If the attachment fabric of a civilization frays, if people cannot get from their relationships the emotional regulation that those bonds were design… - Thomas Lewis

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.

you might think that treatments like group therapy after breast cancer would now be standard. Guess again. Affiliation is not a drug or an operation, and that makes it nearly invisible to Western medicine. Our doctors are not uninformed; on the contrary, most have read these studies and grant them a grudging intellectual acceptance. But they don’t believe in them; they can’t bring themselves to base treatment decisions on a rumored phantom like attachment. The prevailing medical paradigm has no capacity to incorporate the concept that a relationship is a physiologic process, as real and as potent as any pill or surgical procedure.

Everything a person is and everything he knows resides in the tangled thicket of his intertwined neurons. These fateful, tiny bridges number in the quadrillions, but they spring from just two sources: DNA and daily life. The genetic code calls some synapses into being, while experience engenders and modifies others.