COLUMN | Love is something to be metabolized

One can be told they are loved in every tongue and still walk away unfed. One can be held with the gentlest of intentions and still recoil. For love, like sustenance, does not nourish by mere proximity—it must be broken down, received, and metabolized into the self.

Neurobiology defines love not as a moment, but a chain reaction. Dopamine? Oxytocin? Vasopressin? Serotonin? Each enters in sequence, shaping attachment through chemistry. New romance lights up the brain’s reward circuits—the ventral tegmental area, the nucleus accumbens—with a surge not unlike a drug. But science often overlooks what happens when that surge doesn’t land. Or when it does, and the body mistakes it for a threat.

The affective experience of love, though neurochemically initiated, depends on secondary systems—attachment patterns, emotional regulation, and cultural scripts—for integration. When these are impaired, the signal misfires. The body receives the input but lacks the interpretive bandwidth to render it as safe. 

It’s the feeling of hearing “I love you” and freezing—not because you doubt the words, but for your body doesn’t know what to do with them. You smile, maybe even say it back, but there’s a tremble underneath, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

As metabolic enzymes render nutrients bioavailable—disassembling substance into sustenance—so too must the psyche rely on internal regulators to translate intimacy into safety. Self-concept, affective boundaries, emotional modulation—these are not abstract traits, but functional prerequisites. Without them, love may arrive intact yet unusable, like nourishment ingested by a body unequipped to absorb.

These capacities, often rooted in attachment frameworks and emotional history, mediate how affection is processed. Without them, even gentle gestures—someone remembering your coffee order, texting “home safe?”—can feel more invasive than intimate.

Attachment theory suggests that for those shaped by avoidant or anxious patterns, closeness does not always read as comfort. A compliment might register as a veiled demand. A gift may carry the weight of obligation. Praise can awaken doubt rather than assurance. These are not deficits of love itself, but of the systems meant to metabolize it—internal processes miscalibrated by earlier wounds. 

Sometimes, being told “you’re special” doesn’t make you feel cherished—it makes you panic over how long you can keep the act up.

What is often labeled as "sabotaging good love" is, more precisely, the body’s failure to recognize safety when it arrives. The system, uncalibrated, cannot yet convert care into security. And so, like a nutrient the body cannot absorb, love moves through—present, intact, but ultimately unused.

You nod, you say thank you, you smile at the affection offered—but later that night, you replay the moment, wondering what they really meant. Their words rang true—but for a nervous system attuned to upheaval, even comfort echoes like siren: shrill, urgent, suspect.

Modern culture trains us to consume love as aesthetic: a curated montage, a soft-launch caption, a birth chart aligned just so. 

We are conditioned to chase the performance of affection, not its integration.

In a dating economy optimized for novelty and spectacle, connection becomes content, while commitment—quiet, durable, unmarketable—is steadily eroded. It’s easier to post a screenshot of their message than to sit with the silence that follows a vulnerable conversation. Easier to share a playlist than to share a fear.

This isn’t incidental. In an economy of hypervisibility and algorithmic affection, love is shaped for the feed before it’s shaped for the self. It is stylized, distilled, and broadcast—less an experience than a projection. We scroll past its symbols daily: matching playlists, filtered soft-launches, captioned warmth. But when the unedited version arrives—raw, earnest, slow—we flinch.

We are not undone by love withheld, but by love returned. What we feared was absence, yet what hurts is presence—radiant, unlearned, alive.

We speak often of heartbreak, but seldom of heart-resistance—the body’s refusal to receive love not for lack of its truth, but for the fullness of it. 

A system still rehearsing loss cannot yet rehearse return. 

Imagine someone reaching out, and instead of meeting their palm, you shrink back—confused by the calm, suspicious of the secure. You want to believe it’s safe, but your whole body is still waiting for the door to slam.

Contrast this with collectivist and indigenous traditions, where love is not broadcast but embodied—woven into duty, ritual, and communal rhythm. It lives in repetition: in tending to land, in sharing food, in showing up. Love is not announced; it is absorbed through practice. It may not always speak the language of romance, but it is metabolized—steadily, collectively, and absent of mere display.

It’s your grandmother waking before dawn to prepare your breakfast. It’s your uncle who walks you home without needing to say why. It’s presence as protection.

The body keeps score, as Bessel van der Kolk writes—and love is among its most complicated entries. It remembers not only what hurt, but what was withheld, misread, or arrived too fast to be trusted. Trauma does not dictate what we fear; it scripts how we receive. Even tenderness can register as alarm when the nervous system has learned to brace before it yields. You might flinch at a kind word. You might pull away from someone who simply stays.

When steadiness arrives after a history of volatility, the body doesn’t always greet it as relief. Sometimes, it flinches. Calm can feel disorienting. Warmth, suspicious. In the language of neuroception—the body’s pre-conscious threat appraisal system—what is unfamiliar is often marked as unsafe. It isn’t logic that resists love, but physiology shaped by precedent.

This is why some chase volatility and name it passion. Why others leave stable partners, mistaking the absence of tension for emotional deadness. These aren’t moral failings—they’re metabolic errors. The body, conditioned to chaos, confuses stillness with threat. It’s why some feel most alive during the highs and lows—the break-up, the make-up. What feels anchoring is not the substance of love itself, but its resemblance to what once kept them held taut.

Somatic therapies, polyvagal theory, and body-based modalities now converge on an old truth: we cannot think our way out of what the body has not learned to process. Insight alone does not rewire a system that flinches before it understands. Healing, in this frame, is not intellectual—it is physiological.

When love is metabolized, it transforms. It stops feeling like hunger and starts feeling like a full meal you didn’t have to earn. You’re no longer checking if they’ve read your message. You’re not rehearsing exits in your head “just in case.” It’s the quiet sense that you’re not being tolerated—you’re chosen, even in your silence. That shift—from craving to calm—isn’t always loud.

Sometimes, it’s just realizing you didn’t overthink your last conversation. You slept well. You woke up without bracing for the withdrawal. It’s when you no longer crave chaos to feel seen. You don’t need the thrill to believe you’re cared for. That’s what metabolized love does—it fuels instead of depletes. It becomes a steadiness that hums beneath the noise, where once your body only knew how to brace.

Metabolized love does not vanish when the giver exits the frame. It does not claw for evidence or beg to be reassured. It has been absorbed—made usable, stored. It lingers as emotional memory, accessible even in solitude. This is why those who have been deeply loved—slowly, without spectacle, with care that asked nothing in return—move through the world differently.

When love is left untranslated by the nervous system, it mutates. Not into longing, but into noise—background static that unsettles rather than soothes. The individual, surrounded by gestures of care, registers only their dissonance. Affection accumulates, but meaning does not. The result is not emptiness, but saturation without absorption—a system full, yet unfed.

At times, the system doesn’t just falter in receiving—it retaliates. In trauma-informed language, this is emotional autoimmunity: a physiology shaped by survival that wards off what could restore. Affection is misclassified as danger, dismissed before it anchors. Safety, conflated with exposure, is cast out before it can regulate. Like someone who deletes a sweet message before they can feel its weight. Like wincing when someone reaches for your hand—even if, deep down, you wanted them to.

To metabolize love is not metaphor—it is discipline.

It is the slow work of awareness: in therapy, in silence, in the pause before retreat. It is the choice to sit with what unsettles rather than escape it. 

To let praise arrive without deflection. To let warmth settle without suspicion. To allow quiet connection to suffice—not because it dazzles, but because it endures.

Much like digestion, the way one receives love is rarely uniform. Some take it in too fast—not from excess, but from famine. Their histories are shaped by emotional droughts, where affection arrived inconsistently, if at all. Others reject love outright—not due to absence of desire, but because their bodies have been trained to conflate tenderness with volatility, control, or threat.

And then there are those for whom love arrives slowly, metabolized in increments. Even the gentle kind must pass through layers of doubt before it feels secure. For them, it’s not enough to be told “I’m here.” They need to feel it—repeatedly, quietly, without spectacle. Until their body believes it too.

In this frame, love ceases to be a singular offering and becomes a process of calibration: knowing when one is full, when one is famished, or when the system must be repaired before it can receive anything at all.

It is recognizing when love is real but feels dangerous—and pausing long enough to name the feeling before you flee it. It is teaching the body that not all calm is a prelude to harm.

It is shifting the question from “Do they love me?” to something more elemental: “Am I able to receive it?” and “Do I possess the internal architecture to hold what is being offered?”

And if not, then metabolizing love begins at its most rudimentary task: reacquainting the body with safety as sensation, not suspicion. It means constructing the emotional enzymes—discernment, regulation, self-trust—that convert contact into coherence, warmth into sustenance.

Because in the end, it is not the presence of love that shapes us, but our capacity to metabolize it. We are not changed by what we are offered, but by what our systems learn to digest.