The Definition of Love

Introduction

Love is a profound and multifaceted concept that has fascinated human beings for centuries, prompting a rich artistic and literary tradition. The depth and scope of the subject, along with its ubiquity in human relationships and societies, arouse deep curiosity about what love is, how it operates, and why it is important to us. We understand love through different dimensions: it can be an end in itself, the object of passionate longing, a feeling of benevolence enfolding the world, or a profound friendship and sense of peace.

At a psychological level, we can distinguish neurobiological mechanisms, which might result in the sexual and emotional dimensions of love, from a personal disposition that continuously cares for and nurtures another mental life. Some have developed a pantheist and universalist understanding of love, regarding it as an ultimate measure of things, accounting for ethical and cosmic value beyond interpersonal bonds. Love also constitutes an essential feature of commercial, social, and artistic relations.

The complexity of love reflects the duality of individual, social, and normative life. A full-blown account should take into account the emotions of love and how they represent not just individual motivations, but social emotions that relate to evaluations connected with social identity, personal virtue, and communal goods. Unlike other emotions, love is relatively long-lasting and can even transform an individual's identity. Nevertheless, emotions alone cannot explain love’s many compelling features, such as its value and its affective, normative, and phenomenological dimensions. How is it possible to understand the relationship between the erotic and the deeply personal, and how emotions such as affection and tenderness might be deeply felt at the same time as they are normatively regulated?

Historical Perspectives on Love

Love is too broad a topic to be defined universally, and so may never be a widely accepted definition. It has long been contested by philosophers, religious thinkers, and laypeople to be driven by emotions, reason, volition, values, instinct, and/or the irrational. It can be rewarding and painful to feel, to demonstrate, and to receive love. Culture is a central driving force of the definition of love and relationships, suggesting that love can be experienced, expressed, and felt by people differently based on the culture in which they are brought up. Culture in this context refers to the collective mental content of culture, individual values, the norms of the groups based on varying degrees of societal identity, and cultures.

Love is a subject that has been interesting and philosophically defined throughout history. At one point, ancient Greek philosophers began thinking about romance as a subject suitable for debate, but over time, more significant figures put more attention on romance and its connection to passion. In ancient Rome, love was viewed as establishing and governing social relations, offering us a different attitude at the time. The first recorded thinking of a beloved object of appreciation comes from Plato. In his Symposium, the ancient Greek philosopher told the myth of maternal love. The School of Hellenistic philosophy explored and conveyed deep emotions and ideas about love.

Psychological and Philosophical Theories of Love

To study love, one needs to consider different frameworks of thought capable of providing explanations in terms of cause and effect. Developmental psychologists have rich accounts of emotional bonds between children and their caregivers, and some have discussed these in terms of love. Attachment theory has also been embraced as a framework for briefly explaining adult love. In one influential model, it is argued that the robust, scientific dimension of adult love is its emotional basis, which is identified with "passion" and distinguished from "intimacy" and "commitment." Using these three features, different varieties of "true love" are described.

Philosophers are unlikely to be satisfied with this kind of explanation. Several classical philosophers took it for granted that, at its core, love was about what you do. In one philosophical work, love "is born of poverty and always found in need." In another, each member of a community is individualized when she is the object of another's love, "seeking his personal satisfaction just in the one for whom he has directly come to be." More recently, a philosopher expresses a frustration that "the word 'love' is genuinely ambiguous." The complaint is not that different notions of love are "confused" with each other, but that "the conditions of love are so variable." Of course, while it is a feature of our experience that love is variable, there are still many things that can be said about it more generally. If I see a mother cuddling her child, I may not know all the circumstances that lead to that loving moment, but I do know that the mother will move to protect her child from any obvious danger. This paper cannot systematically answer the question, "What is love?" It can, however, investigate what love might be from a particular point of view: the way it shapes the behavior of humans.

Cultural Variations in the Understanding of Love

The word "love" can refer to a variety of feelings and behaviors, leading to the question of whether there is a universal definition of love shared by all people. The answer is, not surprisingly, no. Definitions and expressions of love are diverse across contemporary cultures as well as throughout history. In the same way that people tend to express emotion differently from one another, there are many deeply ingrained beliefs in any given society regarding the emotional bonds between people.

Love comes into being within a cultural context. If people in a given culture have certain preconceptions and feelings, "love" as an interpretative schema is made "in terms of the interpretive schema in people's cultural, moral, and social world." This has been referred to as the "interpretation of love in terms of culture," and it deals with the way that people "use love as a conceptual schema in talking about and interpreting the social world." Each culture has its own values and meaning systems, so love is thought of as being more or less important. It stands to reason that different societies may not always hold the same belief in terms of the importance of romantic love as a necessary prerequisite for marriage. In East Africa, the ruling ideology states that arranged marriage is best because it is detrimental to the family for its head to marry out of romantic love, which is likely to be fleeting. Similarly, in relationships, American young adults in college may place more emphasis on romantic love and less on familial love, while the opposite case is true of their cousins in India. By contrast, the vast majority of contemporary Arabs who marry reflect on both romantic and familial love. Romantic love is thus one of the three key interrelated factors in marriage. Though romantic love is present in these societies, cultural differences are reflected in the degree of importance attached to it.

Contemporary Debates and Evolving Notions of Love

Our culture typically praises romantic love above most other emotions or relational ties. Conversation, contemporary thinking, and art often revolve, in some way, around the experience of love. At the same time, contemporary debates about love speak to shifting norms, the influence of technology and media representations on love, and changing gender and power dynamics. What is more, love is now commonly understood against discussions of LGBTQ rights and identity and defined against the possibility of universalism and the essentialist notion of "men and women" as universals. Indeed, all conversations on love take place within highly polarized urban and rural spaces in Indian and world democracies. Even in a post-feminism #MeToo age of increased sexual awareness and wokeness, the good life still pivots around access to equal opportunities for a fulfilled romantic life of comfort.

A range of beliefs around what love is offers these definitions to us like objects at an auction. Here are four current definitions of love: (1) love as sexual and romantic affection between a man and a woman, (2) love as sexual and gender-queer play and pleasure between any who consent, (3) love as respect, care, or friendship between friends, and (4) love as being loved by an inerrable or "higher" being. These definitions are not mutually exclusive. Yes, they are often combined with some kind of take on romantic and/or sexual love. These combinations are what call the norm of the romantic, sexual couple. Yet within these understandings of love, it is not difficult to find polychromatic beliefs about what needs to be present in order for love to be a good, valuable, and solid basis for a social nucleus in the first place.

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