Quotes About Intimacy

This healthy dependence is the essence of romantic love. The bodies of lovers are linked in a "neural duet." One person sends out signals that alter the hormone levels, cardiovascular function, body rhythms, and even immune system of the other. In loving connection, the cuddle hormone oxytocin floods lovers' bodies, bringing a calm joy and the sense that everything is right with the world. Our bodies are set up for this kind of connection.

People think love is an emotion. Love is good sense. —Ken Kesey   Unless you love someone, nothing else makes any sense. —e. e. cummings

Emotion comes from a Latin word emovere, to move. We talk of being "moved" by our emotions, and we are "moved" when those we love show their deeper feelings to us. If partners were to reconnect, they indeed had to let their emotions move them into new ways of responding to each other. My clients had to learn to take risks, to show the softer sides of themselves, the sides they learned to hide in the Demon Dialogues.

The demand-withdraw pattern is not just a bad habit, it reflects a deeper underlying reality: such couples are starving emotionally. They are losing the source of their emotional sustenance. They feel deprived. And they are desperate to regain that nurturance.

When we feel safely linked to our partners, we more easily roll with the hurts they inevitably inflict, and we are less likely to be aggressively hostile when we get mad at them.

We've long assumed that as we mature, we outgrow the need for the intense closeness, nurturing, and comfort we had with our caregivers as children and that as adults, the romantic attachments we form are essentially sexual in nature. This is a complete distortion of adult love.

Emotional Responsiveness— The Key to a Lifetime of Love A person's "heart withers if it does not answer another heart." —Pearl S. Buck Tim

The more we can reach out to our partners, the more separate and independent we can be.

Love, it seemed, was all about nonnegotiables.

Love is not the icing on the cake of life. It is a basic primary need, like oxygen or water. Once we understand and accept this, we can more easily get to the heart of relationship problems.

Love affairs are just rational bargains," lectured a famed psychologist thirty years ago at an international conference in Banff. "They're negotiations about profit and cost. We all want to maximize our profit.

For better or worse, in the twenty-first century, a love relationship has become the central emotional relationship in most people's lives. One reason is that we are increasingly living in social isolation.

couples spend an average of twelve minutes a day talking together.

they're emotional bonds. They're about the innate need for safe emotional connection. Just like [British psychiatrist] John Bowlby talks about in his attachment theory concerning mothers and kids. The same thing is going on with adults.

We need emotional attachments with a few irreplaceable others to be physically and mentally healthy — to survive.

From your viewpoint, is your partner accessible to you? I can get my partner's attention easily. T F My partner is easy to connect with emotionally. T F My partner shows me that I come first with him/her. T F I am not feeling lonely or shut out in this relationship. T F I can share my deepest feelings with my partner. He/she will listen. T F

the fact that his shut-down strategy works just fine in many situations. But in love relationships, it simply alarms his partner and writes the next part of the story with a negative slant.

Generally in love, sharing even negative emotions, provided they don't get out of hand, is more useful than emotional absence. Lack of response just fires up the primal panic of the other partner.

Generally in love, sharing even negative emotions, provided they don't get out of hand, is more useful than emotional absence. Lack of response just fires up the primal panic of the other partner. As James tells Vincent, "I get so I just want to strike out at you to prove that you can't just turn me off.

As lovers, we poise together delicately on a tightrope. When the winds of doubt and fear begin blowing, if we panic and clutch at each other or abruptly turn away and head for cover, the rope sways more and more and our balance becomes even more precarious. To stay on the rope, we must shift with each other's moves, respond to each other's emotions. As we connect, we balance each other. We are in emotional equilibrium.

For all of us, the person we love most in the world, the one who can send us soaring joyfully into space, is also the person who can send us crashing back to earth.

when you feel pain from your raw spot, are there ghosts standing behind your lover?

The demise of marriages begins with a growing absence of responsive intimate interactions. The conflict comes later.

Even though we are programmed by millions of years of evolution to relentlessly seek out belonging and intimate connection, we persist in defining healthy people as those who do not need others.