Love encompasses a range of positive emotional and mental states.
This diversity of uses and meanings, combined with the complexity of the feelings involved, makes love difficult to consistently define, compared to other emotional states.
This range of meanings is that the love of a mother differs from the love of a spouse, which differs from the love for food.
Love refers mostly to a feeling of strong attraction and emotional attachment.
Love is considered to be both positive and negative emotion, with its virtue representing human kindness, compassion, and affection, with the unselfish, loyal, and benevolent concern for the good of another, and its vice representing a human moral flaw akin to vanity, selfishness, self love, and egotism.
Love also describes compassionate and affectionate actions towards other humans, oneself, or animals.
Love acts as a major facilitator of interpersonal relationships and, is of central psychological importance, and one of the most common themes in the creative arts.
Love is a function that keeps human beings together against menaces and to facilitate the continuation of the species.
Historically six forms of love identified: familial love, friendly love or platonic love, romantic love, self-love, guest love, and divine or unconditional love.
Modern views have further varieties of love: fatuous love, unrequited love, empty love, companionate love, consummate love, infatuated love, amour de soi, and courtly love.
The triangular theory of love suggests intimacy, passion, and commitment are core components of love.
Love has additional religious or spiritual meaning.
Because of cultural differences in conceptualizing love makes it difficult to establish a universal definition.
Love, as a general expression of positive sentiment: a stronger form of like.
Love is commonly contrasted with hate.
As a less sexual and more emotionally intimate form of romantic attachment, love is commonly contrasted with lust.
As an interpersonal relationship with romantic overtones, love is sometimes contrasted with friendship.
The word love is also applied to close friendships or platonic love.
Love often involves caring for, or identifying with, a person or thing including oneself.
Interpersonal love refers to love between human beings.
It is a much more potent sentiment than liking a person.
Unrequited love refers to feelings of love that are not reciprocated.
Interpersonal love: might exist between family members, friends, and couples.
Several psychological disorders exist related to love, such as erotomania.
Biological models view love as a mammalian drive, much like hunger or thirst: dividing the experience of love into three partly overlapping stages: lust, attraction, and attachment.
Lust is the feeling of sexual desire.
Romantic attraction determines what partners find attractive and pursue, conserving time and energy by choosing.
Attachment involves sharing a home, parental duties, mutual defense, and in humans involves feelings of safety and security.
Lust is the initial passionate sexual desire promoting mating, and involves the increased release of hormones such as testosterone and estrogen.
Lust effects rarely last more than a few weeks or months.
Attraction is the more individualized and romantic desire for a specific candidate for mating, which develops out of lust as commitment to an individual mate form.
When people fall in love, the brain consistently releases a certain set of chemicals, including the neurotransmitter hormones dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin, the same compounds released by amphetamine, stimulating the brain’s pleasure center and leading to side effects such as increased heart rate, reduced appetite and sleep, and an intense feeling of excitement.
This stage generally lasts from one and a half to three years.
Since the lust and attraction stages are both considered temporary, a third stage is needed to account for long-term relationships.
Attachment is the bonding that promotes relationships lasting for many years and even decades.
Attachment is generally based on commitments such as marriage and children, or mutual friendship based on things like shared interests.
It has been linked to higher levels of the chemicals oxytocin and vasopressin, to a greater degree than what is found in short-term relationships.
The protein molecule known as the nerve growth factor (NGF) has high levels when people first fall in love, but these return to previous levels after one year.
Psychology depicts love as a cognitive and social phenomenon.
The triangular theory of love has three components: intimacy, commitment, and passion.
Intimacy is when two people share confidences and various details of their personal lives, and is usually shown in friendships and romantic love affairs.
Commitment is the expectation that a relationship is permanent.
Passionate love is shown in infatuation as well as romantic love.
Liking only includes intimacy.
Infatuated love only includes passion.
Empty love only includes commitment.
Romantic love includes both intimacy and passion.
Companionate love includes intimacy and commitment.
Fatuous love includes passion and commitment. Consummate love includes all three components.
Others identify a different set of three factors that constitute love: attachment, caring, and intimacy.
Love, it is held by some, is not merely a feeling but is also actions, and that in fact the feeling of love is superficial in comparison to one’s commitment to love via a series of loving actions over time (Fromm).
That love is ultimately not a feeling at all, but rather is a commitment to, and adherence to, loving actions towards another, oneself, or many others, over a sustained duration.
Fromm described love as a conscious choice that in its early stages might originate as an involuntary feeling, but which then later no longer depends on those feelings, but rather depends only on conscious commitment.
Charles Darwin credited love as a major factor for creating social support systems that enabled the development and expansion of the human species.
People can express love towards things other than humans: objects, principles, or objective, thereby experiencing a sense of love towards it.
People can also love material objects, animals, or activities if they invest themselves in bonding or otherwise identifying with those things.
If sexual passion is also involved with love, then this feeling is called paraphilia.
Interpersonal love between a man and woman facilitates mating and sexual reproduction.
Biologicaly love tends to be seen it as a mammalian drive, similar to hunger or thirst.
Psychology sees love as more of a social and cultural phenomenon.
Love is influenced by hormones, such as oxytocin, neurotrophins and pheromones, and how people think and behave in love is influenced by their conceptions of love.
The conventional view in biology is that there are two major drives in love: sexual attraction and attachment.
Attachment between adults is presumed to work on the same principles that lead an infant to become attached to its mother.
The psychological view sees love as being a combination of companionate love and passionate love.
Passionate love is intense longing, and is often accompanied by physiological arousal of shortness of breath, rapid heart rate: companionate love is affection and a feeling of intimacy not accompanied by physiological arousal.
Love plays a role in human well-being and health.
Activities associated with love, such as nurturing relationships, has been shown to activate key brain regions responsible for emotion, attention, motivation, memory, and to contribute to the regulation of the autonomic nervous system, leading to stress reduction over time, although the initial stages of love may induce stress.
Love’s social bonds enhance both physical and mental health, fostering resilience, compassion, and closeness.
Love boosts immune function and promotes healing, while also encouraging positive motivations and behaviors for individual flourishing and survival.
Breakups can evoke a range of emotional states, including distrust, rejection, and anger, leading to trauma and various psychological challenges such as anxiety, social withdrawal, and even love addiction.
Love addiction: Individuals may become fixated on past relationships, perpetuating emotional distress akin to addiction.
Health benefits grow bigger when married couples are older, this is because the partners play a crucial role in promoting each other’s well-being.
A loving relationship with God has significant impact on health.
Free love describes a social movement that rejects marriage, which is seen as a form of social bondage.
The free love movement’s initial goal was to separate the state from sexual matters such as marriage, birth control, and adultery.
Advocates of free love beliefs: opposition to the idea of forceful sexual activity in a relationship and advocacy for a woman to use her body in any way that she pleases: these are also beliefs of feminism.[68]
Philosophically, four types of love that are distinguished: love as a union; love as robust concern; love as valuing; love as an emotion.
Love as a union suggests that love involves the formation of a union between the two individuals.
Some views love as a literal fusion between the two individuals, resulting in a shared identity and mutual definition.