hug me tight

Author Name: Sue Johnson

“A great loneliness and melancholy, like ice, is attacking many people,” said the Irish poet John Odorno. We now demand from our loved ones the emotional connection and sense of belonging that my grandmother could get from an entire village. This is compounded by the celebration of romantic love fostered by our popular culture; films and television dramas, for example, haunt us with images of romantic love as the beginning and end of all relationships.

So it should come as no surprise that recent surveys rank a satisfying romantic relationship as a primary goal, ahead of financial success and a fulfilling career. It's imperative that we understand what love is, how we get it, and how we make it last. Fortunately, over the past two decades, an exciting and revolutionary new understanding of love has emerged, and we now know that love is, in fact, the pinnacle of evolution and the most compelling survival mechanism for the human race. Not because it drives us to mate and reproduce—we can mate successfully without love—but because it drives us to bond emotionally with a precious few others who offer us a safe haven from the storms of life.

Because love is our fortress designed to provide emotional protection that enables us to deal with the ups and downs of existence, Sue Johnson wrote this book as a guide, targeting couples, engaged couples, and lovers, and explaining her highly successful theory of emotion-focused therapy.