Love is any of a number of emotions and experiences related to a sense of strong affection or profound oneness Depending on context, love can have a wide variety of intended meanings. Romantic love is seen as a deep, ineffable feeling of intense and tender attraction shared in passionate or intimate attraction and intimate interpersonal and sexual relationships. Researchers (Hatfield & Rapson, 1993) have broken up love into two main types:
Passionate love which involves continuously thinking about the loved one and also involves warm sexual feelings and powerful emotional reactions.
Companionate love is having trusting and tender feelings for someone who is close to you
Psychology of Love
One of the best known theories of love is Robert Sternberg's Triangular Theory of Love. The three components of the Triangular Theory of Love are:
Passion
The feeling physically aroused and attracted to someone.
Passion is what makes you feel "in love" and is the feeling most associated with love. It also rises quickly and strongly influences and biases your judgment.
Intimacy
The feeling close and connected to someone (developed through sharing and very good communications over time).
Intimacy is what makes you want to share and offer emotional and material support to each other.
Commitment
Pledging to your self and each other to strengthen the feelings of love and to actively maintain the relationship. Commitment is what makes you want to be serious, have a serious relationship and promise to be there for the other person if things get tough.
Biology of Love
Biological models of sex tend to view love as a mammalian drive, much like hunger or thirst. Helen Fisher (2004), 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 dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin, which act similar to amphetamines, stimulating the brain's pleasure center and leading to side-effects such as an 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, attachment which is a third stage is needed to account for long-term relationships.
- Attachment is the bonding which promotes relationships that last 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 than short-term relationships have.
Religious Views of Love
The Bible speaks of love as a set of attitudes and actions that are far broader than the concept of love as an emotional attachment. Love is seen as a set of behaviors that humankind is encouraged to act out. One is encouraged not just to love one's partner, or even one's friends but also to love one's enemies. The Bible describes this type of active love in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8:
"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails."
Romantic love is also present in the Bible, particularly the Song of Solomon. The passage dodi li v'ani lo, i.e. "my beloved is mine and I am my beloved", from Song of Solomon 2:16, is an example of a biblical quote commonly engraved on wedding bands.
Common questions asked by Teenagers
References
| Oxford Illustrated American Dictionary (1998), Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary (2000). |
| Winston, Robert (2004). Human. Smithsonian Institution. |
| Helen Fisher (2004). Why We Love: the Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love. New York. Henry Holt and Company |
| R. J. Sternberg (1986). A triangular theory of love. Psychological Review, 93, 119–135 |
| Hatfield, E & Rapson R.L. (1993) Love, Sex and Intimacy: Their psychology, biology and history. New York; Harper Collins |
| Bible |
