Does He Love Me? Part 2A: Attachment vs. Love
In Part 1 of this series, we began to untangle the question, “Does he love me?” We discovered that love is more than a feeling. St. Thomas Aquinas described love as willing the good of the other , and in Jesus Christ we encounter the clearest revelation of what authentic love looks like. We also discovered something that makes applying that definition much more complicated: Human beings are capable of genuine love and profound contradiction. So before we try to discern what authentic love looks like in a relationship marked by betrayal, we need to look more closely at some of the experiences we commonly call love. One of the most powerful is attachment . Attachment is not counterfeit love. It is not unhealthy by definition. It is part of the way God created human beings for relationship. But attachment and love are not the same thing. Attachment Feels Like Love Attachment begins long before we have words to describe it. A baby depends upon caregivers not only for food and physical prot...
