Our body, sculpted by the biological forces of natural selection over millennia, was not designed for abstractions of long-distance love. It hungers for moments of oneness.
True connection is physical and unfolds in real time. The main mode is eye contact. This means that when you’re alone, thinking about those you love, reflecting on past loving connections, yearning for more, or writing an impassioned love letter, you are not in that moment experiencing true love.
What about all the warm fuzzies, right? Sure they must be doing some good.
Make Time to Connect
It’s true that the strong feelings you experience in moment of reflection vital to your health and well-being. But they’re not shared (yet), so they lack the critical and undeniably physical ingredient of resonance. Physical presence is key to love.
The problem is that all too often, we simply don’t take the time that’s needed to connect with others. Modern life with its fast-changing technology and oppressive workloads, baits us to speed through our day at a pace that’s antithetical to connection. We multitask just to stay afloat, and increasingly “connect” with others through e-mails, texts, tweets, and other ways that don’t require speaking – let alone seeing one another.
Yet these can’t fulfill your body’s craving for connection. Love requires you to be physically and emotionally present. It also requires that you slow down. To put it briefly, love grows best when you’re attuned to the present moment.
With gratitude to Barbara Fredrickson