This isn’t actually why we fall in love, but it’s closer than you might think. Why we fall in love is attachment, which is sort of a biological pursuit of wholeness.
Attachment is the evolutionarily adaptive emotional mechanism that bonds infants and adult caregivers. I think human childbirth readily fits the description of pain that feels like you’re being separated from a part of yourself. And then, as Christopher Hitchens puts it, when you’re a parent, 17“your heart is running around inside someone else’s body.”
Babies attach, too, always seeking closeness with the adults who care for them. From birth, attachment is the pursuit of our own wholeness— being kept safe, and keeping safe that part of ourselves that lives in someone else’s body. Attachment is love.
When we reach adolescence, our attachment mechanism gets co-opted from parental attachment to peer attachment, in romantic relationships.
There are certain attachment behaviors we engage in that innately activate the attachment mechanism, whether between infant and caregiver or between two adults falling in love: eye contact, smiling, face stroking, hugging, that kind of thing. But with the shift at adolescence, sexual behavior is added to the repertoire of attachment behaviors.
Brain imaging research has found that the mesolimbic systems (eagerness/enjoying/expecting from chapter 3) during a nondistressed experience of parental attachment are extremely similar to the experience of romantic attachment—and they’re especially heavy on the enjoying 18 activation, rather than eagerness activation.At the same time, attachment is why we experience “heartbreak.” As infants, our lives literally depend on our adult caregivers coming when we need them. As adults, that’s no longer true, but our bodies don’t know it. Our bodies are pretty sure that if our attachment object doesn’t come back, we’ll die.
So yeah, love feels good—“I am whole.”
Except when it hurts like you’re dying—“I am broken.”
Because: attachment. the science of falling in love In practice, humans build important social connections with multiple people, and our sense of wholeness emerges both from our own inner sense of wholeness and from our connection with our friends and family, as well as with our partner. But there is the particular experience of “falling in love” or “bonding” with one specific person that typifies what our culture
has come to consider “love.” If you’ve ever had a kid or fallen in love, you’ll recognize the narrative of attachment, the series of behavioral markers that characterize the attachment process.
Proximity Seeking. You feel connected to the other person, so that it feels good to be around them (enjoying) and you want (eagerness) to be close as much as possible. Most parents have experienced proximity seeking in the form of little toddler fingers under the bathroom door, while you try to have thirty seconds in a row of alone-time as you pee. In romantic relationships, proximity can take the form of Twitter, texting, phone calls, and email, as well as walking past their locker six times every day to see if they are there, or leaving work early to get home sooner.
Safe haven. When things go wrong in your life, you want to tell your attachment object all about it; you seek out that person for support. In adult relationships, it’s the phone call to your partner after a long, hard day at work. When your stress response is activated, your attachment mechanism says, “Soothe your stress by connecting with your attachment object.” This is the “tend and befriend” dynamic, which I’ll talk about more later.
Separation Distress. When the person goes away, you feel pain—you miss that person. For adults, it’s the aching loneliness while your partner is away at a conference. It’s okay for a while . . . and then it’s too much, too long, too far.
Secure Base. Wherever that person is, that’s your emotional home. Any adult who has come home from a business trip and fallen onto the couch next to a partner, to hold hands and make eye contact while talking about what happened while they were separated, has experienced this.
A real-life example: My sister Amelia’s husband is a high school music teacher, and every other year he accompanies his choir to Europe for a week or two. And every year during that time, she sits around feeling what she identifies as “homesick,” even though she’s the one at home. Because he is her emotional home, her secure base. So she experiences separation distress.
Amelia’s favorite book is Jane Eyre. Mr. Rochester, the hero of that story, expresses attachment and separation distress when he says to Jane: “I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you—especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous Channel [the Irish Sea], and two hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I’ve a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly.”