The Journal of Lifetime Living once said: “The psychiatrists, in their lurid battle against mental illness, have finally concluded that the great taproot of mental ills is lovelessness. The child psychologists, wrangling over scheduled versus demand feeding, spanking versus non-spanking, have found that none of it makes much difference so long as the child is loved. The sociologists have found love the answer to delinquency, the criminologists have found it the answer to crime, the political scientists have found it the answer to war.”

They may have found the answer, but they obviously have not applied it. Dr. Claude A. Frazier warned that if our technological society is not humanized by love, “the alternative, as we can now surely comprehend, is a nation of cities turned into jungles of hate, of families rent by bitter conflict, of young people seeking escape in drugs and death, and of a world ready to commit global suicide at any moment.”

Just as caring human relationships and love are beneficial to our health, the lack of companionship can be detrimental. The pressures of modern living, broken homes, single-parent families, emotionally neglected children, the mania for material things, the collapse of morals, the demise of true values​—all add to the instability and loneliness that damage our health. James J. Lynch pursues this at length in his book The Broken Heart​—The Medical Consequences of Loneliness. “The price we are paying for our failure to understand our biological needs for love and human companionship,” he says, “may be ultimately exacted in our own hearts and blood vessels. . . . There is reflected in our hearts a biological basis for our need for loving human relationships, which we fail to fulfill at our peril.”