Why do so many relationships end up in breakups, separation, and/or divorce? Why is it that in many situations when we love our partner, they don't love us; and when they love us, we don't love them? Why is it that every relationship promises to be different, but it ends up being very similar to the old relationships? Why do we repeat our patterns – like a broken record?

Neurochemistry of Love - Testosterone and Estrogen are the primary sex hormones. Adrenalin is a  hormone that is released in the body of a person who is feeling a strong emotion (such as excitement, fear, or anger) and that causes the heart to beat faster and gives the person more energy. Dopamine – The dopamine system is strongly associated with the reward system of the brain. Dopamine is released in areas such as the nucleus accumbens and prefrontal cortex as a result of experiencing natural rewards such as food, sex, and neutral stimuli that become associated with them. Serotonin is one of love's most important chemicals that may explain why when you’re falling in love, your new lover keeps popping into your thoughts. Oxytocin (The cuddle hormone) is a neurotransmitter in mammals. Oxytocin is normally produced in the hypothalamus and stored in the posterior pituitary gland. It is the hormone of Love! Vasopressin is another important hormone in the long-term commitment stage and is released after sex. Oxytocin and Vasopressin are attachment and bonding hormones.

Neuroscience of Love - When a person falls in love, at least 12 areas of the brain work in tandem to release euphoria-inducing chemicals such as dopamine, oxytocin, adrenaline and vasopression. The love feeling also affects sophisticated cognitive functions, such as mental representation, metaphors and body image. Other researchers also found blood levels of nerve growth factor, or NGF, also increased. Those levels were significantly higher in couples who had just fallen in love. This molecule involved plays an important role in the social chemistry of humans. You can just be a loving person for your brain/body to function this way, albeit to a lesser extent!

Prerequisites for healthy development of an infant – D.W. Winnicott wirtes: “The mother gazes at the baby in her arms, and the baby gazes at his mother’s face and finds himself therein . . . provided that the mother is really looking at the unique, small, helpless being and not projecting her own expectations, fears and plans for the child. [Otherwise] In that case, the child would find not himself in his mother’s face, but rather the mother’s own projections. This child would remain without a mirror, and for the rest of his life would be seeking this mirror in vain.” Winnicott in this quote tells us why we seek partners who seem to “approve” us and make us feel “good”, “desirable”, and “wanted”, but we are never satisfied and/or our seeking ends in failure.

​Psychology of Love - A Child (Infant) must experience predictable presence of primary care taker to feel safe and protected. Child (Infant) must experience unconditional love, acceptance, empathy, and nonjudgmental presence of primary care taker to feel that he is worthy of love, he is worth it, he is good, and he is OK. He then believes there is benevolence (goodness) in the world, and people are generally good. The infant splits the object toward whom both love and hate were directed, in two. The good object (idealized) representation is important and is necessary to go on in life. The bad (frustrating, repressing) object is further split into two, namely the repressive object, and the exciting object. Ego identifies with the repressive object (anti-libidinal self), and keeps the original object seeking drive in check. Ego also identifies with the exciting object (libidinal self) and seeks exciting objects in the world. It is the idealized object that many seek initially in their relationships (infatuation stage), which is soon replaced by power struggle (acting out of anti-libidinal self). Some are lucky enough to transcend the power struggle stage and enter the “co-creativity” stage.

Fear of Intimacy - Love is not only hard to find, but strange as it may seem, it can be even more difficult to accept and tolerate.  Most of us say that we want to find a loving partner, but many of us have deep-seated fears of intimacy that make it difficult to be in a close relationship. Fear of intimacy begins to develop early in life. As children, when we experience rejection and/or emotional pain, we often shut down. We learn not to rely on others as a coping mechanism. After being hurt in our earliest relationships, we fear being hurt again. We are reluctant to take another chance on being loved. If we felt unseen or misunderstood as children, we may have a hard time believing that someone could really love and value us. Or if we do believe they love us, we find all kinds of reasons why they are not the “right” person for us.
It is painful to love someone when they don't love us. This is more familiar to us, but painful nonetheless. This is about re-experiencing the pain of deprivation from early contact and holding. It is much more painful to be loved – to open ourselves to love, be vulnerable, and let go of our defenses. This is about re-experiencing the pain of heartbreak (if we risk going there). Our defense mechanism may respond with rejection (rejecting the loving object). This is also much harder to perceive and imagine. There may be a tendency of wanting to pull back and go away, to feel weird in your body, to feel shame, to contact in our chest, etc.

A Neuroscience Perspective - Brain is shaped by experience. A new experience results in formation of many neural connections that result in adaptation and response to the experience. Thus our brain is formed (wired) by our experiences starting from our early formative years. Every time a given experience is repeated the corresponding neural networks are strengthened. This statement is a direct corollary of Hebbian axiom which says that the neurons that fire together wire together. Brain can be thought of as an information processing organ (an organ of compare and contrast), in the sense that when faced with a stimulus, it performs very fast correlation-like operations with what it has stored in memory to find the closest match to the stimulus just encountered. The correlations are performed with stored events that are more emotionally significant. Emotional significance is marked by Amygdala – an almond-shape set of neurons located deep in the brain's medial temporal lobe (one in each hemisphere), very close to Hippocampus which manages organizing, storing and retrieving memories. In humans and other mammals, this subcortical brain structure is linked to both fear responses and pleasure. Amygdalae therefore assign emotional significance and information to stimuli. Once the closest match is determined the emotional response will essentially be the same as the response corresponding to the past experience (existing wiring in the brain) with some modifications. This is how we repeat our past. Freud called this phenomenon “Repetition Compulsion”, or the compulsion to repeat past trauma.

An implication of the above assertions is that we unconsciously seek to repeat what is known to the brain. Thus we unconsciously seek similar relationships to the ones we have experienced before. And what is even more astonishing is that even if the relationship is inherently different, our behavior will resemble the past relationships (activation of the same neural pathways), thus changing the new relationship, in essence, to be similar the ones we have experienced in the past. After all, that is all that our brain knows! In psychological terms this is known as projective identification. It means that we may project the image of a past relationship onto our current relationship and the partner may identify with the image and act it out – resulting in repetition of the past! This happens since brain will try to compare the current relationship to what it has stored in its neural connections, and respond in the same way. Projection identification then is brain's attempt to adapt to a new experience based on what is learned in the past. This is the reason why our relationships turn out to be very similar to the old ones, as much we try not to repeat our pat “mistakes”!

Donald Kalsched (Trauma and the Soul) writes: The act of loving is a terrible risk for everyone, and especially for people who have grown up in emotionally impoverished environments. To really love someone (without symbiotically attaching to them through identification), is to risk losing them, precisely because we live in an insecure, unpredictable world in which death, separation, or abandonment is an ever present reality.
 
Erich Fromm (The Art of Loving) writes: Infantile love follows the principle: I love because I am loved! Mature love follows the principle: I am loved because I love! Immature love says: I love you because I need you!Mature love says: I need you because I love you! Fromm also writes: Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love. This is the case since if one has the ability to be alone, one will not seek love in order to fill a void due to early deprivations, but will seek it in order to live a more fulfilled and a more pleasurable life.

Many men report that they feel alienated, alone, remote from the world, disconnected from their families and the community at large. They simply feel lost, and are seeking new images of masculinity that can support them in a return to feeling, aliveness, and a connection to nature, our bodies, our children, women, and other men. Some men turn to women for solutions, but often this creates different sort of problems such as codependency, and isolation from other men.

Most movies and TV shows portray men as heroes and thus many men identify with image of the hero. Consequently most of us (men) have attempted to live our life as some type of masculine hero. It has also been ingrained in men that they need to be heroes in order to gain intimacy with women. There is of course the allure of power and invulnerability in adopting the image of the hero, but there is also a heavy price to pay: alienation, isolation, stress induced physical or mental illness, injury and even death may be possible outcomes. Many men become codependent – that is habitually taking care of others at their own expense just to be a hero in order to seek acceptance and affection. As a result many men become workaholic, numb, and addicted to excitement in order to compensate for numbness, addicted to substances and sex, and finally they may lose their soul.

Let us define the soul as the mysterious quality that animates dead matter and makes it alive – and connects us to mother earth. Many men feel disconnected from an authentic spiritual source of aliveness (connection to mother earth). Having lost our souls we become at best unhealthy and at worst highly destructive to the lives of men, women, and everyone around us. Many men do not feel the loss of their souls until they find themselves in a hospital after a heart attack.

From a very early age boys are taught to be “tough and rough”. Boys are weaned earlier than girls. Boys are touched less than girls (by significant caretakers). Boys are more likely to be held facing outward toward the world and others. Girls are held inward, toward security, warmth, and comfort of the parent. Boys are taught that feelings are not masculine. Boys are taught that they must forego pleasure and endure pain to be a man. Men are taught that they should suffer alone and in silence – hence they cannot become vulnerable in presence of women. Boys are forced into contact competition (various contact sports).

Biology has not been very kind to boys and men either! Boys tend to lag four to six months behind girls in their development. Boys crawl, sit, and speak later and tend to cry more during infancy. Nature makes more genetic errors in the makeup of boys resulting in more birth defects (absence of redundancy – YY vs XY Chromosomes). Boys are more prone to schizophrenia, mental retardations, autism, hemophilia, muscular dystrophy, stuttering, other speech disabilities, dyslexia, etc. All and all, there are about two hundred genetic diseases that affect only boys.

Men perform much more hazardous jobs compared to women. More than 100K veterans of Vietnam war committed suicide (twice the number that died in battle). Wars may finally end when society begins to hold the security and lives of young men to be as sacred as those of women. The highest mortality rates in US are found among timber cutters (90% male), power line workers, insulation workers, garbage collectors, and miners (85% men), and farmers (79% men). Until recently 90% of peptic ulcers were found among men, as well as significantly higher rates of heart disease. Men's life expectancy is 8 years less than women (but this is changing!). Women enter psychotherapy and visit physicians more often. Men are twice as likely to commit suicide or have serious mental and emotional problems following divorce compared to women.

Society also accepts violence perpetrated against men as men are primary objects of violence in our culture. Men comprise 80% of homicide victims, 70% of robberies, and with exception of rape they comprise 70% of all aggravated assaults. Violence against men is a form of entertainment. Boxing, football, hockey, and car racing are examples. In the Vietnam war, men were killed 8K to one over women. In films and television, more than 90% of the characters who die are men. Boys are encouraged to compete for the purpose of winning, while competition in primitive societies was for enhancing skills and not winning.

Absence of Fathers – Fathers have been exiled in the post industrial age. During the pre-industrial age boys worked with their father on the land and identified with them. In our post-industrial age when fathers have to leave home to work in factories or offices, boys are left with their mothers and consequently identify with their mothers. This identification results either in formation of a hypo-masculine (effeminized) man or the hyper-masculine (hero) man. As more boys are brought up by women, fear of women and male passivity seem to be growing, possibly resulting in violent acting out. In absence of their fathers, and in  search of male identity boys may join violent gangs.

Boys fill the absence of father by becoming mother's little man, someone she could lean on, confide in, even flirt with in some cases. The boy becomes the codependent son, metaphorically mother's lover and ultimately her victim. The boy identifies with mother, and sees his masculinity in terms of differences between his sexual organ and that of her mother, and not the similarity between his sexual organ and that of his father. Boy then needs to prove his “manhood” by engaging in, at times, indiscriminate sexual acts. He needs to have sex to feel he is a “man”. His sexual activities are disconnected from his heart feelings. He does not know how to relate to women in mature ways.

Urbanization has also disconnected many men from their more traditional “earthy” masculinity, aggravated by the absence of father in the post-industrial age. Industrial society damages men and causes the “psychological depletion of men in urban settings … While urbanization appears to sponsor male passivity, it has the opposite effect in regard to women and spurs their liberation.” (David Gutmann) 

Men have been encouraged to repress their anger or transform it without expression, while feminist movement has encouraged women to express their anger. Repressed anger, when finally emerged, can be expressed violently or in self destructive ways. We must own our anger embrace it with respect, as men's anger has a very healthy component. When we see oppression and injustice anger is justified. When we see environment being destroyed by greed or ignorance, anger is justified. When we see violence perpetrated against women, other men, and children, anger is justified. Without proper expression of anger joy is not possible.

When we do not own (contain) a feeling, we will either repress it or act it out. Similarly, when men do not own/embrace their masculinity, they become either hyper-masculine (hero image – acting out), or they become hypo-masculine (repression). The heroic male in quest of strength cut away his softness, with it, he also lost sensitivity – Life was diminished and feelings became less rich. The soft male, in cutting away his hardness, lost his fierceness, his capacity for committed action and success in the world. Men must individuate and become their true selves which may not conform to any societal value.

Unless a man is in contact with his own essence – his masculine soul is incomplete. He can become like a vampire, sucking energy out of women because he does not have the ability to nourish himself from his inexhaustible depths. To the extent that we lack a solid connection to a depth of soul within, we seek it outside. When we believe we cannot be loved for who we are, we try to be a hero to save and rescue “her” and therefore gain her love and affection. Reconnection to our depths requires non-heroic attitudes: surrender, sensitivity, humility, and a willingness to leap into the unknown.

Men in their old days – Elder (wise) men are precious assets to our society. An elder man who is connected to his depth is a man of inestimable value. He can temper the aggression of younger men. He knows that the wounds of war never compensate for its glory. He knows that the gleam of marketplace cannot compare with the beauty of nature's wonderful fabric of life. He is a peacemaker. An elder (unwise) man who is still caught in hero image, may long to reclaim glories through the actions of younger men. These are old men who are quick to send young men to war. These are old men who devour non-renewable resource of our planet with no thought for future generations. Men are not merely seeking the lost father in their lives. They are hungering for soulful elders. The elder can plant the seed of soul in a young man. He is closer to death, closer to the mystery, and further from the illusions of youthful endeavor and heroic visions. He can become soul-father to younger men. We are hungry for a connection to elder men, so we now seek them out. We also seek connection to the elder within – a guide and counselor in our lives.

Resources:
The Knight with rusty armor (Robert Fisher)
Knights without armor - A guide to inner lives of men (Aaron Kipnis)
Fire in the belly - On being a man (Sam Keen)