Limbic pursuits sink slowly and steadily lower on America’s list of collective priorities. Top-ranking items remain the pursuit of wealth, physical b… - Thomas Lewis

Because loving is reciprocal physiologic influence, it entails a deeper and more literal connection than most realize. Limbic regulation affords lovers the ability to modulate each other’s emotions, neurophysiology, hormonal status, immune function, sleep rhythms, and stability. If one leaves on a trip, the other may suffer insomnia, a delayed menstrual cycle, a cold that would have been fought off in the fortified state of togetherness.

The neurally ingrained Attractors of one lover warp the emotional virtuality of the other, shifting emotional perceptions — what he feels, sees, knows. When somebody loses his partner and says a part of him is gone, he is more right than he thinks. A portion of his neural activity depends on the presence of that other living brain. Without it, the electric interplay that makes up him has changed. Lovers hold keys to each other’s identities, and they write neurostructural alterations into each other’s networks. Their limbic tie allows each to influence who the other is and becomes.

A culture wise in love’s ways would understand a relationship’s demand for time. It would teach the difference between in love and loving; it would impart to its members the value of the mutuality on which their lives depend. A culture versed in the workings of emotional life would encourage and promote the activities that sustain health — togetherness with one’s partner and children; homes, families, and communities of connectedness. Such a society would guide its inhabitants to the joy that can be found at the heart of attachment — what Bertrand Russell called “in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined.