Love Sense Quotes

“Being the “best you can be” is really only possible when you are deeply connected to another. Splendid isolation is for planets, not people.”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“The most functional way to regulate difficult emotions in love relationships is to share them.”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“The greatest gift a parent has to give a child—and a lover has to give a lover—is emotionally attuned attention and timely responsiveness.”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“• Emotional dependency is not immature or pathological; it is our greatest strength.”
― Sue Johnson, The Love Secret: The revolutionary new science of romantic relationships

“Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new. —Ursula K. Le Guin”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“Hot sex doesn’t lead to secure love; rather, secure attachment leads to hot sex—and also to love that lasts. Monogamy is not a myth.”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“To be human is to need others, and this is no flaw or weakness.”
― Sue Johnson, The Love Secret: The revolutionary new science of romantic relationships

“There is no such thing as constructive criticism,” says John Gottman. “All criticism is painful.” He is correct. We never like to hear that there is something “wrong” with us, or that something needs changing, especially if this message is coming from the loved one we most depend on. Psychologist Jill Hooley’s work at Harvard measures the impact of critical, hostile comments made by loved ones and shows just how venomous disparagement by those we rely on can be. This censure may even trigger relapse of mental illness, such as depression.”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“Bowlby came to believe that disrupted relationships with parents or surrogate caregivers could cripple healthy emotional and social growth, producing alienated and angry individuals. In 1944, Bowlby published a seminal article, “Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves,” observing that “behind the mask of indifference is bottomless misery and behind apparent callousness, despair.”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“It is an ironic paradox: being dependent makes us more independent.”
― Sue Johnson, The Love Secret: The revolutionary new science of romantic relationships

“The first and foremost instinct of humans is neither sex nor aggression. It is to seek contact and comforting connection.”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“Negative emotions, such as anger and fear, narrow our focus, while positive emotion expands the range of our thoughts and creates the urge to play and experiment.”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“Love never dies of a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source, it dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds, it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings, but never of natural death. —Anaïs Nin”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“All of us, from cradle to grave, are happiest when life is organized as a series of excursions, long or short, from the secure base provided by our attachment figure(s).”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“I believe in the compelling power of love. I do not understand it. I believe it to be the most fragrant blossom of all this thorny existence. —Theodore Dreiser”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“As Aristotle said, “What a society honors will be cultivated.” It is time for us to understand, honor, and cultivate the deepest relational elements in our nature.”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“significantly in his work by psychologist Mary Ainsworth, a Canadian researcher who helped give shape to his ideas and test them. Together, they identified four elements of attachment: •We seek out, monitor, and try to maintain emotional and physical connection with our loved ones. Throughout life, we rely on them to be emotionally accessible, responsive, and engaged with us. •We reach out for our loved ones particularly when we are uncertain, threatened, anxious, or upset. Contact with them gives us a sense of having a safe haven, where we will find comfort and emotional support; this sense of safety teaches us how to regulate our own emotions and how to connect with and trust others. •We miss our loved ones and become extremely upset when they are physically or emotionally remote; this separation anxiety can become intense and incapacitating. Isolation is inherently traumatizing for human beings. •We depend on our loved ones to support us emotionally and be a secure base as we venture into the world and learn and explore. The more we sense that we are effectively connected, the more autonomous and separate we can be.”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“The truth is that we stray and have affairs not because we are all naturally inclined to have multiple mates but because our bond with our partner is either inherently weak or has deteriorated so far that we are unbearably lonely. We haven’t understood love or known how to repair it. So, confused and lost in a world that sells sex aggressively as the be-all and end-all of a relationship, the only obvious “solution” has been to seek out new lovers to try to create the longed-for connection.”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“Jack Kornfield offers a beautiful image for our new understanding: “We can let ourselves be carried by the river of feeling—because we know how to swim.”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“We, too, as the Celtic saying goes, “live in the shelter of each other.” World War II historians have noted that the unit of survival in concentration camps was the pair, not the individual. Surveys show that married men and women generally live longer than do their single peers.”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“Learning to love and be loved is, in effect, about learning to tune in to our emotions so that we know what we need from a partner and expressing those desires openly, in a way that evokes sympathy and support from him or her.”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“Distressed partners no longer see each other as their emotional safe haven. Our lover is supposed to be the one person we can count on who will always respond. Instead, unhappy partners feel emotionally deprived, rejected, even abandoned. In that light, couples’ conflicts assume their true meaning: they are frightened protests against eroding connection and a demand for emotional reengagement.”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“The key to restoring connection is, first, interrupting and dismantling these destructive sequences and then actively constructing a more emotionally open and receptive way of interacting, one in which partners feel safe confiding their hidden fears and longings.”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“Love can begin in a thousand ways-with a glance, a stare, a whisper or smile, a compliment, or an insult. It continues with caresses and kisses, or maybe frowns and fights. It ends with silence and sadness, frustration and rage, tears, and even, sometimes, joy and laughter. It can last just hours or days, or endure through years and beyond death. It is something we look for, or it finds us. It can be our salvation or our ruin. Its presence exalts us, and its loss or absence desolates us.”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“without emotion to guide us, we have no compass. We are bereft of direction and have nothing to move us toward one option rather than another. We are stuck pondering all the possibilities.”
― Sue Johnson, The Love Secret: The revolutionary new science of romantic relationships

“Indeed, says psychologist Dan Stern of the University of Geneva, the brain is so relational that our nervous system is actually “constructed to be captured by the nervous systems of others, so that we can experience others as if from within their skin, as well as from within our own.”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“People think love is an emotion. Love is good sense. —Ken Kesey   Unless you love someone, nothing else makes any sense. —e. e. cummings”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“Shakespeare asks, “Tell me where is fancy bred…in the heart or in the head?”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“Despite rejection by the establishment, Bowlby pioneered on, giving form to a theory of what he called attachment. (The story goes that when asked by his wife why he didn’t give it its rightful name, a theory of love, he replied, “What? I’d be laughed out of science.”)”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“Fifty years ago noted animal researcher Harry Harlow, in an address to the American Psychological Association, observed, “As far as love or affection is concerned, psychologists have failed in their mission…The little we write about it has been better written by poets and novelists.”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships