Love
is
any of a number of emotions and experiences related to a sense of
strong affection. The word love can refer to a variety of
different feelings, states, and attitudes, ranging from generic
pleasure ("I loved that meal") to intense interpersonal attraction
("I love my girlfriend"). This diversity of meanings, combined with
the complexity of the feelings involved, makes love unusually
difficult to consistently define, even compared to other emotional
states.
As an abstract
concept, love usually refers to a deep, ineffable feeling
of tenderly caring for another person. Even this limited conception
of love, however, encompasses a wealth of different feelings, from
the passionate desire and intimacy of romantic love to the
nonsexual emotional closeness of familial and platonic love to the
profound oneness or devotion of religious love. Love in its various
forms acts as a major facilitator of interpersonal relationships
and, owing to its central psychological importance, is one of the
most common themes in the creative arts.
Interpersonal
love refers to love between human beings. It is a more potent
sentiment than a simple liking for another. Unrequited love
refers to those feelings of love that are not reciprocated.
Interpersonal love is most closely associated with interpersonal
relationships. Such love might exist between family
members, friends, and couples. There are also a number of
psychological disorders related to love, such as erotomania.
Throughout
history, philosophy and
religion have
done the most speculation on the phenomenon of love. In the last
century, the science of psychology has
written a great deal on the subject. In recent years, the sciences
of evolutionary
psychology, evolutionary
biology, anthropology,
neuroscience, and
biology have
added to the understanding of the nature and function of
love.
Chemical
basis
Love (scientific
views)
Biological
models of sex tend to view love as a mammalian drive,
much like hunger or
thirst. Helen Fisher, a
leading expert in the topic of love, divides the experience of love
into three partly overlapping stages: lust, attraction, and
attachment. Lust exposes people to others; romantic attraction
encourages people to focus their energy on mating; and attachment
involves tolerating the spouse long enough to rear a child into
infancy.
Lust is the
initial passionate sexual desire that promotes mating, and
involves the increased release of chemicals such as testosterone and
estrogen. These
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 forms. Recent studies in neuroscience have
indicated that as people fall in love, the brain consistently
releases a certain set of chemicals, including pheromones,
dopamine,
norepinephrine,
and serotonin, which
act in a manner similar to amphetamines,
stimulating the brain's pleasure center
and leading to side effects such as increased heart rate, loss
of appetite and sleep, and an intense feeling of excitement.
Research has indicated that 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 on
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 short-term relationships have. In 2005, Italian
scientists at Pavia University
found that a 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.
Specifically, four neurotrophin
levels (NGF, BDNF, NT-3, and
NT-4) of 58
subjects who had recently fallen in love were compared with levels
in a control group who were either single or already engaged in a
long-term relationship. The results showed that NGF levels were
significantly higher in the subjects in love than as compared to
either of the control groups.
Psychological
basis
Psychology
depicts love as a cognitive and social phenomenon. Psychologist
Robert Sternberg
formulated a triangular theory of
love and argued that love has three different
components: intimacy, commitment, and passion. Intimacy is a form
in which two people share confidences and various details of their
personal lives, and is usually shown in friendships and romantic
love affairs. Commitment, on the other hand, is the expectation
that the relationship is permanent. The last and most common form
of love is sexual attraction and passion. Passionate love is shown
in infatuation as well as romantic love. All forms of love are
viewed as varying combinations of these three components. American
psychologist
Zick Rubin seeks to define love by psychometrics.
His work states that three factors constitute love: attachment,
caring, and intimacy.
Following
developments in electrical theories such as Coulomb's law,
which showed that positive and negative charges attract, analogs in
human life were developed, such as "opposites attract." Over the
last century, research on the nature of human mating has generally
found this not to be true when it comes to character and
personality—people tend to like people similar to themselves.
However, in a few unusual and specific domains, such as immune
systems, it seems that humans prefer others who are unlike
themselves (e.g., with an orthogonal immune system), since this
will lead to a baby that has the best of both worlds. In recent
years, various human bonding
theories have been developed, described in terms of attachments,
ties, bonds, and affinities.
Some Western
authorities disaggregate into two main components, the altruistic
and the narcissistic. This view is represented in the works of
Scott Peck, whose
work in the field of applied psychology explored the definitions of
love and evil. Peck maintains that love is a combination of the
"concern for the spiritual growth of another," and simple
narcissism. In combination, love is an activity, not
simply a feeling.
