FYI: Hold Me Tight

Taken from Hold Me Tight by Sue Johnson (a book I recommend for any marriage):

“We now ask our lovers for the emotional connection and sense of belonging that my grandmother could get from a whole village. Compounding this is the celebration of romantic love fostered by our popular culture. Movies as well as television soap operas and dramas saturate us with images of romantic love as the be-all and end-all of relationships, while newspapers, magazines, and TV news avidly report on the never-ending search for romance and love among actors and celebrities. So it should come as no surprise that people recently surveyed in the US and Canada rate a satisfying love relationship as their number-one goal, ahead of financial success and satisfying career.
“It is, then, imperative that we comprehend what love is, how to make it, and how to make it last. Thankfully, during the past two decades, an exciting and revolutionary new understanding of love has been emerging.
“We now know that love is, in actuality, the pinnacle of evolution, the most compelling survival mechanism of the human species. Not because it induces us to mate and reproduce. We do manage to mate without love! But because love drives us to bond emotionally with a precious few others who offer us safe haven from the storms of life. Love is our bulwark, designed to provide emotional protection so we can cope with the ups and downs of existence.
“This drive to emotionally attach – to find someone to who we can turn and say “Hold me tight” – is wired into our genes and our bodies. It is a s basic to life, health, and happiness as the drives of food, shelter, or sex. We need emotional attachments with a few irreplaceable others to be physically and mentally healthy – to survive.”