“Sustained Caring” As A Foundation For Partner-Love

September 15, 2010 | Filed Under Small Talk 

In reference to this article, a reader asks:

“If it’s the case that love is really about choosing to offer sustained care to a person, what do you think, if anything, differentiates love between partners and love for say, your parents, or sibling, or kid? I agree this is a solid way to define love generally, but I’m thinking that love for a life-partner needs to have something more specific. What do you think?”

Really, I think love is a cluster concept with lots of different yet similar references. It’s too bad we don’t have a vocabulary that reflects this fact.

Borrowing from socio-biology, it is pretty well known that there are two primary bio-mechanisms that we associate with partner-love:

“In Love” – dopamine saturation – OCD like obsession – new love
“Pair Bond” – oxytocin / vasopressin based emotional feelings of closeness.

Unfortunately, these two aspects rarely track each other. And the intensity of the first aspect is guaranteed to fade with time and can never re-ignite with the same intensity. Such is this universe we inhabit.

The whole idea of “working on love ” basically amounts to creating contexts in which to re-establish these two feelings. But it has to emerge from a foundation of “sustained caring” – in other words, both partners need to care enough to go on a new adventure together… to build something new … to rediscover each other again for the first time.

There is nothing wrong with these simple bio-mechanical feelings. They are wonderful things. They are normally signs that you are doing something right. They are part of partner-love. But I do think that it is important for long term partners to recognize that these feelings come and go in cycles and that without them there is still a part of love that partners can always rely on and execute: sustained caring. In fact, I would suggest that in a healthy relationship, the “pair bond” and to a lesser degree the “in love” aspect of love can be re-invigorated on a cyclic basis if both partners simply *care* enough (i.e. care enough to get in shape, care about getting better together at sex, care enough to surprise each other from time to time, care enough to have a simple freakin’ conversation for God’s sake!)

Related posts:

1. Love Is Not A Feeling – Love As Sustained Caring
2. “Being In Love” versus Love
3. To The Mother Of My Children
4. Learning To Love Reality
5. The Benefits of Trusting Love

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