Is being loved a biological necessity?

A little girl in a pram was wailing as she, her parents, me, and a crush of others queued in the airport ticket rip-off line. She took one look at me and stopped crying.  Burst into smiles.  Then laughter.  I smiled back.  I always do.

Children can see our auras.  We all have that skill when we are born.  It is a survival necessity.  Animals possess this too.  Some species more than others.  Cats, dogs, horses especially.  What they do with the information is rather species dependent though.

Why do we lose this ability as we grow?  The baby brain is more plastic, and as a survival tool, it helps to be able to feel and see energy, particularly for such a survival dependent species such as ours.

The mother noticed what had changed the cries to laughter and followed her daughter’s eyes to me, and we smiled at each other.  Another woman passed and complimented the mother on how smiling and laughing her daughter was.  Positive reinforcement.

The mother then relayed the compliment to her daughter, who was just old enough to understand.  The compliment was delivered with a gentle and soft pinch to the little girl’s cheek, and a caress from the back of her fingers.  The little girl loved feeling the compliment and moved as if she could feel it in her whole body, and then turned her face with an expression that could only be called coy or flirtatious with her mother’s hand.

The mother laid it on thicker, and it got me thinking.  Do we as human animals need to seduce in order to survive.  Do we need to feel this kind of sticky love?  And by sticky love, I refer to not just the typical all-encompassing love of a mother for her child, but a similar love from anyone—when we can count on it.  The kind of love that comes back, sticks around, and will rebound even after a bout of bad behaviour.

And this is not me saying that there is ever license to behave badly or to test the bonds of love.  But we can’t help it.  And a mother’s love usually has the elasticity, the forgiveness, the mercy to give us a sense of always being there.  The floor under our feet.  And boy, is that ever not something to take for granted.  And yet many do.

But I wonder if in that child’s gesture was a way of feeding and probing to make sure it was there, this kind of sticky love.  It is instinctual.  Automatic.  And you see it, without the psychodrama, play out in the animal kingdom.  Animals, as any person who has a deep relationship with an animal will know, are capable of complex emotions.

It is quite possibly a rhetorical question after all.  The hypothesis is that we need to be able to feel that love is not transactional but is fluid and felt and firmly attached.  Without it, there is an emptiness, a kind of existential sorrow.  And I think that when this appears we begin to die a little.  It is a kind of neglect.

The cruelest and saddest form I have seen this was in a documentary abour Romanian orphans many years ago.  The children, orphaned as babies, were kept without human contact, sometimes in cribs that seemed more like cages than ways to keep a child from hurting themselves.  The result was a never-ending litany of behavioral and health problems which sapped the life out of them, but also made them totally dysfunctional.  It was so, so sad.

But this also does, is show a form of euthanasia.  The extreme.  These “unwanted” or abandoned children were forced to grow up without ever experiencing sticky love.  The outcome is obvious.  No partner.  No pairing.  No children.  Example of how nature can overpower nurture in terms of biological outcomes.  And we do know that our environment, our behavior, our circumstances does modify our DNA—changes our wiring.

We are social animals.  Paramount social animals.  All animals are social.  Being social is an evolutionary necessity, reality, and pillar of life.  We are now learning it is not confined to the animal kingdom, but also to the plants, and how they talk to each other, share resources, and the mycorrhizal network under the earth that does the same.  

Sticky love, therefore, is a biological reality, a true necessity.

For adult humans, this translates into lovemaking.  A direct connection to propagation.  A lesbian domme friend described the complicating energy of female-male sexual relations over female-female, and how they had more “animal” energy in them.  I certainly feel no different about the importance of sticky love, either physically or emotionally as I have gone from being a straight man to a queer woman.  I know I need it.  To crawl into her arms and know that she will be there.

Enter kink, BDSM.  The ritual of D/s is a kind of elaborate dance, a superstructure of exactly this kind of stickiness.  We construct rituals around all aspects of interaction, from consent all the way through to reward and punish.  The very idea of “look at how much pain I will take for you,” is a form of ritualized stickiness.  It is a way of saying, no matter how much you hurt me I will be devoted to you.

Of course the recipient of the punishment is not in the “mother” role but in the child role.  But outside of the professional sphere, there are a great many dommes (and doms) who hold this kind of protective/affectionate sticky love for their bottoms.  And it has struck me that the really, really talented and successful pro-dommes have an “ability” to really convey this energy…and while my own view is that you can’t be that good at anything unless it comes from authenticity, there is no way to prove that empirically.

So, we will just have to leave it at this…even if the sub is “taking it” for the top, they are feeling sticky love through being asked to show that they have it, give it, and can be tested with it.  Taking a beating from a dominatrix is a bit like be4ing the child saying, “aren’t I cute” or “don’t you just love me?”

I see and feel this in a real way as I stray away from my origins as a sub and into a world of being a dominant woman, of being a dominatrix.  Even more so in the world that I move in, working with the kinds of submissives that I think shared my own existential existence as a submissive: adult babies, secretaries, pain sluts.  I never liked humiliation myself, but I seem to be both good at, and to really enjoy dishing it out.  Go figure.

But all of these games we play show me one really important thing in particular.  That the roles we play in kink, whether top or bottom, are existential in nature.  We need them.  And this is what makes them sticky.  Makes it so important to satisfy these needs, these urges.

It isn’t Stockholm Syndrome which makes us love the person who hurts us.  It is that we, through an ordeal, are allowed to show that we will still be there.  And the giver of love needs this as much as the receiver.

What do you think?