Love hardly needs an introduction—or does it?

It is probably one of the most written-about concepts in the world, with countless songs, books, films, TV shows and plays focused on it, showcasing it, or mentioning it. However, do we really understand the word love?

Around 300,000 Google searches per month ask ‘What is love?’ or request a definition. This suggests that the answer to that question is a resounding ‘no’.

Certainly the word is used differently in different contexts. For example, we understand that there is a distinction between romantic or sexual love, say, and the love between a parent and child. However, the same word is used for both.

It is, perhaps, not surprising that we may sometimes be confused about the nature of love. In fact, it is not even clear whether love is an emotion, or more properly a basic biological need. People are still debating whether love is a biological or cultural phenomenon. This page unpacks some of these issues to try to answer the question ‘What is love?’.

What is the Nature of Love?

The American Psychological Association defines love as:

“a complex emotion involving strong feelings of affection and tenderness for the love object, pleasurable sensations in their presence, devotion to their well-being, and sensitivity to their reactions to oneself.”

That seems clear: psychologically at least, love is an emotion.

In practice, the situation is more complex. Many psychologists say that love is a secondary emotion, that is, a mixture of several primary emotions. However, that also doesn’t feel quite right—unless love can be a mixture of all primary emotions, sometimes all at once.

It is worth unpicking this idea a little by exploring the nature of emotions (and there is more about this in our page on Understanding Emotions).

Most emotions are involuntary. We feel fear automatically when something threatens us. We cannot choose whether or not we are frightened by something, just as we cannot choose when we are sad or happy.

Is love like this?

It has a visible neurological impact, like many emotions.

There are changes in our brains when we are with someone we love. The hormones dopamine and norepinephrine are released, causing us to feel ‘rewarded’ and making us want more. Those reactions are involuntary—and as such may be akin to emotions. However, they may also be more closely connected to sexual attraction or liking than what most of understand by love.

Love is certainly attached to feelings—but we generally see it more as a cause of those feelings rather than the feelings themselves.

Love causes us to feel happy when we see someone, sad when we leave them, and often devastated when a relationship breaks down. It is therefore not always associated with same emotions—which argues that it is in fact not an emotion, even a secondary one.

Some researchers agree with this. They argue that love should not be seen as an emotion, but more like a basic biological motivation.

“Love is a physiological motivation such as hunger, thirst, sleep, and sex drive.”

Enrique Burunat, biologist and psychologist
Source: Burunat E. Love is not an emotion. Psychology. 2016;07(14):1883.

Whatever the exact nature of love, it certainly exists across almost all cultures.

This suggests that it is at least partly biological in its nature, and also that it is a fundamental part of being human. However, there are also many cultural elements to love and how we express it.

Perhaps the answer is that there are many different forms of love. Indeed, since ancient times, cultures have distinguished between types of love. The precise distinctions have often varied between cultures, although some concepts will be recognised by most people in some form or another.

Types of Love in Different Cultures

What do we actually mean by love?

It is often said that the Ancient Greeks had seven different words for love, all with slightly different meanings.

This might explain some of our confusion about the nature of love—except that in reality, it is a myth. Ancient Greek literature does contain six terms for love, but probably only four of those words were in common use. The six terms are:

If these six concepts are all the words available in ancient Greek, where did the idea of seven or eight words come from? It may stem from a book published in the 1970s called Colours of Love by J.A. Lee. This described different ‘love styles’. It included those above, but also added two ‘new’ styles, giving classical-sounding names to them. They were:

• Ludus or playful love

  This is characterised by a lack of commitment, or love being treated as a sport or game. This is from the Latin word ludus meaning play or sport, and can be seen in literature in places such as the playful love poems of the Roman poet Ovid.

• Pragma or practical love

  This is based on shared goals, longer-term interests and a determination to ‘make things work’. We might see this as the foundation for many arranged marriages, certainly historically. However, it is doubtful whether most people nowadays would call this love exactly.

When we talk about love now, we mostly mean romantic or passionate love, closest to the Greek concept of eros.

Indeed, one of the key distinctions often drawn about love is between liking and loving.

For example, Zick Rubin suggested that romantic love consisted of three elements:

• Attachment, or wanting to be with someone, and seeking physical contact;

• Caring, or valuing the other person’s happiness as much as your own; and

• Intimacy, or sharing private thoughts and feelings with the other person.

He created two scales to measure these concepts in both liking and loving. He found that when people liked someone else, they viewed them as a pleasant person. However, when they felt love, what they described sounded more devoted, passionate, and intimate.

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Modern Types of Love

Modern psychologists have also identified several different types of love, including:

• Friendship, involving liking and sharing a certain amount of intimacy;

• Infatuation, the form of love that you feel early on in a relationship before you have really got to know someone;

• Passionate love, characterised by a need for physical closeness and often sexual in nature;

• Companionate or compassionate love, characterised by trust, affection and intimacy; and

• Unrequited love, where one person feels love towards the other, but those feelings are not returned. Some people might say that this is a form of infatuation, just not reciprocated.

In the 1980s, psychologist Robert Sternberg built on these ideas to develop the triangular theory of love. He divided love into three components, intimacy, passion and commitment. These seem very similar to Rubin’s concepts of intimacy, attachment and caring.

Sternberg suggested that different forms of love were created by combining these concepts in different ways (see Figure 1).

[Figure 1: Sternberg’s triangular theory of love, showing the three components of intimacy, passion, and commitment, and how their combinations form different types of love.]

This theory is helpful in explaining why you might feel sexual attraction towards someone, but then not develop closer emotional intimacy or commitment to them.

Sexual attraction is often very physical in its nature, but commitment and intimacy are more emotional. They are also based more on personal choice.

This suggests that sexual attraction is akin to an emotion or feeling—it is involuntary, and defined by clear changes in our brain chemistry.

However, beyond that is a different story.

You do not become intimate by chance: you make a choice to let someone into your life. Similarly, you do not commit by chance, it is a deliberate decision. This is why we celebrate marriage: because it represents that commitment to each other.

This idea moves the concept love closer towards being a physical bond between people based on mutual choices.

In other words, you can be infatuated with someone without knowing them at all well. You cannot control the feeling of passion. However, beyond that, you make a choice. You cannot share Sternberg’s consummate love without both making choices to engage with and commit to each other—as well as sharing passion for each other.

In other words, passion alone is not love in the way that we really understand it.

It is a form of love—but the love that most people strive for in romantic relationships is much, much more. The answer to the question about the nature of love, therefore, is that it can be many things, depending on your situation, and what you want. It is both voluntary and involuntary, a feeling or emotion and a choice, and also different in different circumstances. No wonder there is so much confusion about it.

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The End—or the Beginning?

Falling in love is quite often literally the end in books.

The hero and heroine commit to each other, get married and ‘live happily ever after’.

In real life, however, a commitment or wedding is only the beginning—and that is perhaps what is so exciting about love.

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