A bit over a couple years ago I was riding the travelator up to Woolworths when I heard the yelling. A man in his mid-thirties, hands shaking, trying and failing to light a smoke, as if that could calm him down. Twenty metres away his wife stood crying, their baby beside her. A security guard had planted himself between them, talking the man down. The rest of us did what crowds do. We kept walking, eyes forward, pretending not to see.
The only words of his I caught: "that woman is making me mad." It was over a couple years ago and the scene still visits me, not because it was dramatic but because it was so sad. I don't know what started it, and I would bet it wasn't the whole story. Underneath a scene like that sits a question far older than any argument: do you love me? Still? Even now?
This is the first of a weekly letter I will be writing you, one small idea about love each week, drawn from the best books I found when my own marriage needed them. It seems right to start at the bottom of the pile, with the need everything else rests on.
The need is not a weakness
Gary Chapman, the counsellor behind The 5 Love Languages, puts it plainly: psychologists have concluded that the need to feel loved is a primary human emotional need. Not a nice extra. Primary, in the same tier as food and rest. He observes that people will cross oceans and endure almost anything for love, and that without it, ordinary hardship starts to feel unbearable.
Scripture said it first, and earlier than you might think. Before anything in the world had gone wrong, God looked at the man in the garden and named the one thing that was not good: "It is not good for the man to be alone" (Genesis 2:18). The need to feel loved is not neediness. It was stitched into us at creation, before the fall, before the first excuse.
A quick note here. Genesis is not trying to be a science lesson on how the world was built. It is sacred story, told in figurative language, and its concern is not the mechanics of creation but the mystery of what we are. On the question of what a human heart needs, it speaks with full authority.
So, when your heart keeps asking the question, it is not malfunctioning. It is doing its job.
The whole house feels it
Here is the part that stopped me when I first read it. John Gottman, who has studied couples in his lab for decades, ran a study of 63 preschoolers. The children growing up around constant marital hostility had chronically elevated stress hormones. He followed them to age fifteen and found more depression, more trouble with peers, more aggression, more struggle at school.
The question of whether we feel loved is never a private matter between two adults. Children read the weather in a house long before they can name it. That baby at Woolworths was already reading it. Which means the work you put into your marriage is not self-indulgence. It is one of the most practical gifts you can give your kids, and Gottman is careful to add that what harms children is the hostility itself, wherever it lives.
The two options that are not the only options
Chapman describes what happens when the falling-in-love stage wears off, as it does for everyone. Many couples quietly conclude they have two options left: settle into a flat marriage or leave and try again with someone new.
The statistics are not kind to the second plan. Second marriages fail at a higher rate than first ones, and third marriages higher still. The need travels with us. A new person does not fill it any better if we never learned how the filling works.
Chapman's answer is the third option: love as a choice. Not a feeling we wait to catch again, but something we decide to do, in the other person's language, whether or not the mood arrives first. The Choice is real, and it is ours, and we are not making it alone. Poor choices in the past do not sentence us to more of them. Anyone can start with a sentence as simple as: I know I have hurt you, and I want the future to be different.
The secret weapon
Gottman found that happy couples are not couples who never argue. They argue plenty. What sets them apart is what he calls the repair attempt: any small word or gesture that stops a quarrel from escalating. A hand reached across the table. A silly face mid-shout. A quiet "can we start that again?"
In his research, it is one of the strongest predictors of whether a marriage lasts. Not the absence of conflict. The presence of repair. And repair attempts only land when there is enough friendship underneath for your partner to catch them, which is where these letters will spend a lot of their time.
Try this: The Feel-Loved Question
This week, pick a calm moment. Not during an argument, not straight after one. Ask your partner one question: "What can I do to make you feel loved?"
Then the hard part. Listen. No defending, no explaining, no promising on the spot. Just take the answer, thank them, and sit with it for a day before you act on it. You will likely learn something you could not have guessed, because the honest answer is rarely the thing we have been busy providing.
A need that deep does raise a bigger question, one I have been circling for a long time: Can any one person actually meet it? That question deserves its own letter, and it gets one next week.
If you would like a slower, daily way to practise this, our free 31-day challenge sends one small step to your inbox each morning. No pressure, no homework marathons. Take a look when you are ready.
— Leo
