Psychology says the adults who were raised with very little affection don’t grow up unable to love, they grow up suspicious of the love that finally arrives, and the warmth a partner offers them at thirty or forty often gets quietly held at arm’s length, not because they don’t want it, but because the body that didn’t learn how to receive affection at six is still trying to figure out the choreography at fifty
The cruelest paradox of human connection: those who needed love most as children often spend their adult lives physically tensing up when it finally arrives, their bodies still protecting them from a danger that existed decades ago.