50 years of research has given us some clear answers about the nature of love. We now know what it is we really need in our closest relationships, WHY we need it, HOW and WHY we so often make such a mess of it, and HOW we can repair damage and rebuild when things go wrong.We can understand scientifically that the need to be securely connected to our important others is biologically wired-in. It's a safety thing. Our bodies react in very urgent and predictable ways when we don't feel safe. For good reason, right? If danger is coming at us – we need to ACT first and THINK later or we'll be eaten, or trampled or burned or maimed or fall to our death or...

Well, it turns out that in a brain-scan-measurable, research-provable way, feeling disconnected or abandoned, or not important, or not heard or understood by those we count on activates that very same safety switch in our brain. It's how we're wired! A secure connection is coded as a safety imperative. Physical danger and attachment danger activate the same part of the brain, in the same way.

I promise I am not making this up.

By the time a relationship (or one person) gets to critical mass, there are usually a lot of contributing factors. It's like a great big snowball and it's taken on a life of its own and keeps on getting bigger and bigger. It's complicated, and what's happening now can't be separated from the things that have happened to get to this point. In order to understand and then address what's happening now, we need to consider how we got here.

To understand this, let's identify some factors that research tells us are facts: