Love and Attachment
Plato's Divided Halves, Courtly Invention, and the Shelter of Another Mind
In Plato's Symposium, composed around 385 BCE, the comic playwright Aristophanes explains human longing through a fable of severed wholeness. Primeval humans were round, four-armed beings until Zeus sliced them in half like apples to humble their pride. Ever since, every mortal wanders the earth searching for the missing half that restores wholeness.
Where modern English forces a single four-letter word to cover everything from a new crush to a grandmother's devotion, classical Greek separated four distinct forms of love. Eros named passionate longing, philia named loyal friendship between equals, storge named quiet family affection, and agape named unselfish generosity that expects nothing back.
Romantic love as an exalted ideal was largely invented in twelfth-century southern France by Provençal troubadour poets and courts like that of Eleanor of Aquitaine. In an era when noble marriages were cold property treaties, the code of fin'amor turned rough knights into humble servants who composed songs for an unattainable lady.
In his 1822 treatise On Love, French novelist Stendhal compared falling in love to dropping a bare winter twig into the deep salt mines of Salzburg. Pulled up two months later, the plain wooden branch is encrusted from tip to tip with glittering salt crystals—just as a lover's imagination dresses the beloved in perfection.
Observing young children separated from their parents in London hospital wards after the Second World War, John Bowlby overturned the harsh advice that hugging spoils a child. Attachment is not a childish dependency to outgrow. A warm, reliable parent acts as a safe home base that gives a child courage to explore.
In 1958, researcher Harry Harlow tested the mid-century belief that babies love mothers only because mothers provide milk. He placed infant monkeys in a cage with a bare wire cylinder holding a milk bottle and a milkless frame wrapped in soft terrycloth. The babies clung to the warm cloth mother twenty-two hours a day.
Living quietly as a lens grinder in seventeenth-century Holland after being cast out of his synagogue, philosopher Baruch Spinoza defined love in his 1677 Ethics with clean geometric clarity. Love, he wrote, is joy accompanied by the idea of an external cause—taking delight simply in the fact that another person exists.
After his friend Étienne de La Boétie died in 1563, Michel de Montaigne tried to explain why the two men had trusted each other completely from their first meeting. Crossing out every ordinary reason of utility or charm, Montaigne wrote simply that their bond existed because it was he, and because it was I.
In 1971, Japanese writer Takeo Doi illuminated a warm corner of human attachment that Western individualism rarely names: amae. Derived from the verb for presuming upon another's kindness, amae describes a sweet, trusting confidence. It is the assurance that a parent, spouse, or dear friend will indulgently forgive one's occasional helplessness.
Sociologists comparing romantic marriages with arranged marriages in India found an intriguing reversal over time. Couples who marry for headlong passion start at peak heat and often cool down across the first decade. Couples whose families arrange a match start with modest affection, yet building a shared life together often yields deeper warmth at year ten.
In 2006 at the University of Virginia, psychologist James Coan warned married women that they were about to receive a mild electric shock to the ankle. Holding a polite stranger's hand calmed their bodily stress response slightly, whereas holding a trusted, loving husband's hand quieted the stress alarm almost to nothing.
Across thirty thousand years of living beside human campfires, domestic dogs learned a quiet bonding trick that wild wolves never use. When a dog and its owner gaze softly into each other's eyes for five minutes, both experience the same surge of bonding chemistry that links a human parent and newborn baby.