Fathers and teachers,” wrote Dostoyevsky, “I ponder the question, ‘What is Hell?’ I maintain it is the suffering of being unable to love. - Thomas Lewis

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.

In a dazzling vote of confidence for form over substance, our culture fawns over the fleetingness of being “in love” while discounting the importance of loving.

In all of its varied and protean forms, love is the tether binding our whirling lives. Without that biological anchor, all of us are flung outward, singly into the encroaching dark.