The Primacy of Love

I do not have time to write this topic well. Which raises the risk that I will never write it at all. Please allow me to toss some raw-ish thoughts into the universe.

A year ago, maybe more (yes, the risk of never writing this is very real), I was listening to an audiobook by Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby.  She was talking about relationships, and how the severance of a valued relationship is akin to a trauma. And how a close relationship in many ways – physiologically, psychologically – mirrors an addiction. I think she was talking primarily about romantic relationships, but it doesn’t have to be. She talked about the evolutionary roots of attachment theory. How being separated from one’s clan was tantamount to a literal death sentence in the wilds of our ancient history. We react with a complete meltdown during any kind of breakup because a complete meltdown is warranted. She also talked about neurological studies and how the rush of being in love lights up the very same parts of the brain as the rush of a drug-induced high.

None of this was particularly new to me. I’d heard the teenage warnings about how falling in love can make you completely lose your mind. I’d heard the comparisons of a love-induced high and a drug-induced high. I even had a friend in grad school who studied attachment theories as part of her dissertation. (I have been known to converse with reasonable intelligence about anxious, avoidant, and fearful-avoidant attachment styles.) So yeah, I had heard it all before.

But something in the way this author presented the material, or in the spidery connections to whatever other thoughts or events were happening in my life at the time, I suddenly realized:

We have it completely backwards.

We talk about how love lights up our brains the same way as an opioid, because scientists studied drug addictions long before they studied attachment theories. We liken love to drugs because that’s how we understand the data. That’s the order we came to understand it.

But the opposite is true.

God wired us first for love.

Love does not light us up like a drug. A drug lights us up like love.

Selah.

The problem is drugs are a poor imposter. And they aren’t the only one.

Everything we use to imitate that sense of love – and what a sense it is: belonging, comfort, connection, security, value, importance, meaning, excitement, _____ – is an imposter of the real thing.

Only love is love. And God wired us for love. God himself is wired for love (Trinity, anyone?). God IS love.

I’m not sure where I go from here. There is more to be said, but I don’t know what it is. Maybe God wants us to simply sit and hold this thought for a while:

Love came first.

Love. Came first.