The neurally ingrained Attractors of one lover warp the emotional virtuality of the other, shifting emotional perceptions — what he feels, sees, know… - Thomas Lewis

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.

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.

Describing good relatedness to someone, no matter how precisely or how often, does not inscribe it into the neural networks that inspire love. Self-help books are like car repair manuals: you can read them all day, but doing so doesn't fix a thing. Working on a car means rolling up your sleeves and getting under the hood, and you have to be willing to get dirt on your hands and grease beneath your fingernails. Overhauling emotional knowledge is no spectator sport; it demands the messy experience of yanking and tinkering that comes from a limbic bond. If someone's relationship today bear a troubled imprint, they do so because an influential relationship left its mark on a child's mind. When a limbic connection has established a neural pattern, it takes a limbic connection to revise it.

Encountering an early series of consistent instances can implant an erroneous generality in a child's mind. This mental machinery distills and does not evaluate; it cannot detect whether the larger world runs in accordance with the scheme it has drawn forth from the emotional microcosm of a family. Just as grammatical English emerges from our lips automatically, a structured pattern of emotional relatedness emanates from each of us.