Connection isn’t always warm and fuzzy. But Julie agreed.
He made Saturday cleaning day, and he turned it into a project he shared wth their daughter. The first Saturday afternoon Julie came home from a physical therapy appointment to find the house tidy—not tidy like she would have made it, but tidy, and she hadn’t had to do it herself—she almost cried. There was food in the oven that she hadn’t had to cook. All the people she cared about most were there for her. All she had to do to accept their help was let go of her impulse to be in control and make everything perfect.
Ha. “All.”
Sometimes connection is emotional support. Sometimes it’s information and education, like the medical professionals helping her relearn how to live in a body. And sometimes it’s cooking, carpools, dishes, dusting, putting things back where they belong. Public health theory calls it “instrumental support.”
To Julie, it just felt like “having a wife.”
Good Connection Is Good for You
People vary in their appetites for connection.12 Our variability is partly explained by introversion or extroversion, partly by the pleasure an individual experiences in socializing, and it also seems to be its own little quirk of personality.13 Researchers can assess it as simply as asking a person whether they agree or disagree with the statement “I have a strong need to belong.”14 There is no “right amount” of needing to belong; there’s just the amount of belonging that feels right for you.
Let’s talk about the health benefits of getting the connection you need. Caveat: Connection is emphatically not just about marriagey-type relationships; it’s about having positive relationships of all kinds, including friends, BFFLs, besties, buds, bros, and the fam. But spousal relationships might be the most commonly studied, so those are the ones that provide the most evidence of connection’s benefits to our lives.
For example, a recent meta-analysis of more than seventy thousand participants (all in heterosexual marriages) across a dozen nations found that worse marital quality leads to worse physical health and shorter life, as well as declining mental health.15 The standards for “quality” weren’t intimidatingly high; they included “high self-reported satisfaction with the relationship, predominantly positive attitudes toward one’s partner, and low levels of hostile and negative behavior.” In short, “I’m satisfied with my relationship, I like my partner, and we’re generally pretty supportive and nice to each other.” But this baseline level of satisfaction can be powerful. Among people with higher marital quality, injuries and wounds heal faster and chronic pain interferes less with quality of life. In fact, relationship quality was found to be a better predictor of health than smoking, and smoking is among the strongest predictors of ill health. And the benefits of a high-quality relationship were sometimes even greater for women than for men.
Researchers found that this effect is probably due, at least in part, to the fact that people tend to take better care of themselves when they’re in a high-quality relationship. In other words, our “self-care” is facilitated by the ways we care for and are cared for by someone else.
A loved one doesn’t have to be your literal twin for it to happen to you. We hope you have at least one person in your life so attuned to you that they quite literally feel your pain, and stand with you inside it.
These energy-creating connections are what we call the “Bubble of Love.”
The Bubble of Love
Social connections fuel your body just as eating nutritious foods and taking deep breaths do.16 If Human Giver Syndrome is a virus, the Bubble of Love is the environment that fuels your immune response. You might experience connection in the Bubble with one person at a time—that’s Emily’s most common experience. Or you might feel it most strongly in large, cooperative groups—which has been Amelia’s experience. You might experience it best with your best friends. Your spouse. Your church family. Your dog—yes, we experience these kinds of connections with other species. Different Bubbles have different styles; you don’t experience or express connection with your roller derby teammates the same way you would with your family, and you don’t experience or express connection with your family the same way you would with your anti-capitalist, womynist knitting group—but all these different energy-creating Bubbles of Love share two specific ingredients: trust and connected knowing.
Bubble Ingredient #1: Trust
Lots of species, including humans, keep track of who gives something to another and who reciprocates. The belief that the people around us will reciprocate in proportion to what we give them is called “trust.”
Researchers, particularly in economic science but also in psychology, use the Trust Game as a tool for discovering the ways people respond to being trusted or not, being betrayed or not. If you want to know more about that science, just google “Trust Game.” They use money. We’re going to use cupcakes. The experiments go like this:
Researchers put Emily and Amelia in a lab. They give Amelia four cupcakes and a choice. She can take her cupcakes and go home, or she can give Emily any number of the cupcakes she chooses. Any cupcake she chooses to give Emily transforms into three cupcakes. So she can give away one cupcake, and Emily will get three while Amelia still has three. She can give away two, and Emily will have six while Amelia has two. And so on.
And then if Emily gets any cupcakes, she, too, has a choice. She can choose to return some to Amelia, or she can take her cupcakes and go home.
If Amelia trusts Emily, she gives away all four of her cupcakes, meaning a dozen cupcakes for Emily! If Emily is trustworthy, she gives half back, and they both get six! Trust followed by reciprocity results in maximum cupcakes and a peaceable queendom.
In real life, the “cupcakes” we give and receive in relationships can be almost anything—money, time, attention, actual cupcakes, or compassion for our difficult feelings. That last is the most important cupcake of all. If we turn toward someone with our difficult feelings—sadness, anger, hurt—and they tune in to our feelings without judgment or defensiveness, it helps us to move through that feeling, like a tunnel, to the light at the end.
This definition of trust can be boiled down to one question: “Are you there for me?”17 Trustworthy people are there for each other, and that mutual trust and trustworthiness maximizes wellness for both people.
But suppose Emily is having PMS cravings at the moment, and twelve cupcakes look like dinner. She scarfs them down right there in the research lab, then runs out the door, leaving Amelia alone with zero cupcakes and a deep sense of betrayal.
This activates a stress response. Amelia may feel motivated, for example, to seek revenge. In reality, revenge is neither the usual nor the most productive response to betrayal. The most likely and valuable thing Amelia will do after Emily’s betrayal is go home and complain to her husband that Emily took all the cupcakes! A supportive guy, he bakes her a batch of her own dozen cupcakes and invites some friends over, who all bring even more cupcakes and agree that Emily is a PMSing jerk. Emerging from the hormonal fog, eventually even Emily will agree, and she’ll show up at Amelia’s house with even more cupcakes, apologize, and agree not to do that again. In this way, trust is repaired and the Bubble is stabilized.18
However, if Emily says she’s sorry but she just can’t control her cupcake-swiping urges, Amelia may forgive her, but she would be wise to put Emily on the periphery of the Bubble.
Outside the energy-generating Bubble of Love, some jerk might say to Amelia, “That’s what you get for giving away all your cupcakes.” But that’s why they’re outside the Bubble. People who don’t trust or are untrustworthy are energy drains.