The Price of True Love is to Never Love Again

The Body, the Law and the Permanence of Human Attachment

Abstract

The proposition that the price of true love is to never love again appears romantic, yet it raises a more difficult question about the relationship between attachment, memory and personal identity. Can a person experience a love so profound that every subsequent relationship becomes a comparison with something that can never be recreated? Drawing on attachment psychology, the embodied experience of grief, legal reasoning and philosophical accounts of personal identity, this article examines whether significant love permanently alters the capacity to love again. It argues that the persistence of attachment should not be confused with the impossibility of future intimacy. Relationships shape the expectations through which later experiences are interpreted, while the body and mind may continue to respond to the absence of a person long after a relationship has ended. The legal analogy of precedent offers a way of understanding this influence, provided that it is not mistaken for determinism: the past informs the present without necessarily dictating its outcome. Ultimately, the article challenges the romanticisation of permanent emotional loss and proposes that the lasting consequence of profound love is not necessarily the inability to love again, but the loss of innocence with which love was once approached.

Keywords: romantic attachment; grief; emotional memory; human embodiment; personal identity; legal analogy; precedent; love and loss.

1. Introduction: The Romance of Irreplaceability

There is a sentence that sounds romantic until it is examined closely: the price of true love is to never love again.

At first, the proposition appears to express the extraordinary significance of a relationship. It suggests that certain people occupy a place in our lives so profound that no subsequent attachment could ever equal what came before. The person becomes irreplaceable, the relationship becomes definitive, and the loss acquires a kind of permanence that seems proportionate to the depth of the love itself.

Yet the sentiment contains a contradiction. If love is valuable because it enables us to know another person, to become vulnerable and to experience a form of intimacy that changes us, why should the loss of that experience require us to renounce the possibility of experiencing it again?

Perhaps the sentence does not describe the incapacity to love again so much as the impossibility of returning to the person we were before we loved.

A significant relationship does not merely occupy a period of time. It can change our understanding of trust, intimacy, vulnerability and the self. We learn what it means to be known by another person, to organise ordinary life around their presence, and to allow their happiness or suffering to matter to us in ways that exceed our own immediate interests. When the relationship ends, its influence does not necessarily end with it.

This is why heartbreak can feel like more than the loss of a person. It can feel like the loss of a version of ourselves: someone who existed within a particular relationship, who spoke a particular emotional language, and who understood the world through a set of expectations that no longer have the same place to exist.

My legal education has offered an unexpected way of thinking about this. Law recognises that the past can influence the present without determining every future outcome. Earlier decisions may establish principles through which later disputes are understood, but the application of those principles depends upon the circumstances before the court. A precedent has authority, but its relevance is not identical to inevitability.

Human attachment is not governed by binding precedent. Nevertheless, the analogy raises a useful question: when a relationship establishes our first understanding of a particular kind of intimacy, does it become a permanent standard against which every subsequent relationship must be judged?

The answer may explain why love can remain psychologically significant after its practical circumstances have disappeared. It may also explain why the belief that one can love only once is simultaneously understandable and misleading.

2. The Body Does Not Experience Love as an Abstraction

Love is often discussed as though it were principally an emotion, something that exists within the mind and can therefore be resolved through a sufficient exercise of thought. We tell ourselves that a relationship has ended, that a person is no longer present, and that the rational response is to accept the circumstances and continue.

But the human experience of attachment is not confined to conscious reasoning.

Romantic attachment involves patterns of attention, expectation, emotional regulation and physical response. A person's presence can become associated with comfort, anticipation and security. Their voice, familiar gestures and ordinary habits may acquire significance through repetition. Over time, the relationship becomes embedded in the routines through which daily life is experienced.

The absence of that person can therefore be felt physically as well as emotionally. Sleep may be disrupted. Concentration may become difficult. Familiar places can provoke unexpected sadness, while ordinary moments may produce a sudden awareness of absence. The body can respond to reminders before the conscious mind has fully understood why they matter.

Research on adult attachment and relationship loss supports the general proposition that separation can have substantial emotional consequences, with individual responses influenced by attachment patterns and other personal circumstances. Research into the neural correlates of romantic rejection has also identified activity in brain systems associated with distress, memory, reward and emotional regulation, although the available neuroimaging evidence remains limited.

Phillip R Shaver and Mario Mikulincer, ‘An Attachment Perspective on Loss and Grief’ (2022) 59 Current Opinion in Psychology 101348.

‘Functional Neuroimaging of Adult-to-Adult Romantic Attachment Separation, Rejection, and Loss: A Systematic Review’ (2021) European Journal of Neuroscience.

These findings should not be overstated. They do not demonstrate that the heart is biologically designed to love only once, nor that the body preserves a former partner in some permanent and unalterable form. They suggest something more modest: attachment involves psychological and physiological processes that cannot always be brought to an immediate conclusion simply because a relationship has ended.

This distinction matters because the language of moving on can imply that emotional recovery is a matter of decision alone. If someone continues to miss a former partner, they may interpret that persistence as evidence that the relationship was uniquely irreplaceable, or that their own capacity for attachment has been permanently damaged.

Neither conclusion necessarily follows.

The persistence of grief does not prove that the lost relationship was the only relationship capable of producing intimacy. It may instead reflect the significance of the attachment, the circumstances of its ending, the individual's attachment patterns, or the amount of time and emotional adjustment involved in adapting to loss.

The body remembers in the sense that experiences can shape emotional responses, expectations and habits. That is not the same as saying that the body refuses all future love.

Perhaps the more accurate observation is that the body does not immediately adapt to the world simply because the mind has declared that the world has changed.

3. The Person We Become in the Presence of Another

A relationship can alter not only what we feel, but how we understand ourselves.

There may be a version of us that exists only in the presence of a particular person. We may become more spontaneous, more affectionate, more intellectually curious or more willing to expose parts of ourselves that ordinarily remain concealed. Some relationships allow us to experience qualities that were already present but had never found the right conditions in which to emerge.

When the relationship ends, the loss can extend beyond the other person. We may also miss the self we were able to become with them.

This complicates the assumption that recovery means returning to the person we were before the relationship began. That person no longer exists in precisely the same form, because experience has changed the context through which we understand ourselves.

The philosopher Paul Ricoeur's account of personal identity offers a useful way of approaching this problem. His work distinguishes between dimensions of identity that involve continuity over time and those that involve the self's capacity to understand and reinterpret its own history. The significance of this distinction is that remaining the same person does not require remaining unchanged.

Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans Kathleen Blamey (University of Chicago Press 1992).

A relationship can become part of the story through which we understand our lives without becoming the only story available to us.

This is an important qualification to the romantic ideal of irreplaceability. A former partner may have been unique in the literal sense that no other person can reproduce the exact relationship that existed between them. Their particular humour, habits, history and manner of understanding us cannot be replicated in every detail.

But uniqueness does not establish exclusivity. The fact that one relationship cannot be repeated does not mean that no other relationship can possess comparable depth or significance.

Two people cannot recreate the exact conditions of a previous love, because they cannot recreate the exact past. They can, however, build something different that becomes meaningful in its own right.

The mistake is to treat emotional significance as a competition in which the future must prove itself superior to the past. A subsequent relationship need not reproduce an earlier one to be genuine. It must be understood on its own terms.

Perhaps what makes love so difficult to replace is not that it happens only once, but that every meaningful relationship creates a particular world that can never exist in precisely the same form again.

4. The Legal Analogy: Love as Precedent, Not Sentence

The law offers a useful analogy for understanding how past experience influences future judgment.

In common law, precedent provides an established point of reference for subsequent cases. Earlier judicial decisions may guide or constrain later decisions, depending on the authority of the court, the relevant legal principles and the material facts. But precedent does not mean that every future case must produce an identical result. Distinctions can matter, and the application of an established principle requires attention to the circumstances of the case before the court.

A significant relationship can operate in a similar, though much less formal, way.

Before experiencing a particular form of intimacy, we may understand love principally through expectation. We imagine what it might mean to be deeply known, to trust someone without constant explanation, or to find comfort in another person's ordinary presence. After experiencing it, we possess a reference point. We know something about the reality behind the expectation.

Future relationships are therefore encountered by a person who has already been changed by experience. We may become more attentive to certain qualities, more cautious about particular behaviours, or more conscious of what we need from another person. We may also become more vulnerable to comparison, interpreting unfamiliar forms of affection through the memory of what we previously understood as love.

The past has become a kind of emotional precedent.

But the analogy must be used carefully. A former relationship does not establish a rule that every future partner must satisfy. Nor does the intensity of an earlier attachment prove that it was the best possible relationship, the healthiest relationship or the only relationship capable of fulfilling us.

In law, a previous decision's authority depends upon its legal status and relevance, not merely upon how significant it appeared to the people involved. In personal life, by contrast, the emotional authority of a memory can be disproportionate to its actual relevance. We may treat a past experience as decisive simply because it remains painful or vivid.

This is where the analogy becomes most revealing.

A person may approach every new relationship as though it were being assessed against a binding precedent established by someone who is no longer present. A new partner may be judged for failing to reproduce a familiar kind of intimacy, even where the new relationship offers different and potentially valuable qualities.

The former partner then acquires an authority that exceeds the relationship's actual place in the present. The past no longer informs judgment; it controls it.

Yet precedent is useful precisely because it does not eliminate the need for judgment. Previous decisions can guide us, but they cannot decide every question in advance.

Likewise, the experience of love should inform our future without determining it. We can learn from what a relationship revealed about our needs, vulnerabilities and expectations without assuming that every future relationship must reproduce its emotional structure.

The legal analogy therefore leads to a more balanced conclusion: the past deserves consideration, but not unlimited jurisdiction.

5. Memory as Evidence: What Do We Actually Miss?

Memory is not a perfect record of experience. It is selective, reconstructive and influenced by the circumstances in which recollection occurs.

When we remember a relationship, we do not retrieve an entirely objective transcript of every conversation, disappointment, disagreement and ordinary day. We reconstruct the past from fragments, emotional associations and the meanings those experiences have acquired over time.

This does not mean that memory is inherently unreliable or that love is merely an illusion created by recollection. It means that the relationship we remember and the relationship as it was experienced in its entirety are not necessarily identical.

After a loss, certain moments may become unusually vivid. A particular conversation may acquire significance it did not possess at the time. Difficulties may fade into the background, while the tenderness of an ordinary evening becomes emblematic of everything that has been lost.

The reverse can also happen. Someone may remember a relationship principally through its final months, allowing disappointment to overshadow the value of earlier experiences.

Neither pattern necessarily reveals the whole truth.

A useful legal comparison emerges here. Evidence must be evaluated in context, and a persuasive account should not be mistaken for a complete account merely because it is emotionally compelling. The same caution is valuable when interpreting the past. A memory may be genuine without being comprehensive; a feeling may be intense without being a reliable measure of what a relationship was capable of sustaining.

The question is not whether we should distrust our memories. It is whether we should treat them as conclusive.

A person can have loved someone profoundly and still acknowledge that the relationship contained incompatibilities. Someone can miss another person without concluding that the separation was a mistake. A relationship can have changed us permanently without having been capable of lasting indefinitely.

These distinctions are particularly important because grief often invites a search for certainty. We may want to believe that the relationship was either the greatest love imaginable or a mistake that must be forgotten. Both conclusions offer simplicity. Neither is always justified.

A more mature account allows for contradiction. A relationship can have been beautiful and painful, formative and imperfect, deeply meaningful and ultimately unsustainable.

Its ending does not require its beginning to be reclassified as false.

6. The Psychological Difference Between Attachment and Destiny

One of the most seductive features of romantic grief is the belief that the persistence of attachment proves the uniqueness of the person who has been lost.

If someone remains in our thoughts, we may conclude that the connection must have been exceptional. If we continue to feel the absence physically, we may interpret the intensity of the response as evidence that the relationship was irreplaceable.

But the intensity of an attachment and the objective suitability of a relationship are different questions.

Attachment theory provides a framework for understanding how people form emotional bonds and respond to separation. Individual differences in attachment are associated with differences in emotional regulation and responses to relationship stress. Research does not, however, support a simple rule that every intense attachment is destined to endure or that persistent distress proves a person cannot form another meaningful bond.

Jeffry A Simpson and W Steven Rholes, ‘Adult Attachment, Stress, and Romantic Relationships’ (2017) 13 Current Opinion in Psychology 19

A relationship can be emotionally powerful for many reasons. It may have provided security during a difficult period, met an important need for recognition, or become closely associated with a particular stage of personal development. Its ending may also have been unexpected, ambiguous or unresolved, making it more difficult to integrate into one's understanding of the past.

None of these possibilities diminishes the reality of the love involved. They simply caution against treating emotional persistence as proof of romantic destiny.

There is a further danger in interpreting the inability to move forward as evidence of exceptional devotion. If suffering becomes the measure of love, recovery can begin to feel like betrayal. The less we hurt, the less meaningful the relationship appears to become. The prospect of loving someone new may then produce guilt, as though emotional openness to the future would diminish the authenticity of the past.

This creates an unfortunate moral confusion. Grief becomes something that must be preserved to demonstrate loyalty.

But a person's continued suffering is not a necessary condition of having loved sincerely. Nor does healing require the rejection of what was meaningful. The relationship can remain part of one's history without demanding that every future possibility be sacrificed to its memory.

It is possible to honour a person without remaining attached to the life that existed with them. It is possible to acknowledge that a relationship changed us without assuming that the change has made future intimacy impossible.

The distinction is between carrying an experience and remaining governed by it.

7. The Heart, the Body and the Question of Loving Only Once

The question of whether the heart is meant to love only once has emotional force because it appears to describe love as something finite: a capacity that can be given away completely and cannot be restored.

The human heart, however, is both a biological organ and a metaphor for emotional life. Confusing these meanings risks giving a romantic proposition the appearance of biological truth.

The body is capable of forming attachments, responding to separation and adapting to new circumstances. Human beings can experience profound grief and later develop meaningful relationships. The fact that a former attachment continues to influence emotional responses does not establish that the capacity for new attachment has been exhausted.

There is no sound basis for concluding that the human heart is biologically designed to love one person only once.

But the metaphor points towards a genuine philosophical problem. When we say that we gave someone our heart, we are describing more than affection. We are describing a form of trust through which another person acquired significance in our emotional world. To lose that person can therefore feel like losing part of the self that existed in the relationship.

The heart may not be finite in the sense that love can occur only once. Yet the experience of loving is finite in another sense: each relationship takes place within a particular period of our lives, between particular people, under circumstances that cannot be reproduced exactly.

We cannot return to the precise moment before our first profound attachment. We cannot experience a second relationship with the same innocence, because we now know more about vulnerability, uncertainty and loss.

That knowledge may make us more cautious. It may also make us more discerning. We may learn to distinguish the excitement of attraction from the steadiness of intimacy, the comfort of familiarity from the freedom to be ourselves, and the desire to be wanted from the experience of being understood.

The price of love, then, may be the loss of a certain innocence rather than the loss of the capacity itself.

This is not necessarily a tragic conclusion. Innocence and wisdom are not interchangeable, but neither are they mutually exclusive. We can become more aware of the risks of intimacy without concluding that those risks make intimacy irrational.

The body may remember what it has lost. The mind may revisit what it cannot change. But neither response establishes that the future has been closed.

8. Love, Freedom and the Ethics of Letting Go

Love creates a moral tension because intimacy involves both attachment and freedom.

To love someone is to allow their existence to matter to us. Their choices may affect us; their absence may hurt us; their happiness may become important independently of our own immediate satisfaction. This vulnerability is part of what makes love significant.

But it also creates the temptation to confuse the depth of attachment with a claim upon the other person.

If a relationship ends, the person who remains attached may feel that the intensity of their love should carry some continuing authority. They may believe that a connection so profound ought not to be abandoned, or that moving forward would diminish what the relationship meant.

Yet the reality of an emotional bond does not automatically establish a right to its continuation. Another person's freedom cannot be annulled by the depth of our feelings. Love may create responsibilities within a relationship, but it does not grant ownership over another person's future.

This is where philosophical reflection becomes important. A relationship is not made meaningful solely by its intensity. It also depends upon the freedom, dignity and mutual recognition of the people involved.

A love that can exist only if the past remains permanently binding risks becoming a form of captivity. The former partner is held in memory as an unchanging figure, while the person who remembers them becomes unable to recognise the possibility of a future that differs from what has been lost.

Letting go does not necessarily mean ceasing to care. It may mean accepting that care does not confer control, that a meaningful relationship can end without becoming meaningless, and that the other person's life is no longer required to conform to our emotional expectations.

There is no need to romanticise this process. Acceptance can be painful, particularly when the ending was unwanted or unresolved. Nor does acceptance follow a uniform timetable. The psychological work of adapting to loss varies between individuals and circumstances.

But the ethical distinction remains important. We can recognise the significance of a relationship without treating its continuation as something we are entitled to demand.

The ability to love again may depend, in part, upon learning that intimacy is not possession. We can allow a person to have mattered profoundly without requiring them to remain the final authority over our lives.

9. Catholic Thought: Love Without Idolatry

Catholic thought offers a further perspective on the relationship between love, attachment and personal freedom.

Christian teaching places considerable value on love, fidelity and the dignity of relationships. The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes charity as a virtue directed towards God and neighbour, and presents Christian love as something that should not be reduced to possession, vanity or the pursuit of personal satisfaction.

Catechism of the Catholic Church (2nd edn, Geoffrey Chapman 1999) paras 1822–1827. See also the Vatican's online text on charity and its moral significance

This does not mean that romantic love should be treated as spiritually insignificant. Nor does it imply that the loss of a relationship should be met with indifference. Grief can reflect the depth of a genuine attachment, and the experience of loss can demand patience, compassion and time.

The more difficult question is whether the memory of a person can become so central that it begins to occupy a place beyond its proper limits.

When we conclude that no future relationship could ever matter because one particular relationship has ended, we may be treating an experience of human love as though it were the final source of meaning available to us. This can transform gratitude for what was received into an absolute claim upon the future.

Catholic moral thought provides grounds for questioning that conclusion. Love is not merely the intensity of one's attachment to a particular person; it is also expressed through the recognition of the other's dignity and freedom. The theological virtue of hope, as described in the Catechism, resists the assumption that loss and suffering must exhaust the possibilities of a life.

Catechism of the Catholic Church (n 5) paras 1817–1818.

This should not be used to minimise heartbreak or to suggest that faith makes grief disappear. Such a claim would be both psychologically simplistic and spiritually unhelpful. Faith does not require a person to pretend that loss is painless.

Rather, it offers a framework in which grief can be acknowledged without being made absolute. The fact that a relationship has ended does not mean that the capacity to love, to grow or to find meaning has ended with it.

There is also a distinction between fidelity to a person and fidelity to a memory. Fidelity may remain a central obligation within a continuing marriage or relationship, but the moral significance of a past relationship does not automatically require permanent emotional exclusion of every future possibility. The circumstances matter, and different relationships carry different obligations.

The broader point is that love should not become an idol: an attachment so absolute that it prevents the person who experiences it from recognising any further good.

To remember someone with gratitude is not to deny their significance. It is to acknowledge that their significance does not have to become the limit of everything that follows.

10. The Future Is Not an Appeal Against the Past

Perhaps the greatest difficulty in loving again is the assumption that a new relationship must somehow compete with the old one.

We ask whether we will feel the same intensity, whether we will experience the same closeness, whether the new person will understand us in the same way. We may compare gestures, conversations and familiar routines, searching for evidence that what we have found is equal to what we lost.

But this approach misunderstands the nature of personal relationships.

A new relationship cannot reproduce an old one because the people involved, their histories and their circumstances are different. Even if the emotional intensity were comparable, the experience would not be identical. The comparison therefore risks measuring a new possibility against a standard that it was never capable of meeting.

Law offers one final, limited analogy. An appeal does not necessarily erase the decision that came before it; nor does a later decision have to reproduce an earlier one to possess legitimacy. The task is to assess the matter before the decision-maker in light of the relevant principles and circumstances.

Similarly, a new relationship need not overturn the significance of the old one. It does not need to prove that the previous love was inferior, mistaken or replaceable. It can simply be different.

The past can remain valuable without being treated as a verdict against the future.

This is not an argument for forgetting. Memory can preserve tenderness, teach us about our own behaviour and remind us of the qualities we hope to cultivate in future relationships. It can also reveal patterns we should avoid repeating. The challenge is to use that knowledge without allowing the memory to dictate every subsequent possibility.

To love again is not to declare that the person who came before no longer matters. It is to recognise that meaning is not a finite resource that must be allocated exclusively to one period of life.

Different relationships can possess different kinds of significance. One may teach us vulnerability; another, patience. One may reveal what intimacy feels like; another may show us how intimacy can coexist with independence. There is no requirement that one relationship must defeat the other in order for either to have been real.

The future does not need to appeal against the past because the two are not competing judgments on the same question.

11. Conclusion: What Is the Real Price of True Love?

The proposition that the price of true love is to never love again is powerful because it gives suffering a clear meaning. It suggests that the inability to replace someone is proof of the depth of the attachment, and that permanent grief is the natural consequence of having experienced something extraordinary.

But the proposition confuses several different things: the uniqueness of a relationship, the persistence of attachment, the pain of loss and the capacity to form future bonds.

A relationship can be unique without being the only relationship capable of producing profound intimacy. Attachment can persist without establishing that the past was perfect. Grief can be severe without proving that recovery is impossible. And the experience of loving deeply can change a person without permanently closing the possibility of love.

Psychology helps explain why attachment survives separation and why the body may continue to respond to a loss that the conscious mind understands has occurred. Philosophy reminds us that identity is shaped by experience without being reducible to it. Law provides a useful analogy for the way prior experience informs subsequent judgment, while warning us, through its own distinctions, against treating every precedent as determinative.

None of these perspectives proves that everyone will love again, or that every person should seek a new relationship. Some people may choose to remain single, and others may require substantial time before intimacy becomes possible. The point is not that love must recur, but that a past relationship does not establish an inevitable limit on future capacity.

Perhaps the real price of true love is that we can never again approach it in precisely the same way. We know that vulnerability creates the possibility of pain. We know that familiarity can become absence, that promises do not guarantee permanence, and that even a relationship of genuine affection may end.

We cannot unknow these things. But knowledge does not necessarily diminish the value of love. It may make our decisions more deliberate, our expectations more realistic and our appreciation of intimacy more conscious.

The person who loves after loss is not the same person who loved before it. They may be more cautious, more discerning and more aware of the consequences of attachment. Yet they may also be more capable of recognising what they need, what they can offer and what they should no longer mistake for love.

Perhaps, then, the heart is not meant to love only once. Perhaps it is meant to remember, to adapt and, where life permits, to remain open to forms of love that cannot yet be imagined.

The past may always occupy a particular place within us. Some people will remain significant long after their presence has ended. Their influence need not be denied, minimised or erased.

But a memory is not a sentence, and grief is not a legal prohibition against the future.

We do not honour a profound love by insisting that nothing meaningful can follow it. We honour it by acknowledging that it changed us, accepting that its ending cannot be undone, and allowing its lessons to accompany us without demanding that they govern every possibility.

The real price of true love may therefore be neither permanent grief nor the inability to love again. It may be the knowledge that love makes us vulnerable, that no relationship can guarantee permanence, and that the willingness to love another person always involves accepting uncertainty.

That is not evidence that the heart has failed.

It is evidence that the heart has lived.

Editorial note: This article approaches love and loss through an interdisciplinary framework, drawing on attachment psychology, philosophy of personal identity, the embodied experience of grief, legal reasoning and Catholic thought. Its central argument is that a love may remain irreplaceable in its particularity without being the only love a person is capable of experiencing. The article challenges the romantic assumption that the permanence of attachment necessarily requires the permanent renunciation of future intimacy.

The legal analogy between romantic attachment and precedent is conceptual rather than doctrinal. It illustrates how the past can inform present judgment without determining every future outcome. It should not be understood as suggesting that human relationships operate according to legal rules. Similarly, psychological research on attachment and grief can help explain the persistence of emotional and bodily responses to loss, but it cannot establish that the heart is biologically designed to love only once. The philosophical and theological discussion offers interpretive perspectives rather than empirical proof.

The article therefore seeks to preserve the emotional significance of enduring love without treating suffering as evidence of destiny. Its conclusion is not that the past should be forgotten, but that remembering someone need not mean surrendering the possibility of loving again. Before publication, the bibliographic details of the cited psychological research, including the full authorship and publication information for the neuroimaging review, should be verified against the original sources. All references and any required pinpoint citations should also be checked for compliance with the fifth edition of OSCOLA.

Books

1. Catechism of the Catholic Church (2nd edn, Geoffrey Chapman 1999)

2. Ricoeur P, Oneself as Another, trans Kathleen Blamey (University of Chicago Press 1992)

Journal articles

1. Shaver PR and Mikulincer M, ‘An Attachment Perspective on Loss and Grief’ (2022) 59 Current Opinion in Psychology 101348

2. Simpson JA and Rholes WS, ‘Adult Attachment, Stress, and Romantic Relationships’ (2017) 13 Current Opinion in Psychology 19

3. ‘Functional Neuroimaging of Adult-to-Adult Romantic Attachment Separation, Rejection, and Loss: A Systematic Review’ (2021) European Journal of Neuroscience