From Plato to pet dogs, thinkers have kept asking what binds people together
Goethe compared lovers to chemicals that cannot help reacting, and Plato's dinner guests argued that love holds the whole universe in balance. Modern psychology is more careful, but it still treats bonding, the slow growth of trust and affection between people, as something different from simply liking someone.
Bonding happens most often within families and friendships, but teammates and anyone who spends enough time together can form one. It is mutual rather than one-sided. In Plato's Symposium, from the 4th century BC, the physician Eryximachus claims love operates everywhere, harmonising opposites like wet and dry when it is the right kind and wreaking havoc when it is crude and impulsive. Spinoza, writing in the 1660s, meant something else by human bondage: our inability to master our emotions, which leaves us at the mercy of fortune. In his 1809 novella Elective Affinities, Goethe likened marriage to the way particles of quicksilver draw together.
Biologists coined the phrase pair bond in 1940 for mated birds. Some form of monogamy appears in around 90 percent of bird species but only about 3 percent of mammals, and primates mostly favour one male with several females. Even so, primates build long-lasting social ties of many kinds. The psychologist Dorothy Tennov, after interviewing over 500 people, proposed in 1979 that romantic bonds come in three varieties depending on whether neither, one or both partners feel limerence, an obsessive, hopeful infatuation.
John Bowlby's 1958 paper on a child's tie to its mother laid the groundwork for attachment theory, arguing babies are born needing emotional bonds because those bonds secure the care they need to survive. Later research eased fears that adoptive parents miss some critical window, suggesting infants and adults are evolved to fit each other rather than bound strictly by biology. Hormones play a part: oxytocin during nursing lowers anxiety, and a 2003 study in mice linked low progesterone to more fatherly behaviour.
Bonds reach beyond our own species. In the late 18th century Quakers at The Retreat in York had patients tend farm animals, and a Paris surgeon in the 1870s found that riding horses helped patients with nerve disorders. Over 24,000 horses and mules served with Canadian forces in the First World War.
Source: Human bonding
