"In popular culture, love is often framed as something that soothes us, completes us, or protects us from pain. Yet, this version of love leaves out something essential. Love, from the beginning, was never meant to be risk-free. To love someone is to offer your most tender, most unarmoured and vulnerable self, without any assurance that this offering will be met. Even when love is met, another risk immediately follows: the risk of loss."
"We love because we have no choice. We are deeply relational beings before we are anything else. Connection is not a preference or a personality trait; it is a biological, social, and psychological imperative. Being held within a human web of connection is what steadies us in a world that can feel too vast, too unpredictable, and too much to face alone."
Love operates as an attachment bond that shapes experiences of connection, closeness, loss, desire, and separation. Loving involves offering a tender, unarmoured, vulnerable self without assurance of reciprocation, and even received love introduces the risk of loss. Humans are biologically, socially, and psychologically driven to seek relational connection; relationality is an imperative rather than a preference. Early bodily and unconscious relational experiences form internal maps that guide how people seek closeness and respond to distance across the lifespan. Attachment theory and developmental psychology locate love’s origins in early caregiving interactions that steady individuals in an unpredictable world.
Read at Psychology Today
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