part of the problem. Real connection with others is being crowded out by virtual kinship. This is worrying even on just a pragmatic level. Psychologists point out that cooperation, on which society depends, is a learned skill that until recently almost everyone acquired. Today, however, fewer and fewer people have the ability to collaborate; instead they withdraw from group tasks and social life.
My client Marjorie stares at the floor in my office while she tells me, “I am on my own since my marriage split up and my son left. So it’s quiet, and I just have to deal with me. I have gotten used to it. I watch TV a lot and play video games. But at work, there is this buzz. Lots of people, and they want me to listen and help them do stuff. I get overwhelmed and irritated. And now my supervisor says she is going to lay me off. I told her that was fine. But it isn’t, really. Then I really would be all by myself—and broke.”
You do not have to go far to find other examples of just how dismissive of relationships Western societies have become or to grasp how relationships are increasingly viewed as commodities. Standing at my kitchen counter at breakfast time one day, near the end of writing this book, I casually began to read an article in my local newspaper. Noel Biderman, CEO of Ashley Madison, an online dating service for married folks who want to cheat, had just announced the results of the company’s survey of its clientele. I scanned the findings on the unfaithful: the typical man is in his forties, the woman is thirty-one; they have been married for about five years and commonly have a daughter around age two or three; and they are affluent. Interesting. And sad.
But the next line really got my attention. In fact, I dropped my toast! Ottawa, the small, sleepy capital city where I spend much of my time, is a hot spot for customers buying the opportunity to have an affair, having the most paid subscribers to Ashley Madison per capita. And my very own neighborhood, bounded by a lazy river and quiet canal, full of old houses and huge trees, coffee shops and florists, is the very hottest local area for customers. I won’t tell you what I did next, but it was loud. My dog took a dive under the table. Maybe it’s capital cities: the top subscriber locale in the United States is Washington, DC.
According to Biderman, the most popular time for women who have kids to sign up is right after Mother’s Day! These moms say they get little attention from their partner and miss feeling emotionally supported and sexually desired. I felt sad and a bit sick that so many of my neighbors might feel that the only place they can turn to to find a way out of this kind of distress is a website that takes advantage of their vulnerability and has them pay for the privilege of further injuring their relationship.
Later in the morning, I got a long e-mail from a colleague who was writing to me about relationship education programs. His point was that there are a number of solid programs that seem to help couples improve their relationship before irrevocable harm has been done, but that enrollment in these programs tends to be low. In general, relationship education is a hard sell. Then I remembered an article indicating that the majority of people who sign up for sites that facilitate cheating never, in fact, cheat. They join to flirt with cheating, to talk with someone about cheating, but rarely meet up with a potential lover. In all likelihood, they are feeling abandoned and alone and looking for a distraction, a fantasy that promises relief from their pain and makes them feel as if they have options.
I had an overwhelming desire to run out into the streets and yell to all my neighbors, “Listen up. You just shut down those dead-end quick-and-easy lover sites. They won’t help. Go find yourself a program to help you and your partner reconnect.” Why don’t people do that? Maybe they do not know how to even begin to talk to their partner about their distress, or they believe their partner would not agree to attend such a program. Perhaps they find going to a program scarier than conducting a fantasy affair on the Internet.
But when I think of all the unhappy couples I have seen, and that so many of them wait years before seeking a couple therapist, I am convinced that resorting to the Web is about a collective sense that love is something that just happens to us, that we have no control over its vagaries, and that our only recourse when it turns against us is to seek distance and distraction.
If we take the research on the power of loving bonds seriously, then what? How can we begin to use the lessons of the new science? We can answer this question in two ways. We can improve our individual decisions and practices with our loved ones, and we can try to actively shape society to recognize, honor, and prioritize our innate need for connection.
On a personal level, if we consider that in a relationship the connection between two partners is always variable, oscillating between moments of attunement and synchrony and moments of misattunement and disconnection, then we can set up rituals in which we intentionally reset the dial, reattune, and reconnect. I remember a client, Charlene, telling me of a game she and her small son engaged in that morphed into a reattunement ritual with her husband. It was called Where Are You? With her son, it was a hide-and-seek game, but with her spouse it was about moving into being emotionally present. “Where are you now?” she would ask. He had learned to report his emotional state at that moment. “I am feeling fried. Too much to do. I like that you ask me this, though. It calms me down.” Then she would reciprocate by telling him what she was feeling. This simple routine stopped days rolling by, said Charlene, with “no real personal connection, no one tuning in to and opening the emotional channel, if you know what I mean.”
Anniversaries are a great opportunity for reconnection. What if we renewed our wedding vows not after ten or twenty years together, as some of us do, but every year? We could talk with our partner to review what has changed in the past year, what the delights and disappointments have been, and also what the theme of our own love story has been over the long term. Then, using our original vows as a guide, we could make those vows again with a focus on the following year and the ways in which we intend to nurture our love for each other. With understanding, we can learn to be more attentive and deliberate about our most precious and necessary relationships.
On a societal level, the most obvious implication of the new science of bonding is that we must educate for connection. The most organic way to do this is to support couples in their efforts to create loving bonds and be responsive parents. We should acknowledge, as Frans de Waal notes, that “there is no escaping the reality that we are dependent on others. It is a given. If dependency/vulnerability is recognized and handled well in loving relationships…it is the source of the best human qualities, empathy, kindness and cooperation.” We need to educate for qualities such as empathy, which is at least as relevant to health, happiness, and citizenship as arithmetic. But do we know how to teach these qualities?
Empathy can be “caught, not taught,” says educator Mary Gordon, who founded the program Roots of Empathy (ROE). Nine times a year, she brings one particular mother and her maturing infant to an elementary school to coach children in grades 1 through 8 in “emotional literacy” and give them “the picture of what love looks like.” Before each session, an instructor explains the language of feelings and attachment and gives tips on observing the mother and infant interacting. After the visit, the children review the visit and discuss their own experiences and feelings of, say, fear or frustration and the ways in which they can deal with or help others who have these emotions.
An ROE instructor might ask, “What is the baby trying to tell us right now?” “How did the baby tell the mother that she needed her?” “What did the mother do?” “What can the baby do now that she couldn’t do last time?” “What should we do?” The children also receive art, drama, and writing assignments to further explore feelings of attachment as well as gain basic information on human development.
By end of 2012, 450,000 children in Canada and Australia had gone through the program. Gordon believes that far too many people are “emotional islands, cut off from meaningful connection to others because they can’t speak the universal language of their emotions.” Research conducted since 2000 by professor of education Kimberly Schonert-Reichl of the University of British Columbia finds that emotional understanding and pro-social behaviors increase, and aggressive behavior decreases, in children who receive ROE instruction. Nasty behavior dropped 61 percent in ROE children (compared with an increase of 67 percent in youngsters who weren’t in the program). ROE children generally became more cooperative, helpful, and kinder, and peers rated them so. For example, when children in an ROE class explained to schoolmates how humiliated and unhappy a nine-year-old who is wheelchair-bound and drools uncontrollably feels when students call him names and mock him, the harassment stopped.
The program creates a safe environment where children can discuss their feelings and learn to regulate them. The implications are broad. Programs like this could help curb bullying, which has reached epidemic proportions in North American schools and is a strong predictor of delinquency as well as later criminal activity, alcoholism, and mental health problems. Today, one in five children and adolescents experience psychological difficulties, including depression and anxiety, severe enough to warrant treatment.
Some teachers call ROE the fourth R (after reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic) as a way of stating how much they value this program and how it builds essential basic social skills. Indeed, this kind of program does seem to help boost basic abilities and also general academic achievement. Research shows that the social skills a child exhibits in grade 3 more strongly predict academic success in grade 8 than does academic prowess. “Too many children are unable to learn because they are in so much social pain,” says Gordon. Their energy is spent on being vigilant for threats and managing fear; there’s little left over for studying.
By increasing emotional engagement and responsiveness, Gordon hopes to build children who will be better friends, better citizens, and eventually become better parents themselves. We now have “so many people running on empty,” she says, and draws an analogy. “There is fluoride in our water supply to prevent tooth decay…we need empathy in our water to prevent social decay.”
The real question is, how much do we value human connection? It seems we are ambivalent. In 2009, the British Columbia provincial government cut the funding for the Roots of Empathy program, but in 2012, a new government restored enough funding for it to be reinstated in 360 classrooms. The question of whether we value human connection and empathy enough to educate for it and deliberately promote it perhaps depends on how we see civilization itself. When he came to England in the 1930s for talks on Indian self-rule, Mahatma Gandhi was asked by a reporter what he thought of Western civilization. Gandhi replied, “I think it would be a very good idea.”
The word civilization comes from the Latin word for “citizens” and signifies an advanced state of human social development and organization. Do we judge this state by how high our buildings are and how many fancy goods are in our stores? Or do we judge it by the quality of our relationships?
In November of 2012, walking in the streets of old Jerusalem, I saw, in this long-divided and fractious city, two little girls of around three years old walking calmly hand in hand down the narrow stone street. After seeing young Israeli soldiers cradling their automatic weapons at every city gate, this innocent image of connection and assumed safety felt reassuring. In Denmark, people leave their children unattended outside, trusting that no one will take them or hurt them. In Oslo, there are no beggars on the streets; if someone begins to beg, people come up and offer to help or call a city staffer for assistance. In small-town America and Canada, where communities are more closely knit than they are in cities, doors are left open and cars unlocked. Civilization, it seems to me, works most effectively when we take our social capital seriously and cultivate it.
As we understand relationships and how they foster growth and strength in us as individuals, we can extend this understanding to the world of work and use it to create more effective leaders. Scientific descriptions of successful leaders in business and the armed forces reflect the qualities of model attachment figures. They are tuned in and responsive to subordinates, they give them guidance, offer them challenges, support their initiatives, and foster their self-confidence and self-worth. A good example is found in the movie Saving Private Ryan. Captain Miller, played by Tom Hanks, teaches his men to trust him and each other; he turns them into a powerful, cohesive team that can accomplish its mission. Trust is the glue that turns a group of men into a unit, just as it is the adhesive that turns two individuals into a bonded pair.
This holds true in sports as well. Psychologist Michael Kraus and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, found that the best predictor of which National Basketball Association team was going to win the final playoffs in the 2008–9 season was not early-season performance but the number of times team members reached for and touched each other in the first game. Reassuring touch from teammates appears to enhance the sense that they can rely on each other, increases cooperation, and frees players to focus completely on the game. Human connection works!
Mario Mikulincer, of the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, has examined the link between attachment and leadership in the Israeli army. In one study, he identified the attachment styles of young military recruits at the start of four months of intensive training. When they finished, he asked them to name those who should become leaders. The recruits’ nominees all had secure attachment styles.
In another study, Mikulincer asked 200 people, including officers in the Israel Defense Forces and business managers in the public and private sectors, to fill out questionnaires about their attachment style and their motives for seeking leadership positions. More avoidant leaders generally endorsed statements that demonstrated strength, toughness, independence, dictatorial decision making, and staying removed from followers; their attitude is summed up by the phrase “I like the pleasure of having control over people.” More anxiously attached leaders tended to check statements that showed a desire to cultivate subordinates’ growth (“I devote effort to the personal development of my followers”). But they were so unsure of themselves that their followers reported being uncertain as to exactly how they could effectively contribute to the unit’s performance in key tasks and problem solving. Anxiety interferes with effective communication.
In a third study, Mikulincer surveyed soldiers about group unity (“Does the team work well together?” “Does your group have a high level of consensus?”). Soldiers rated both anxious and avoidant leaders as poor at building group cohesion, but in different ways. Anxiously attached officers were judged as deficient in providing direction in task-oriented situations, while avoidant leaders were deficient in emotion-focused duties, such as building morale. Avoidant leaders received particularly poor marks when soldiers were questioned after stressful combat training. The more avoidant the officer, the less he was viewed by his unit as a supportive influence. Indeed, soldiers, even those who rated themselves before training as very secure, reported feeling nervous strain and becoming depressed.
Mikulincer and his team conclude that avoidant leaders are inclined to dismiss their own and others’ emotions and to hold a negative general attitude toward others. They demoralize followers, reducing enthusiasm for group tasks. Anxious leaders, on the other hand, doubt their own abilities and communicate uncertainty to subordinates, and that makes the team hesitant to act and lowers productivity. This kind of research expands our concepts of effective leadership. It demonstrates that in leadership, as in other spheres of life, it is those who can manage their emotions and connect well with others who are most able to create the secure structure that promotes high achievement.
For many years the goals of personal growth and autonomy have been seen as somehow antithetical to bonding and our need for others. In fact, secure connection is the fertile soil out of which confident, resilient, and independent human beings spring. This sense of safe connection and openness sets us up for what noted psychologist Abraham Maslow in the 1970s called self-actualization. More secure folks tend to accept who they are and see themselves and others as deserving of caring and concern. When we are securely attached we have a more positive, balanced, complex, and coherent sense of self. In fact, securely attached people show fewer discrepancies between their stated actual and ideal traits. At the end of therapy, Anita tells me, “When I am closer to Ken, I feel more confident, and just better about myself. Knowing I am special to him helps me accept my fears and know that I can deal with them. It’s okay to be afraid sometimes. I don’t have to put on this facade of coolness anymore. It’s simpler in the end to just recognize your vulnerabilities—that is the best way to be.”
But more than this, since securely attached people live in what they perceive as a safe world, they are less self-absorbed and less preoccupied with threats than are anxious or avoidant people. This enables them to focus on, empathize with, and be tolerant of others. John Bowlby believed that when given loving care as children, human beings are naturally empathetic and altruistic. He also believed that insecure attachment tends to suppress or override our natural tendency to care for others. And it seems that secure connection with others does indeed further in us the ability to respond compassionately to their needs.
Psychologists can now “prime,” or turn on, a sense of security in a lab and, for at least a short time, expand a person’s compassion. Mikulincer and his colleagues have been examining how a taste of loving connection affects our ability to feel for and act in the interest of others. In one study, students read either a story of a person providing loving care and support to someone in distress or a story describing a person who voiced the sort of platitudes expected to lift a general listener’s mood. After that, they read a story about a student whose parents had just been killed in a car accident. Then they were told to rate how much sympathy and compassion as well as personal sorrow they felt for the student. After the attachment-priming story, everyone felt more compassion for the bereaved student than they did after the story containing good-mood phrases. But avoidant and anxious readers felt less than did securely attached readers. And the anxiously attached also reported being more personally upset by the tale than those with other attachment styles. It became about their sadness, not the student’s.
If we become more connected, do higher levels of empathy really translate into action—into a willingness to help a person in distress? In another experiment, subjects were asked to identify the people they were closest to (through questions such as “Who is the person you turn to when you are feeling down?”). Most had three attachment figures. Then the subjects were seated at a computer and told to look at strings of letters that appeared on the screen and determine if they constituted a word. Buried in each string was a rapid subliminal (that is, subconscious) presentation of the name of one of their loved ones. Another group of folks also scrolled through letters but were told to deliberately (that is, consciously) think of a significant positive incident with a particular loved one. A comparison group went through the same process, but the name provided in the experiment was of someone who was an acquaintance, not a loved one.
All the subjects then were asked, ostensibly as part of a different experiment, to watch a woman in another lab performing a series of increasingly aversive tasks. As they watched, the researcher in the lab insisted very strongly that the tasks had to be done or the whole project would be ruined. In fact, subjects were watching an actress in a pre-recorded video clip. The grim tasks progressed from looking at photos of a gory accident to sinking a hand into frigid water to holding a crawling tarantula or squirming rat. As the video progressed, the woman’s agony intensified, and at one point she pleaded for someone to replace her. Viewers were asked to rate their own distress and also their willingness to take her place.
This study was replicated five times with five different groups of participants. Each time, subjects who were primed, consciously and unconsciously, with the name of a loved one reported being more upset by the woman’s predicament and feeling more compassion for her than were subjects primed with an acquaintance’s name. They were also more likely to offer to take her place.
Within the attachment-primed group, there were some subtle differences. Avoidant folks rated themselves as feeling less compassionate and alarmed by the woman’s situation and less willing to take her place than did secure observers. Anxious folks became very distressed by her predicament but were also less willing to take her place than were secures. Priming our attachment system appears to turn on our altruistic, care-giving system for a moment, but we seem to need a certain level of security before we move into compassionate action. Avoidants appear to maintain a certain detachment, while the anxious are gripped by their own suffering.
Security also creates a tolerant attitude toward what is unfamiliar or novel. When you believe that others have your back, the unfamiliar is less threatening. Secure folks have more stable self-esteem and are less inclined to denigrate others (as in “We—my group and I—are better than they are”). So it makes sense that this kind of priming security research has also been used to test whether it is possible to promote tolerance between groups of people who are different and between whom there may be enmity, such as homosexuals and heterosexuals or Arabs and Israelis.
When research subjects were asked to visualize the face of a loving attachment figure immediately before rating their reaction to images of a member of a “foreign” group, their previously assessed negative attitude toward these out-groups disappeared entirely. Tuning in to their sense of safe connection made them less judgmental. Where before they had described out-group members as “sleazy, spineless, and lazy,” they subsequently regarded them as “trustworthy, warm, and kind”—just like members of their own group. This positive view was present even when a sense of threat was induced, as when subjects were told that members of their own group had recently been insulted by someone from the “foreign” group.
But can turning on a felt sense of secure attachment actually reduce aggression between warring groups? This is a little hard to test in a lab. Mikulincer decided to try the Hot Sauce study. This is the research version of a common childhood ruse: offering a kid you’re on the outs with what appears to be a gummy worm but is actually a real worm. Do you watch with glee as he eats it and begins to heave (or not)? In studies of aggression, the question is: how much hot sauce is a subject willing to push on someone else?
One such study involved a group of Israeli students. On several occasions, each student was repeatedly subliminally primed for 20 milliseconds with the name of a main attachment figure, that of a friend who was not a security figure, and that of an acquaintance. After each priming, the subjects were asked to give an Arab and an Israeli a quantity of hot sauce to sample; the students were told that both very much disliked spicy foods. Those who had been primed for attachment gave small equal amounts of sauce to both the Arab and Israeli. When primed with the names of the other two people, however, the subjects repeatedly gave larger amounts of hot sauce to the Arab than they did to the Israeli.
The implications of this kind of research for society are obvious. Secure relationships with parents and partners make for more compassionate and caring citizens, who will be more tolerant of those who are not like them. These priming procedures remind me of religious rituals in which people are encouraged to become more compassionate by visualizing the loving Buddhist goddess Tara, praying to the loving Christian God, or simply meditating with gratitude on the benevolence of the universe that surrounds them.
The findings of priming studies like those above suggest that our feeling for and willingness to act on behalf of others has plasticity; it can be shaped, especially if images that awaken our deepest need to belong and be held in loving connection are evoked. Understanding attachment shows us how loving parenting and partnering translates into a kinder, more humane society. You may not realize it, but when you hold your child or respond to your partner’s call, you are sculpting a civilization.
In terms of revolutions, the latter half of the 18th century was hot! First there was the American Revolution of 1775, and then the French Revolution of 1789. Both these momentous uprisings enshrined ideals that are reflected in the founding documents of many modern democracies. The American War of Independence hallowed the rights of the individual to liberty and equality. The French Revolution consecrated an additional principle: the brotherhood of man. Liberté, égalité, fraternité is the French national motto.
There are some people, such as the late Charles Gonthier, a justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, who suggest that we have forgotten the core values of empathy, trust, and commitment that characterize this last pillar of democracy—fraternity. The new science of human bonding extends this last element beyond a recognition of the need for fellow feeling and cooperation between neighbors. It places a recognition of our emotional and physical interdependence and the need for safe, trusting, caring relationships at the very core of human nature and of a truly human society. This new science is not just a formula for romantic and family love. It is a blueprint for the reform and optimal development of human society.
We could start by considering ways to raise awareness of the perils of loneliness and by validating our need for belonging and support. Can you imagine if we took a small amount of the $641 million spent on antismoking campaigns in the United States in 2010 and created an anti-disconnection campaign, publicizing the dangers of emotional isolation? Emotional isolation has actually been found to be more dangerous to our health than smoking, so this suggestion has much logic to it. We could put banners up in our cities asking people, “Who did you reach out to today?” or even telling them, “Take someone you know (or don’t know!) for a latte today. It’s good for your health.”
There are a thousand ways we could bring building relationships to front and center. Let’s just make a very short list. We could write letters to our government representatives pressing them to help create more connection-friendly communities with public spaces that promote easy social engagement. We could also ask our representatives to widely promote basic relationship education for partners and for parents. We could encourage our radio and TV stations to offer serious and informative programs on relationship issues. We could revise professional education programs to inform doctors and psychologists of research that shows that including a patient’s partner increases the efficacy of treatment for everything from anxiety to heart disease.
The new awareness of how relationships affect our health and well-being has already resulted in small, specific changes that we can, I hope, expand and consolidate. Some of them, such as the Roots of Empathy program, are mentioned here. Some communities are contributing to public relationship education with small initiatives—for example, religious groups are recruiting happy middle-aged and older couples to act as group consultants to younger couples by sharing their experience of long-term love. Most cities have distress lines operated by volunteers, and some agencies offer free training to young people who are interested in staffing hotlines for those who need and want someone to confide in. Some of our youth already take a gap year between high school and university and choose programs dedicated to service to others. This practice started in the U.K. in the 1960s, and programs like AmeriCorps, created in the 1990s by U.S. president Bill Clinton, now promote youngsters’ involvement in projects such as community education and environmental cleanup. This initiative could be expanded so that, as part of a humanistic education, all students would be required to dedicate a year to direct community service as a prerequisite for entering university or college.
In “Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves,” John Bowlby explained that the defiance, desperation, and rage typically found in young delinquents is largely a reflection of family dysfunction and the resulting disconnection from others. Optimal family functioning starts and ends with the bond between parents; it is infinitely harder to pull off responsive parenting without such a bond, especially without the web of support that so many small and intimate communities used to provide. Simple indicators of connection tell us how far off track we are. Surveys show that U.S. families now rarely share meals together and that parents spend little time talking with their offspring. Almost half of American two-year-olds watch TV for at least three hours each day. A 2007 UNICEF report on child well-being in the world’s twenty-one richest nations rated the United States, with its chaotic family structures, troubled family relationships, and exposure to violence, second worst. Fragile, unstable families do not bode well for the creation of strong, safe emotional relationships that will stabilize children and help them grow into well-functioning adults and citizens of the world.
In addition to awakening to the fact that we need to take care of the planet we live on, we must also recognize that we need to guard the ecological niche we occupy—close connection with others. Our overwhelmed health systems are already passing the buck back to families by releasing people from hospitals sooner and expecting family members to care for the sick and also the elderly. But increasingly, caregivers are overwhelmed and unable to cope with the burden. The social problems that our society faces can only be effectively addressed by strengthening adult love relationships, families, and communities.
The quality of love relationships is no longer simply a personal affair. When these relationships blossom, we all benefit; when they become distressed or break, we all suffer. Dissolving a marriage costs individuals and also taxpayers. In the United States, it is estimated that on average, each divorce drains thirty thousand dollars out of the public treasury; the money is spent on food, housing, and health care for needy single-parent families as well as child-support enforcement. There are indirect costs as well: physical and mental health problems, lost work time, addiction, and crime.
In light of the above, governments around the world are starting to offer supportive services to couples in serious difficulty or facing stressful transitions—for example, preparing for marriage or the empty nest. Relate, in Great Britain, and the National Marriage Coalition, in Australia, provide free information, advice, consultation, and referrals to professionals through the Internet. In the United States, the federal government has been giving small grants to local and religious organizations as part of its Healthy Marriage Initiative program. The results of these efforts have been inconsistent, possibly because most programs have not focused on the attachment issues that are at the root of relationship discord. Most couples do not need to learn how to call time-outs during fights; they need to understand the fundamentals of love and learn how to reach for each other and be responsive to each other’s needs. I believe that my new educational program, Hold Me Tight: Conversations for Connection, based on the science described in this book, will bring better results.
The biggest hurdle, however, is not the design of education programs but getting couples to attend them. Many see such courses as an admission of failure. Jenny, a client in individual therapy for depression, tells me, “Well, I know my relationship with Russell sometimes sparks my feeling depressed, but we would never consider doing a relationship education program, let alone anything like couple therapy! After all, that is for couples who are divorcing or something. And it’s private stuff. I don’t know anyone who has done that. You can’t really change love, can you? ‘It works or it doesn’t’ is what my mother says. And my friends are convinced you can’t hold on to that love feeling forever.”
Jenny is telling me that intentionally working at understanding love does not seem natural or feasible. She has no inkling that love is something that can be actively shaped and controlled and that she can learn how to do it. I imagine if you had advocated parent training just a few decades ago, you would have received a similar response from most people. Largely because of John Bowlby’s work on mother-and-child relationships, the culture of parenting has changed. There is now an endless stream of books, courses, websites, media articles, and parenting groups reflecting and shaping a new consciousness of what it means to be a parent and what a child needs. The greatest promise of the new science of love is simply this: it will create a similar new empowering consciousness about what it is to be a lover.
As we educate for love and begin to see romantic love as intelligible and malleable, we will be able to shift from an obsession with the “fall” part of love to the “make” aspect of love (which will mean more than just sex). We will develop more confidence in our ability to work with and mold our love relationships. The more you believe you can influence what happens in a marriage, the harder you will try to keep it and mend it. And the more commitment you show, the more effective your efforts will be and, ultimately, the more stable your relationship will become. This increased stability is the second great promise of the new science of love. We can make love last because we now know how to repair and renew it.
But awakened awareness and education will never be enough in and of itself. Our political thinking has a long way to go to catch up with our new understanding of human bonding and the power of secure connection. If we truly want to support safe-haven and secure relationships for adults and children, then governments and corporations also need to offer a wide range of supportive workplace policies, including paid leave for new mothers and fathers as well as for employees caring for sick children and elderly or infirm adults. Opponents argue that such policies are costly and undermine productivity and competitiveness. Evidence suggests the contrary. Studies of highly effective companies find that family-friendly policies pay off in reduced costs and increased productivity. Employees are more engaged and creative and stay with their companies longer. And clients are more satisfied, too.
Surveys find the greatest reported well-being and happiness not in the wealthiest nations but in those with the highest level of trust among citizens and the most bonding-friendly social policies. In fact, wealth seems to come with a high price tag; many studies show that becoming preoccupied with materialistic concerns goes along with a loss of empathy for and trust in others. The preoccupation with acquiring more possessions or reaching for greater highs from drugs or alcohol will not work as a substitute for connection with others. The need for emotional connection is so intrinsic to who we are that there can be no substitutes. If we acknowledge love sense, we can move forward. We can move toward a time when “true” love, being known, becomes simpler and easier and more accessible to all of us.
* * *
There is much talk across cultures of the time we live in as a tipping point for mankind. Shamans and holy men have seen this period as the beginning of the end of the world—or the beginning of a new cycle. The Mayans predicted destruction. The Incas and Tibetan Bon shamans foretold renewal and transformation. The Hopi prophesied a “time of turning the earth over.”
Commentators in our modern world are noting that there seems to be a dramatic shift in awareness, a new empathetic consciousness developing. This would make sense, given that we are beginning to realize how very interdependent we all are on this small blue planet and how very easy it would be for us to destroy ourselves. We are beginning to realize, after the long cycles of evolution that got us to this point, that mankind’s survival depends on our finding a way to connect and cooperate in our personal, communal, and political lives. The serious study of our most formative love relationships fits very well with this tipping-point perspective. And it definitely comes down on the side of optimism. We are on the cusp of glorious new discoveries in medicine and in physics that will make for a quantum leap in the evolution of our species. Learning to love and be loved has to be at the heart of this leap as well.
Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah of Princeton University makes the point that, “In life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you are playing.” The science summarized in this book has the potential to change our game. In my opinion, the only game worth playing is that of building a more humane society, a society that fits with our core nature as social and bonding animals and offers us a real chance to find secure, lasting love relationships—those that allow us not only to survive but also to become fully and optimally alive. As the old song suggests, when we truly love, we love someone “body and soul.” The word soul comes from Old English and means “vital breath.” And we are never so alive as when we love.
The development of love sense offers us a way forward into a different kind of world, a world in which we honor our deep desire to belong, where we have a felt sense of connection to our own soul and that of others. Secure love calms and restores balance and equilibrium. In 2006, while visiting Vancouver, Canada, the Dalai Lama told his audience, “I am now seventy-one years old. I feel, still, deep in my mind, my first experience, my mother’s care. I can still feel it. That immediately gives me inner peace, inner calmness.” Secure love promotes exploration and growth, expanding inner and outer worlds. It allows for a world based on trust and touches the most human quality of all, the one that we all share, our vulnerability.
There is an old hymn, “Abide with Me,” that touches something very deep inside me whenever I hear it sung. Though a prayer to God, to me this is a song of attachment. Every scientist mentioned in this book and most of you, too, will know why it makes me weep.
Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens; still with me abide.
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me.