essay for definition of love

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This essay focuses on personal love, or the love of particular persons as such. Part of the philosophical task in understanding personal love is to distinguish the various kinds of personal love. For example, the way in which I love my wife is seemingly very different from the way I love my mother, my child, and my friend. This task has typically proceeded hand-in-hand with philosophical analyses of these kinds of personal love, analyses that in part respond to various puzzles about love. Can love be justified? If so, how? What is the value of personal love? What impact does love have on the autonomy of both the lover and the beloved?

1. Preliminary Distinctions

2. love as union, 3. love as robust concern, 4.1 love as appraisal of value, 4.2 love as bestowal of value, 4.3 an intermediate position, 5.1 love as emotion proper, 5.2 love as emotion complex, 6. the value and justification of love, other internet resources, related entries.

In ordinary conversations, we often say things like the following:

• I love chocolate (or skiing).
• I love doing philosophy (or being a father).
• I love my dog (or cat).
• I love my wife (or mother or child or friend).

However, what is meant by ‘love’ differs from case to case. (1) may be understood as meaning merely that I like this thing or activity very much. In (2) the implication is typically that I find engaging in a certain activity or being a certain kind of person to be a part of my identity and so what makes my life worth living; I might just as well say that I value these. By contrast, (3) and (4) seem to indicate a mode of concern that cannot be neatly assimilated to anything else. Thus, we might understand the sort of love at issue in (4) to be, roughly, a matter of caring about another person as the person she is, for her own sake. (Accordingly, (3) may be understood as a kind of deficient mode of the sort of love we typically reserve for persons.) Philosophical accounts of love have focused primarily on the sort of personal love at issue in (4); such personal love will be the focus here (though see Frankfurt (1999) and Jaworska & Wonderly (2017) for attempts to provide a more general account that applies to non-persons as well).

Even within personal love, philosophers from the ancient Greeks on have traditionally distinguished three notions that can properly be called “love”: eros , agape , and philia . It will be useful to distinguish these three and say something about how contemporary discussions typically blur these distinctions (sometimes intentionally so) or use them for other purposes.

‘ Eros ’ originally meant love in the sense of a kind of passionate desire for an object, typically sexual passion (Liddell et al., 1940). Nygren (1953a,b) describes eros as the “‘love of desire,’ or acquisitive love” and therefore as egocentric (1953b, p. 89). Soble (1989b, 1990) similarly describes eros as “selfish” and as a response to the merits of the beloved—especially the beloved’s goodness or beauty. What is evident in Soble’s description of eros is a shift away from the sexual: to love something in the “erosic” sense (to use the term Soble coins) is to love it in a way that, by being responsive to its merits, is dependent on reasons. Such an understanding of eros is encouraged by Plato’s discussion in the Symposium , in which Socrates understands sexual desire to be a deficient response to physical beauty in particular, a response which ought to be developed into a response to the beauty of a person’s soul and, ultimately, into a response to the form, Beauty.

Soble’s intent in understanding eros to be a reason-dependent sort of love is to articulate a sharp contrast with agape , a sort of love that does not respond to the value of its object. ‘ Agape ’ has come, primarily through the Christian tradition, to mean the sort of love God has for us persons, as well as our love for God and, by extension, of our love for each other—a kind of brotherly love. In the paradigm case of God’s love for us, agape is “spontaneous and unmotivated,” revealing not that we merit that love but that God’s nature is love (Nygren 1953b, p. 85). Rather than responding to antecedent value in its object, agape instead is supposed to create value in its object and therefore to initiate our fellowship with God (pp. 87–88). Consequently, Badhwar (2003, p. 58) characterizes agape as “independent of the loved individual’s fundamental characteristics as the particular person she is”; and Soble (1990, p. 5) infers that agape , in contrast to eros , is therefore not reason dependent but is rationally “incomprehensible,” admitting at best of causal or historical explanations. [ 1 ]

Finally, ‘ philia ’ originally meant a kind of affectionate regard or friendly feeling towards not just one’s friends but also possibly towards family members, business partners, and one’s country at large (Liddell et al., 1940; Cooper, 1977). Like eros , philia is generally (but not universally) understood to be responsive to (good) qualities in one’s beloved. This similarity between eros and philia has led Thomas (1987) to wonder whether the only difference between romantic love and friendship is the sexual involvement of the former—and whether that is adequate to account for the real differences we experience. The distinction between eros and philia becomes harder to draw with Soble’s attempt to diminish the importance of the sexual in eros (1990).

Maintaining the distinctions among eros , agape , and philia becomes even more difficult when faced with contemporary theories of love (including romantic love) and friendship. For, as discussed below, some theories of romantic love understand it along the lines of the agape tradition as creating value in the beloved (cf. Section 4.2 ), and other accounts of romantic love treat sexual activity as merely the expression of what otherwise looks very much like friendship.

Given the focus here on personal love, Christian conceptions of God’s love for persons (and vice versa ) will be omitted, and the distinction between eros and philia will be blurred—as it typically is in contemporary accounts. Instead, the focus here will be on these contemporary understandings of love, including romantic love, understood as an attitude we take towards other persons. [ 2 ]

In providing an account of love, philosophical analyses must be careful to distinguish love from other positive attitudes we take towards persons, such as liking. Intuitively, love differs from such attitudes as liking in terms of its “depth,” and the problem is to elucidate the kind of “depth” we intuitively find love to have. Some analyses do this in part by providing thin conceptions of what liking amounts to. Thus, Singer (1991) and Brown (1987) understand liking to be a matter of desiring, an attitude that at best involves its object having only instrumental (and not intrinsic) value. Yet this seems inadequate: surely there are attitudes towards persons intermediate between having a desire with a person as its object and loving the person. I can care about a person for her own sake and not merely instrumentally, and yet such caring does not on its own amount to (non-deficiently) loving her, for it seems I can care about my dog in exactly the same way, a kind of caring which is insufficiently personal for love.

It is more common to distinguish loving from liking via the intuition that the “depth” of love is to be explained in terms of a notion of identification: to love someone is somehow to identify yourself with him, whereas no such notion of identification is involved in liking. As Nussbaum puts it, “The choice between one potential love and another can feel, and be, like a choice of a way of life, a decision to dedicate oneself to these values rather than these” (1990, p. 328); liking clearly does not have this sort of “depth” (see also Helm 2010; Bagley 2015). Whether love involves some kind of identification, and if so exactly how to understand such identification, is a central bone of contention among the various analyses of love. In particular, Whiting (2013) argues that the appeal to a notion of identification distorts our understanding of the sort of motivation love can provide, for taken literally it implies that love motivates through self -interest rather than through the beloved’s interests. Thus, Whiting argues, central to love is the possibility that love takes the lover “outside herself”, potentially forgetting herself in being moved directly by the interests of the beloved. (Of course, we need not take the notion of identification literally in this way: in identifying with one’s beloved, one might have a concern for one’s beloved that is analogous to one’s concern for oneself; see Helm 2010.)

Another common way to distinguish love from other personal attitudes is in terms of a distinctive kind of evaluation, which itself can account for love’s “depth.” Again, whether love essentially involves a distinctive kind of evaluation, and if so how to make sense of that evaluation, is hotly disputed. Closely related to questions of evaluation are questions of justification: can we justify loving or continuing to love a particular person, and if so, how? For those who think the justification of love is possible, it is common to understand such justification in terms of evaluation, and the answers here affect various accounts’ attempts to make sense of the kind of constancy or commitment love seems to involve, as well as the sense in which love is directed at particular individuals.

In what follows, theories of love are tentatively and hesitantly classified into four types: love as union, love as robust concern, love as valuing, and love as an emotion. It should be clear, however, that particular theories classified under one type sometimes also include, without contradiction, ideas central to other types. The types identified here overlap to some extent, and in some cases classifying particular theories may involve excessive pigeonholing. (Such cases are noted below.) Part of the classificatory problem is that many accounts of love are quasi-reductionistic, understanding love in terms of notions like affection, evaluation, attachment, etc., which themselves never get analyzed. Even when these accounts eschew explicitly reductionistic language, very often little attempt is made to show how one such “aspect” of love is conceptually connected to others. As a result, there is no clear and obvious way to classify particular theories, let alone identify what the relevant classes should be.

The union view claims that love consists in the formation of (or the desire to form) some significant kind of union, a “we.” A central task for union theorists, therefore, is to spell out just what such a “we” comes to—whether it is literally a new entity in the world somehow composed of the lover and the beloved, or whether it is merely metaphorical. Variants of this view perhaps go back to Aristotle (cf. Sherman 1993) and can also be found in Montaigne ([E]) and Hegel (1997); contemporary proponents include Solomon (1981, 1988), Scruton (1986), Nozick (1989), Fisher (1990), and Delaney (1996).

Scruton, writing in particular about romantic love, claims that love exists “just so soon as reciprocity becomes community: that is, just so soon as all distinction between my interests and your interests is overcome” (1986, p. 230). The idea is that the union is a union of concern, so that when I act out of that concern it is not for my sake alone or for your sake alone but for our sake. Fisher (1990) holds a similar, but somewhat more moderate view, claiming that love is a partial fusion of the lovers’ cares, concerns, emotional responses, and actions. What is striking about both Scruton and Fisher is the claim that love requires the actual union of the lovers’ concerns, for it thus becomes clear that they conceive of love not so much as an attitude we take towards another but as a relationship: the distinction between your interests and mine genuinely disappears only when we together come to have shared cares, concerns, etc., and my merely having a certain attitude towards you is not enough for love. This provides content to the notion of a “we” as the (metaphorical?) subject of these shared cares and concerns, and as that for whose sake we act.

Solomon (1988) offers a union view as well, though one that tries “to make new sense out of ‘love’ through a literal rather than metaphoric sense of the ‘fusion’ of two souls” (p. 24, cf. Solomon 1981; however, it is unclear exactly what he means by a “soul” here and so how love can be a “literal” fusion of two souls). What Solomon has in mind is the way in which, through love, the lovers redefine their identities as persons in terms of the relationship: “Love is the concentration and the intensive focus of mutual definition on a single individual, subjecting virtually every personal aspect of one’s self to this process” (1988, p. 197). The result is that lovers come to share the interests, roles, virtues, and so on that constitute what formerly was two individual identities but now has become a shared identity, and they do so in part by each allowing the other to play an important role in defining his own identity.

Nozick (1989) offers a union view that differs from those of Scruton, Fisher, and Solomon in that Nozick thinks that what is necessary for love is merely the desire to form a “we,” together with the desire that your beloved reciprocates. Nonetheless, he claims that this “we” is “a new entity in the world…created by a new web of relationships between [the lovers] which makes them no longer separate” (p. 70). In spelling out this web of relationships, Nozick appeals to the lovers “pooling” not only their well-beings, in the sense that the well-being of each is tied up with that of the other, but also their autonomy, in that “each transfers some previous rights to make certain decisions unilaterally into a joint pool” (p. 71). In addition, Nozick claims, the lovers each acquire a new identity as a part of the “we,” a new identity constituted by their (a) wanting to be perceived publicly as a couple, (b) their attending to their pooled well-being, and (c) their accepting a “certain kind of division of labor” (p. 72):

A person in a we might find himself coming across something interesting to read yet leaving it for the other person, not because he himself would not be interested in it but because the other would be more interested, and one of them reading it is sufficient for it to be registered by the wider identity now shared, the we . [ 3 ]

Opponents of the union view have seized on claims like this as excessive: union theorists, they claim, take too literally the ontological commitments of this notion of a “we.” This leads to two specific criticisms of the union view. The first is that union views do away with individual autonomy. Autonomy, it seems, involves a kind of independence on the part of the autonomous agent, such that she is in control over not only what she does but also who she is, as this is constituted by her interests, values, concerns, etc. However, union views, by doing away with a clear distinction between your interests and mine, thereby undermine this sort of independence and so undermine the autonomy of the lovers. If autonomy is a part of the individual’s good, then, on the union view, love is to this extent bad; so much the worse for the union view (Singer 1994; Soble 1997). Moreover, Singer (1994) argues that a necessary part of having your beloved be the object of your love is respect for your beloved as the particular person she is, and this requires respecting her autonomy.

Union theorists have responded to this objection in several ways. Nozick (1989) seems to think of a loss of autonomy in love as a desirable feature of the sort of union lovers can achieve. Fisher (1990), somewhat more reluctantly, claims that the loss of autonomy in love is an acceptable consequence of love. Yet without further argument these claims seem like mere bullet biting. Solomon (1988, pp. 64ff) describes this “tension” between union and autonomy as “the paradox of love.” However, this a view that Soble (1997) derides: merely to call it a paradox, as Solomon does, is not to face up to the problem.

The second criticism involves a substantive view concerning love. Part of what it is to love someone, these opponents say, is to have concern for him for his sake. However, union views make such concern unintelligible and eliminate the possibility of both selfishness and self-sacrifice, for by doing away with the distinction between my interests and your interests they have in effect turned your interests into mine and vice versa (Soble 1997; see also Blum 1980, 1993). Some advocates of union views see this as a point in their favor: we need to explain how it is I can have concern for people other than myself, and the union view apparently does this by understanding your interests to be part of my own. And Delaney, responding to an apparent tension between our desire to be loved unselfishly (for fear of otherwise being exploited) and our desire to be loved for reasons (which presumably are attractive to our lover and hence have a kind of selfish basis), says (1996, p. 346):

Given my view that the romantic ideal is primarily characterized by a desire to achieve a profound consolidation of needs and interests through the formation of a we , I do not think a little selfishness of the sort described should pose a worry to either party.

The objection, however, lies precisely in this attempt to explain my concern for my beloved egoistically. As Whiting (1991, p. 10) puts it, such an attempt “strikes me as unnecessary and potentially objectionable colonization”: in love, I ought to be concerned with my beloved for her sake, and not because I somehow get something out of it. (This can be true whether my concern with my beloved is merely instrumental to my good or whether it is partly constitutive of my good.)

Although Whiting’s and Soble’s criticisms here succeed against the more radical advocates of the union view, they in part fail to acknowledge the kernel of truth to be gleaned from the idea of union. Whiting’s way of formulating the second objection in terms of an unnecessary egoism in part points to a way out: we persons are in part social creatures, and love is one profound mode of that sociality. Indeed, part of the point of union accounts is to make sense of this social dimension: to make sense of a way in which we can sometimes identify ourselves with others not merely in becoming interdependent with them (as Singer 1994, p. 165, suggests, understanding ‘interdependence’ to be a kind of reciprocal benevolence and respect) but rather in making who we are as persons be constituted in part by those we love (cf., e.g., Rorty 1986/1993; Nussbaum 1990).

Along these lines, Friedman (1998), taking her inspiration in part from Delaney (1996), argues that we should understand the sort of union at issue in love to be a kind of federation of selves:

On the federation model, a third unified entity is constituted by the interaction of the lovers, one which involves the lovers acting in concert across a range of conditions and for a range of purposes. This concerted action, however, does not erase the existence of the two lovers as separable and separate agents with continuing possibilities for the exercise of their own respective agencies. [p. 165]

Given that on this view the lovers do not give up their individual identities, there is no principled reason why the union view cannot make sense of the lover’s concern for her beloved for his sake. [ 4 ] Moreover, Friedman argues, once we construe union as federation, we can see that autonomy is not a zero-sum game; rather, love can both directly enhance the autonomy of each and promote the growth of various skills, like realistic and critical self-evaluation, that foster autonomy.

Nonetheless, this federation model is not without its problems—problems that affect other versions of the union view as well. For if the federation (or the “we”, as on Nozick’s view) is understood as a third entity, we need a clearer account than has been given of its ontological status and how it comes to be. Relevant here is the literature on shared intention and plural subjects. Gilbert (1989, 1996, 2000) has argued that we should take quite seriously the existence of a plural subject as an entity over and above its constituent members. Others, such as Tuomela (1984, 1995), Searle (1990), and Bratman (1999) are more cautious, treating such talk of “us” having an intention as metaphorical.

As this criticism of the union view indicates, many find caring about your beloved for her sake to be a part of what it is to love her. The robust concern view of love takes this to be the central and defining feature of love (cf. Taylor 1976; Newton-Smith 1989; Soble 1990, 1997; LaFollette 1996; Frankfurt 1999; White 2001). As Taylor puts it:

To summarize: if x loves y then x wants to benefit and be with y etc., and he has these wants (or at least some of them) because he believes y has some determinate characteristics ψ in virtue of which he thinks it worth while to benefit and be with y . He regards satisfaction of these wants as an end and not as a means towards some other end. [p. 157]

In conceiving of my love for you as constituted by my concern for you for your sake, the robust concern view rejects the idea, central to the union view, that love is to be understood in terms of the (literal or metaphorical) creation of a “we”: I am the one who has this concern for you, though it is nonetheless disinterested and so not egoistic insofar as it is for your sake rather than for my own. [ 5 ]

At the heart of the robust concern view is the idea that love “is neither affective nor cognitive. It is volitional” (Frankfurt 1999, p. 129; see also Martin 2015). Frankfurt continues:

That a person cares about or that he loves something has less to do with how things make him feel, or with his opinions about them, than with the more or less stable motivational structures that shape his preferences and that guide and limit his conduct.

This account analyzes caring about someone for her sake as a matter of being motivated in certain ways, in part as a response to what happens to one’s beloved. Of course, to understand love in terms of desires is not to leave other emotional responses out in the cold, for these emotions should be understood as consequences of desires. Thus, just as I can be emotionally crushed when one of my strong desires is disappointed, so too I can be emotionally crushed when things similarly go badly for my beloved. In this way Frankfurt (1999) tacitly, and White (2001) more explicitly, acknowledge the way in which my caring for my beloved for her sake results in my identity being transformed through her influence insofar as I become vulnerable to things that happen to her.

Not all robust concern theorists seem to accept this line, however; in particular, Taylor (1976) and Soble (1990) seem to have a strongly individualistic conception of persons that prevents my identity being bound up with my beloved in this sort of way, a kind of view that may seem to undermine the intuitive “depth” that love seems to have. (For more on this point, see Rorty 1986/1993.) In the middle is Stump (2006), who follows Aquinas in understanding love to involve not only the desire for your beloved’s well-being but also a desire for a certain kind of relationship with your beloved—as a parent or spouse or sibling or priest or friend, for example—a relationship within which you share yourself with and connect yourself to your beloved. [ 6 ]

One source of worry about the robust concern view is that it involves too passive an understanding of one’s beloved (Ebels-Duggan 2008). The thought is that on the robust concern view the lover merely tries to discover what the beloved’s well-being consists in and then acts to promote that, potentially by thwarting the beloved’s own efforts when the lover thinks those efforts would harm her well-being. This, however, would be disrespectful and demeaning, not the sort of attitude that love is. What robust concern views seem to miss, Ebels-Duggan suggests, is the way love involves interacting agents, each with a capacity for autonomy the recognition and engagement with which is an essential part of love. In response, advocates of the robust concern view might point out that promoting someone’s well-being normally requires promoting her autonomy (though they may maintain that this need not always be true: that paternalism towards a beloved can sometimes be justified and appropriate as an expression of one’s love). Moreover, we might plausibly think, it is only through the exercise of one’s autonomy that one can define one’s own well-being as a person, so that a lover’s failure to respect the beloved’s autonomy would be a failure to promote her well-being and therefore not an expression of love, contrary to what Ebels-Duggan suggests. Consequently, it might seem, robust concern views can counter this objection by offering an enriched conception of what it is to be a person and so of the well-being of persons.

Another source of worry is that the robust concern view offers too thin a conception of love. By emphasizing robust concern, this view understands other features we think characteristic of love, such as one’s emotional responsiveness to one’s beloved, to be the effects of that concern rather than constituents of it. Thus Velleman (1999) argues that robust concern views, by understanding love merely as a matter of aiming at a particular end (viz., the welfare of one’s beloved), understand love to be merely conative. However, he claims, love can have nothing to do with desires, offering as a counterexample the possibility of loving a troublemaking relation whom you do not want to be with, whose well being you do not want to promote, etc. Similarly, Badhwar (2003) argues that such a “teleological” view of love makes it mysterious how “we can continue to love someone long after death has taken him beyond harm or benefit” (p. 46). Moreover Badhwar argues, if love is essentially a desire, then it implies that we lack something; yet love does not imply this and, indeed, can be felt most strongly at times when we feel our lives most complete and lacking in nothing. Consequently, Velleman and Badhwar conclude, love need not involve any desire or concern for the well-being of one’s beloved.

This conclusion, however, seems too hasty, for such examples can be accommodated within the robust concern view. Thus, the concern for your relative in Velleman’s example can be understood to be present but swamped by other, more powerful desires to avoid him. Indeed, keeping the idea that you want to some degree to benefit him, an idea Velleman rejects, seems to be essential to understanding the conceptual tension between loving someone and not wanting to help him, a tension Velleman does not fully acknowledge. Similarly, continued love for someone who has died can be understood on the robust concern view as parasitic on the former love you had for him when he was still alive: your desires to benefit him get transformed, through your subsequent understanding of the impossibility of doing so, into wishes. [ 7 ] Finally, the idea of concern for your beloved’s well-being need not imply the idea that you lack something, for such concern can be understood in terms of the disposition to be vigilant for occasions when you can come to his aid and consequently to have the relevant occurrent desires. All of this seems fully compatible with the robust concern view.

One might also question whether Velleman and Badhwar make proper use of their examples of loving your meddlesome relation or someone who has died. For although we can understand these as genuine cases of love, they are nonetheless deficient cases and ought therefore be understood as parasitic on the standard cases. Readily to accommodate such deficient cases of love into a philosophical analysis as being on a par with paradigm cases, and to do so without some special justification, is dubious.

Nonetheless, the robust concern view as it stands does not seem properly able to account for the intuitive “depth” of love and so does not seem properly to distinguish loving from liking. Although, as noted above, the robust concern view can begin to make some sense of the way in which the lover’s identity is altered by the beloved, it understands this only an effect of love, and not as a central part of what love consists in.

This vague thought is nicely developed by Wonderly (2017), who emphasizes that in addition to the sort of disinterested concern for another that is central to robust-concern accounts of love, an essential part of at least romantic love is the idea that in loving someone I must find them to be not merely important for their own sake but also important to me . Wonderly (2017) fleshes out what this “importance to me” involves in terms of the idea of attachment (developed in Wonderly 2016) that she argues can make sense of the intimacy and depth of love from within what remains fundamentally a robust-concern account. [ 8 ]

4. Love as Valuing

A third kind of view of love understands love to be a distinctive mode of valuing a person. As the distinction between eros and agape in Section 1 indicates, there are at least two ways to construe this in terms of whether the lover values the beloved because she is valuable, or whether the beloved comes to be valuable to the lover as a result of her loving him. The former view, which understands the lover as appraising the value of the beloved in loving him, is the topic of Section 4.1 , whereas the latter view, which understands her as bestowing value on him, will be discussed in Section 4.2 .

Velleman (1999, 2008) offers an appraisal view of love, understanding love to be fundamentally a matter of acknowledging and responding in a distinctive way to the value of the beloved. (For a very different appraisal view of love, see Kolodny 2003.) Understanding this more fully requires understanding both the kind of value of the beloved to which one responds and the distinctive kind of response to such value that love is. Nonetheless, it should be clear that what makes an account be an appraisal view of love is not the mere fact that love is understood to involve appraisal; many other accounts do so, and it is typical of robust concern accounts, for example (cf. the quote from Taylor above , Section 3 ). Rather, appraisal views are distinctive in understanding love to consist in that appraisal.

In articulating the kind of value love involves, Velleman, following Kant, distinguishes dignity from price. To have a price , as the economic metaphor suggests, is to have a value that can be compared to the value of other things with prices, such that it is intelligible to exchange without loss items of the same value. By contrast, to have dignity is to have a value such that comparisons of relative value become meaningless. Material goods are normally understood to have prices, but we persons have dignity: no substitution of one person for another can preserve exactly the same value, for something of incomparable worth would be lost (and gained) in such a substitution.

On this Kantian view, our dignity as persons consists in our rational nature: our capacity both to be actuated by reasons that we autonomously provide ourselves in setting our own ends and to respond appropriately to the intrinsic values we discover in the world. Consequently, one important way in which we exercise our rational natures is to respond with respect to the dignity of other persons (a dignity that consists in part in their capacity for respect): respect just is the required minimal response to the dignity of persons. What makes a response to a person be that of respect, Velleman claims, still following Kant, is that it “arrests our self-love” and thereby prevents us from treating him as a means to our ends (p. 360).

Given this, Velleman claims that love is similarly a response to the dignity of persons, and as such it is the dignity of the object of our love that justifies that love. However, love and respect are different kinds of responses to the same value. For love arrests not our self-love but rather

our tendencies toward emotional self-protection from another person, tendencies to draw ourselves in and close ourselves off from being affected by him. Love disarms our emotional defenses; it makes us vulnerable to the other. [1999, p. 361]

This means that the concern, attraction, sympathy, etc. that we normally associate with love are not constituents of love but are rather its normal effects, and love can remain without them (as in the case of the love for a meddlesome relative one cannot stand being around). Moreover, this provides Velleman with a clear account of the intuitive “depth” of love: it is essentially a response to persons as such, and to say that you love your dog is therefore to be confused.

Of course, we do not respond with love to the dignity of every person we meet, nor are we somehow required to: love, as the disarming of our emotional defenses in a way that makes us especially vulnerable to another, is the optional maximal response to others’ dignity. What, then, explains the selectivity of love—why I love some people and not others? The answer lies in the contingent fit between the way some people behaviorally express their dignity as persons and the way I happen to respond to those expressions by becoming emotionally vulnerable to them. The right sort of fit makes someone “lovable” by me (1999, p. 372), and my responding with love in these cases is a matter of my “really seeing” this person in a way that I fail to do with others who do not fit with me in this way. By ‘lovable’ here Velleman seems to mean able to be loved, not worthy of being loved, for nothing Velleman says here speaks to a question about the justification of my loving this person rather than that. Rather, what he offers is an explanation of the selectivity of my love, an explanation that as a matter of fact makes my response be that of love rather than mere respect.

This understanding of the selectivity of love as something that can be explained but not justified is potentially troubling. For we ordinarily think we can justify not only my loving you rather than someone else but also and more importantly the constancy of my love: my continuing to love you even as you change in certain fundamental ways (but not others). As Delaney (1996, p. 347) puts the worry about constancy:

while you seem to want it to be true that, were you to become a schmuck, your lover would continue to love you,…you also want it to be the case that your lover would never love a schmuck.

The issue here is not merely that we can offer explanations of the selectivity of my love, of why I do not love schmucks; rather, at issue is the discernment of love, of loving and continuing to love for good reasons as well as of ceasing to love for good reasons. To have these good reasons seems to involve attributing different values to you now rather than formerly or rather than to someone else, yet this is precisely what Velleman denies is the case in making the distinction between love and respect the way he does.

It is also questionable whether Velleman can even explain the selectivity of love in terms of the “fit” between your expressions and my sensitivities. For the relevant sensitivities on my part are emotional sensitivities: the lowering of my emotional defenses and so becoming emotionally vulnerable to you. Thus, I become vulnerable to the harms (or goods) that befall you and so sympathetically feel your pain (or joy). Such emotions are themselves assessable for warrant, and now we can ask why my disappointment that you lost the race is warranted, but my being disappointed that a mere stranger lost would not be warranted. The intuitive answer is that I love you but not him. However, this answer is unavailable to Velleman, because he thinks that what makes my response to your dignity that of love rather than respect is precisely that I feel such emotions, and to appeal to my love in explaining the emotions therefore seems viciously circular.

Although these problems are specific to Velleman’s account, the difficulty can be generalized to any appraisal account of love (such as that offered in Kolodny 2003). For if love is an appraisal, it needs to be distinguished from other forms of appraisal, including our evaluative judgments. On the one hand, to try to distinguish love as an appraisal from other appraisals in terms of love’s having certain effects on our emotional and motivational life (as on Velleman’s account) is unsatisfying because it ignores part of what needs to be explained: why the appraisal of love has these effects and yet judgments with the same evaluative content do not. Indeed, this question is crucial if we are to understand the intuitive “depth” of love, for without an answer to this question we do not understand why love should have the kind of centrality in our lives it manifestly does. [ 9 ] On the other hand, to bundle this emotional component into the appraisal itself would be to turn the view into either the robust concern view ( Section 3 ) or a variant of the emotion view ( Section 5.1 ).

In contrast to Velleman, Singer (1991, 1994, 2009) understands love to be fundamentally a matter of bestowing value on the beloved. To bestow value on another is to project a kind of intrinsic value onto him. Indeed, this fact about love is supposed to distinguish love from liking: “Love is an attitude with no clear objective,” whereas liking is inherently teleological (1991, p. 272). As such, there are no standards of correctness for bestowing such value, and this is how love differs from other personal attitudes like gratitude, generosity, and condescension: “love…confers importance no matter what the object is worth” (p. 273). Consequently, Singer thinks, love is not an attitude that can be justified in any way.

What is it, exactly, to bestow this kind of value on someone? It is, Singer says, a kind of attachment and commitment to the beloved, in which one comes to treat him as an end in himself and so to respond to his ends, interests, concerns, etc. as having value for their own sake. This means in part that the bestowal of value reveals itself “by caring about the needs and interests of the beloved, by wishing to benefit or protect her, by delighting in her achievements,” etc. (p. 270). This sounds very much like the robust concern view, yet the bestowal view differs in understanding such robust concern to be the effect of the bestowal of value that is love rather than itself what constitutes love: in bestowing value on my beloved, I make him be valuable in such a way that I ought to respond with robust concern.

For it to be intelligible that I have bestowed value on someone, I must therefore respond appropriately to him as valuable, and this requires having some sense of what his well-being is and of what affects that well-being positively or negatively. Yet having this sense requires in turn knowing what his strengths and deficiencies are, and this is a matter of appraising him in various ways. Bestowal thus presupposes a kind of appraisal, as a way of “really seeing” the beloved and attending to him. Nonetheless, Singer claims, it is the bestowal that is primary for understanding what love consists in: the appraisal is required only so that the commitment to one’s beloved and his value as thus bestowed has practical import and is not “a blind submission to some unknown being” (1991, p. 272; see also Singer 1994, pp. 139ff).

Singer is walking a tightrope in trying to make room for appraisal in his account of love. Insofar as the account is fundamentally a bestowal account, Singer claims that love cannot be justified, that we bestow the relevant kind of value “gratuitously.” This suggests that love is blind, that it does not matter what our beloved is like, which seems patently false. Singer tries to avoid this conclusion by appealing to the role of appraisal: it is only because we appraise another as having certain virtues and vices that we come to bestow value on him. Yet the “because” here, since it cannot justify the bestowal, is at best a kind of contingent causal explanation. [ 10 ] In this respect, Singer’s account of the selectivity of love is much the same as Velleman’s, and it is liable to the same criticism: it makes unintelligible the way in which our love can be discerning for better or worse reasons. Indeed, this failure to make sense of the idea that love can be justified is a problem for any bestowal view. For either (a) a bestowal itself cannot be justified (as on Singer’s account), in which case the justification of love is impossible, or (b) a bestowal can be justified, in which case it is hard to make sense of value as being bestowed rather than there antecedently in the object as the grounds of that “bestowal.”

More generally, a proponent of the bestowal view needs to be much clearer than Singer is in articulating precisely what a bestowal is. What is the value that I create in a bestowal, and how can my bestowal create it? On a crude Humean view, the answer might be that the value is something projected onto the world through my pro-attitudes, like desire. Yet such a view would be inadequate, since the projected value, being relative to a particular individual, would do no theoretical work, and the account would essentially be a variant of the robust concern view. Moreover, in providing a bestowal account of love, care is needed to distinguish love from other personal attitudes such as admiration and respect: do these other attitudes involve bestowal? If so, how does the bestowal in these cases differ from the bestowal of love? If not, why not, and what is so special about love that requires a fundamentally different evaluative attitude than admiration and respect?

Nonetheless, there is a kernel of truth in the bestowal view: there is surely something right about the idea that love is creative and not merely a response to antecedent value, and accounts of love that understand the kind of evaluation implicit in love merely in terms of appraisal seem to be missing something. Precisely what may be missed will be discussed below in Section 6 .

Perhaps there is room for an understanding of love and its relation to value that is intermediate between appraisal and bestowal accounts. After all, if we think of appraisal as something like perception, a matter of responding to what is out there in the world, and of bestowal as something like action, a matter of doing something and creating something, we should recognize that the responsiveness central to appraisal may itself depend on our active, creative choices. Thus, just as we must recognize that ordinary perception depends on our actively directing our attention and deploying concepts, interpretations, and even arguments in order to perceive things accurately, so too we might think our vision of our beloved’s valuable properties that is love also depends on our actively attending to and interpreting him. Something like this is Jollimore’s view (2011). According to Jollimore, in loving someone we actively attend to his valuable properties in a way that we take to provide us with reasons to treat him preferentially. Although we may acknowledge that others might have such properties even to a greater degree than our beloved does, we do not attend to and appreciate such properties in others in the same way we do those in our beloveds; indeed, we find our appreciation of our beloved’s valuable properties to “silence” our similar appreciation of those in others. (In this way, Jollimore thinks, we can solve the problem of fungibility, discussed below in Section 6 .) Likewise, in perceiving our beloved’s actions and character, we do so through the lens of such an appreciation, which will tend as to “silence” interpretations inconsistent with that appreciation. In this way, love involves finding one’s beloved to be valuable in a way that involves elements of both appraisal (insofar as one must thereby be responsive to valuable properties one’s beloved really has) and bestowal (insofar as through one’s attention and committed appreciation of these properties they come to have special significance for one).

One might object that this conception of love as silencing the special value of others or to negative interpretations of our beloveds is irrational in a way that love is not. For, it might seem, such “silencing” is merely a matter of our blinding ourselves to how things really are. Yet Jollimore claims that this sense in which love is blind is not objectionable, for (a) we can still intellectually recognize the things that love’s vision silences, and (b) there really is no impartial perspective we can take on the values things have, and love is one appropriate sort of partial perspective from which the value of persons can be manifest. Nonetheless, one might wonder about whether that perspective of love itself can be distorted and what the norms are in terms of which such distortions are intelligible. Furthermore, it may seem that Jollimore’s attempt to reconcile appraisal and bestowal fails to appreciate the underlying metaphysical difficulty: appraisal is a response to value that is antecedently there, whereas bestowal is the creation of value that was not antecedently there. Consequently, it might seem, appraisal and bestowal are mutually exclusive and cannot be reconciled in the way Jollimore hopes.

Whereas Jollimore tries to combine separate elements of appraisal and of bestowal in a single account, Helm (2010) and Bagley (2015) offer accounts that reject the metaphysical presupposition that values must be either prior to love (as with appraisal) or posterior to love (as with bestowal), instead understanding the love and the values to emerge simultaneously. Thus, Helm presents a detailed account of valuing in terms of the emotions, arguing that while we can understand individual emotions as appraisals , responding to values already their in their objects, these values are bestowed on those objects via broad, holistic patterns of emotions. How this amounts to an account of love will be discussed in Section 5.2 , below. Bagley (2015) instead appeals to a metaphor of improvisation, arguing that just as jazz musicians jointly make determinate the content of their musical ideas through on-going processes of their expression, so too lovers jointly engage in “deep improvisation”, thereby working out of their values and identities through the on-going process of living their lives together. These values are thus something the lovers jointly construct through the process of recognizing and responding to those very values. To love someone is thus to engage with them as partners in such “deep improvisation”. (This account is similar to Helm (2008, 2010)’s account of plural agency, which he uses to provide an account of friendship and other loving relationships; see the discussion of shared activity in the entry on friendship .)

5. Emotion Views

Given these problems with the accounts of love as valuing, perhaps we should turn to the emotions. For emotions just are responses to objects that combine evaluation, motivation, and a kind of phenomenology, all central features of the attitude of love.

Many accounts of love claim that it is an emotion; these include: Wollheim 1984, Rorty 1986/1993, Brown 1987, Hamlyn 1989, Baier 1991, and Badhwar 2003. [ 11 ] Thus, Hamlyn (1989, p. 219) says:

It would not be a plausible move to defend any theory of the emotions to which love and hate seemed exceptions by saying that love and hate are after all not emotions. I have heard this said, but it does seem to me a desperate move to make. If love and hate are not emotions what is?

The difficulty with this claim, as Rorty (1980) argues, is that the word, ‘emotion,’ does not seem to pick out a homogeneous collection of mental states, and so various theories claiming that love is an emotion mean very different things. Consequently, what are here labeled “emotion views” are divided into those that understand love to be a particular kind of evaluative-cum-motivational response to an object, whether that response is merely occurrent or dispositional (‘emotions proper,’ see Section 5.1 , below), and those that understand love to involve a collection of related and interconnected emotions proper (‘emotion complexes,’ see Section 5.2 , below).

An emotion proper is a kind of “evaluative-cum-motivational response to an object”; what does this mean? Emotions are generally understood to have several objects. The target of an emotion is that at which the emotion is directed: if I am afraid or angry at you, then you are the target. In responding to you with fear or anger, I am implicitly evaluating you in a particular way, and this evaluation—called the formal object —is the kind of evaluation of the target that is distinctive of a particular emotion type. Thus, in fearing you, I implicitly evaluate you as somehow dangerous, whereas in being angry at you I implicitly evaluate you as somehow offensive. Yet emotions are not merely evaluations of their targets; they in part motivate us to behave in certain ways, both rationally (by motivating action to avoid the danger) and arationally (via certain characteristic expressions, such as slamming a door out of anger). Moreover, emotions are generally understood to involve a phenomenological component, though just how to understand the characteristic “feel” of an emotion and its relation to the evaluation and motivation is hotly disputed. Finally, emotions are typically understood to be passions: responses that we feel imposed on us as if from the outside, rather than anything we actively do. (For more on the philosophy of emotions, see entry on emotion .)

What then are we saying when we say that love is an emotion proper? According to Brown (1987, p. 14), emotions as occurrent mental states are “abnormal bodily changes caused by the agent’s evaluation or appraisal of some object or situation that the agent believes to be of concern to him or her.” He spells this out by saying that in love, we “cherish” the person for having “a particular complex of instantiated qualities” that is “open-ended” so that we can continue to love the person even as she changes over time (pp. 106–7). These qualities, which include historical and relational qualities, are evaluated in love as worthwhile. [ 12 ] All of this seems aimed at spelling out what love’s formal object is, a task that is fundamental to understanding love as an emotion proper. Thus, Brown seems to say that love’s formal object is just being worthwhile (or, given his examples, perhaps: worthwhile as a person), and he resists being any more specific than this in order to preserve the open-endedness of love. Hamlyn (1989) offers a similar account, saying (p. 228):

With love the difficulty is to find anything of this kind [i.e., a formal object] which is uniquely appropriate to love. My thesis is that there is nothing of this kind that must be so, and that this differentiates it and hate from the other emotions.

Hamlyn goes on to suggest that love and hate might be primordial emotions, a kind of positive or negative “feeling towards,” presupposed by all other emotions. [ 13 ]

The trouble with these accounts of love as an emotion proper is that they provide too thin a conception of love. In Hamlyn’s case, love is conceived as a fairly generic pro-attitude, rather than as the specific kind of distinctively personal attitude discussed here. In Brown’s case, spelling out the formal object of love as simply being worthwhile (as a person) fails to distinguish love from other evaluative responses like admiration and respect. Part of the problem seems to be the rather simple account of what an emotion is that Brown and Hamlyn use as their starting point: if love is an emotion, then the understanding of what an emotion is must be enriched considerably to accommodate love. Yet it is not at all clear whether the idea of an “emotion proper” can be adequately enriched so as to do so. As Pismenny & Prinz (2017) point out, love seems to be too varied both in its ground and in the sort of experience it involves to be capturable by a single emotion.

The emotion complex view, which understands love to be a complex emotional attitude towards another person, may initially seem to hold out great promise to overcome the problems of alternative types of views. By articulating the emotional interconnections between persons, it could offer a satisfying account of the “depth” of love without the excesses of the union view and without the overly narrow teleological focus of the robust concern view; and because these emotional interconnections are themselves evaluations, it could offer an understanding of love as simultaneously evaluative, without needing to specify a single formal object of love. However, the devil is in the details.

Rorty (1986/1993) does not try to present a complete account of love; rather, she focuses on the idea that “relational psychological attitudes” which, like love, essentially involve emotional and desiderative responses, exhibit historicity : “they arise from, and are shaped by, dynamic interactions between a subject and an object” (p. 73). In part this means that what makes an attitude be one of love is not the presence of a state that we can point to at a particular time within the lover; rather, love is to be “identified by a characteristic narrative history” (p. 75). Moreover, Rorty argues, the historicity of love involves the lover’s being permanently transformed by loving who he does.

Baier (1991), seeming to pick up on this understanding of love as exhibiting historicity, says (p. 444):

Love is not just an emotion people feel toward other people, but also a complex tying together of the emotions that two or a few more people have; it is a special form of emotional interdependence.

To a certain extent, such emotional interdependence involves feeling sympathetic emotions, so that, for example, I feel disappointed and frustrated on behalf of my beloved when she fails, and joyful when she succeeds. However, Baier insists, love is “more than just the duplication of the emotion of each in a sympathetic echo in the other” (p. 442); the emotional interdependence of the lovers involves also appropriate follow-up responses to the emotional predicaments of your beloved. Two examples Baier gives (pp. 443–44) are a feeling of “mischievous delight” at your beloved’s temporary bafflement, and amusement at her embarrassment. The idea is that in a loving relationship your beloved gives you permission to feel such emotions when no one else is permitted to do so, and a condition of her granting you that permission is that you feel these emotions “tenderly.” Moreover, you ought to respond emotionally to your beloved’s emotional responses to you: by feeling hurt when she is indifferent to you, for example. All of these foster the sort of emotional interdependence Baier is after—a kind of intimacy you have with your beloved.

Badhwar (2003, p. 46) similarly understands love to be a matter of “one’s overall emotional orientation towards a person—the complex of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings”; as such, love is a matter of having a certain “character structure.” Central to this complex emotional orientation, Badhwar thinks, is what she calls the “look of love”: “an ongoing [emotional] affirmation of the loved object as worthy of existence…for her own sake” (p. 44), an affirmation that involves taking pleasure in your beloved’s well-being. Moreover, Badhwar claims, the look of love also provides to the beloved reliable testimony concerning the quality of the beloved’s character and actions (p. 57).

There is surely something very right about the idea that love, as an attitude central to deeply personal relationships, should not be understood as a state that can simply come and go. Rather, as the emotion complex view insists, the complexity of love is to be found in the historical patterns of one’s emotional responsiveness to one’s beloved—a pattern that also projects into the future. Indeed, as suggested above, the kind of emotional interdependence that results from this complex pattern can seem to account for the intuitive “depth” of love as fully interwoven into one’s emotional sense of oneself. And it seems to make some headway in understanding the complex phenomenology of love: love can at times be a matter of intense pleasure in the presence of one’s beloved, yet it can at other times involve frustration, exasperation, anger, and hurt as a manifestation of the complexities and depth of the relationships it fosters.

This understanding of love as constituted by a history of emotional interdependence enables emotion complex views to say something interesting about the impact love has on the lover’s identity. This is partly Rorty’s point (1986/1993) in her discussion of the historicity of love ( above ). Thus, she argues, one important feature of such historicity is that love is “ dynamically permeable ” in that the lover is continually “changed by loving” such that these changes “tend to ramify through a person’s character” (p. 77). Through such dynamic permeability, love transforms the identity of the lover in a way that can sometimes foster the continuity of the love, as each lover continually changes in response to the changes in the other. [ 14 ] Indeed, Rorty concludes, love should be understood in terms of “a characteristic narrative history” (p. 75) that results from such dynamic permeability. It should be clear, however, that the mere fact of dynamic permeability need not result in the love’s continuing: nothing about the dynamics of a relationship requires that the characteristic narrative history project into the future, and such permeability can therefore lead to the dissolution of the love. Love is therefore risky—indeed, all the more risky because of the way the identity of the lover is defined in part through the love. The loss of a love can therefore make one feel no longer oneself in ways poignantly described by Nussbaum (1990).

By focusing on such emotionally complex histories, emotion complex views differ from most alternative accounts of love. For alternative accounts tend to view love as a kind of attitude we take toward our beloveds, something we can analyze simply in terms of our mental state at the moment. [ 15 ] By ignoring this historical dimension of love in providing an account of what love is, alternative accounts have a hard time providing either satisfying accounts of the sense in which our identities as person are at stake in loving another or satisfactory solutions to problems concerning how love is to be justified (cf. Section 6 , especially the discussion of fungibility ).

Nonetheless, some questions remain. If love is to be understood as an emotion complex, we need a much more explicit account of the pattern at issue here: what ties all of these emotional responses together into a single thing, namely love? Baier and Badhwar seem content to provide interesting and insightful examples of this pattern, but that does not seem to be enough. For example, what connects my amusement at my beloved’s embarrassment to other emotions like my joy on his behalf when he succeeds? Why shouldn’t my amusement at his embarrassment be understood instead as a somewhat cruel case of schadenfreude and so as antithetical to, and disconnected from, love? Moreover, as Naar (2013) notes, we need a principled account of when such historical patterns are disrupted in such a way as to end the love and when they are not. Do I stop loving when, in the midst of clinical depression, I lose my normal pattern of emotional concern?

Presumably the answer requires returning to the historicity of love: it all depends on the historical details of the relationship my beloved and I have forged. Some loves develop so that the intimacy within the relationship is such as to allow for tender, teasing responses to each other, whereas other loves may not. The historical details, together with the lovers’ understanding of their relationship, presumably determine which emotional responses belong to the pattern constitutive of love and which do not. However, this answer so far is inadequate: not just any historical relationship involving emotional interdependence is a loving relationship, and we need a principled way of distinguishing loving relationships from other relational evaluative attitudes: precisely what is the characteristic narrative history that is characteristic of love?

Helm (2009, 2010) tries to answer some of these questions in presenting an account of love as intimate identification. To love another, Helm claims, is to care about him as the particular person he is and so, other things being equal, to value the things he values. Insofar as a person’s (structured) set of values—his sense of the kind of life worth his living—constitutes his identity as a person, such sharing of values amounts to sharing his identity, which sounds very much like union accounts of love. However, Helm is careful to understand such sharing of values as for the sake of the beloved (as robust concern accounts insist), and he spells this all out in terms of patterns of emotions. Thus, Helm claims, all emotions have not only a target and a formal object (as indicated above), but also a focus : a background object the subject cares about in terms of which the implicit evaluation of the target is made intelligible. (For example, if I am afraid of the approaching hailstorm, I thereby evaluate it as dangerous, and what explains this evaluation is the way that hailstorm bears on my vegetable garden, which I care about; my garden, therefore, is the focus of my fear.) Moreover, emotions normally come in patterns with a common focus: fearing the hailstorm is normally connected to other emotions as being relieved when it passes by harmlessly (or disappointed or sad when it does not), being angry at the rabbits for killing the spinach, delighted at the productivity of the tomato plants, etc. Helm argues that a projectible pattern of such emotions with a common focus constitute caring about that focus. Consequently, we might say along the lines of Section 4.3 , while particular emotions appraise events in the world as having certain evaluative properties, their having these properties is partly bestowed on them by the overall patterns of emotions.

Helm identifies some emotions as person-focused emotions : emotions like pride and shame that essentially take persons as their focuses, for these emotions implicitly evaluate in terms of the target’s bearing on the quality of life of the person that is their focus. To exhibit a pattern of such emotions focused on oneself and subfocused on being a mother, for example, is to care about the place being a mother has in the kind of life you find worth living—in your identity as a person; to care in this way is to value being a mother as a part of your concern for your own identity. Likewise, to exhibit a projectible pattern of such emotions focused on someone else and subfocused on his being a father is to value this as a part of your concern for his identity—to value it for his sake. Such sharing of another’s values for his sake, which, Helm argues, essentially involves trust, respect, and affection, amounts to intimate identification with him, and such intimate identification just is love. Thus, Helm tries to provide an account of love that is grounded in an explicit account of caring (and caring about something for the sake of someone else) that makes room for the intuitive “depth” of love through intimate identification.

Jaworska & Wonderly (2017) argue that Helm’s construal of intimacy as intimate identification is too demanding. Rather, they argue, the sort of intimacy that distinguishes love from mere caring is one that involves a kind of emotional vulnerability in which things going well or poorly for one’s beloved are directly connected not merely to one’s well-being, but to one’s ability to flourish. This connection, they argue, runs through the lover’s self-understanding and the place the beloved has in the lover’s sense of a meaningful life.

Why do we love? It has been suggested above that any account of love needs to be able to answer some such justificatory question. Although the issue of the justification of love is important on its own, it is also important for the implications it has for understanding more clearly the precise object of love: how can we make sense of the intuitions not only that we love the individuals themselves rather than their properties, but also that my beloved is not fungible—that no one could simply take her place without loss. Different theories approach these questions in different ways, but, as will become clear below, the question of justification is primary.

One way to understand the question of why we love is as asking for what the value of love is: what do we get out of it? One kind of answer, which has its roots in Aristotle, is that having loving relationships promotes self-knowledge insofar as your beloved acts as a kind of mirror, reflecting your character back to you (Badhwar, 2003, p. 58). Of course, this answer presupposes that we cannot accurately know ourselves in other ways: that left alone, our sense of ourselves will be too imperfect, too biased, to help us grow and mature as persons. The metaphor of a mirror also suggests that our beloveds will be in the relevant respects similar to us, so that merely by observing them, we can come to know ourselves better in a way that is, if not free from bias, at least more objective than otherwise.

Brink (1999, pp. 264–65) argues that there are serious limits to the value of such mirroring of one’s self in a beloved. For if the aim is not just to know yourself better but to improve yourself, you ought also to interact with others who are not just like yourself: interacting with such diverse others can help you recognize alternative possibilities for how to live and so better assess the relative merits of these possibilities. Whiting (2013) also emphasizes the importance of our beloveds’ having an independent voice capable of reflecting not who one now is but an ideal for who one is to be. Nonetheless, we need not take the metaphor of the mirror quite so literally; rather, our beloveds can reflect our selves not through their inherent similarity to us but rather through the interpretations they offer of us, both explicitly and implicitly in their responses to us. This is what Badhwar calls the “epistemic significance” of love. [ 16 ]

In addition to this epistemic significance of love, LaFollette (1996, Chapter 5) offers several other reasons why it is good to love, reasons derived in part from the psychological literature on love: love increases our sense of well-being, it elevates our sense of self-worth, and it serves to develop our character. It also, we might add, tends to lower stress and blood pressure and to increase health and longevity. Friedman (1993) argues that the kind of partiality towards our beloveds that love involves is itself morally valuable because it supports relationships—loving relationships—that contribute “to human well-being, integrity, and fulfillment in life” (p. 61). And Solomon (1988, p. 155) claims:

Ultimately, there is only one reason for love. That one grand reason…is “because we bring out the best in each other.” What counts as “the best,” of course, is subject to much individual variation.

This is because, Solomon suggests, in loving someone, I want myself to be better so as to be worthy of his love for me.

Each of these answers to the question of why we love understands it to be asking about love quite generally, abstracted away from details of particular relationships. It is also possible to understand the question as asking about particular loves. Here, there are several questions that are relevant:

• What, if anything, justifies my loving rather than not loving this particular person?
• What, if anything, justifies my coming to love this particular person rather than someone else?
• What, if anything, justifies my continuing to love this particular person given the changes—both in him and me and in the overall circumstances—that have occurred since I began loving him?

These are importantly different questions. Velleman (1999), for example, thinks we can answer (1) by appealing to the fact that my beloved is a person and so has a rational nature, yet he thinks (2) and (3) have no answers: the best we can do is offer causal explanations for our loving particular people, a position echoed by Han (2021). Setiya (2014) similarly thinks (1) has an answer, but points not to the rational nature of persons but rather to the other’s humanity , where such humanity differs from personhood in that not all humans need have the requisite rational nature for personhood, and not all persons need be humans. And, as will become clear below , the distinction between (2) and (3) will become important in resolving puzzles concerning whether our beloveds are fungible, though it should be clear that (3) potentially raises questions concerning personal identity (which will not be addressed here).

It is important not to misconstrue these justificatory questions. Thomas (1991) , for example, rejects the idea that love can be justified: “there are no rational considerations whereby anyone can lay claim to another’s love or insist that an individual’s love for another is irrational” (p. 474). This is because, Thomas claims (p. 471):

no matter how wonderful and lovely an individual might be, on any and all accounts, it is simply false that a romantically unencumbered person must love that individual on pain of being irrational. Or, there is no irrationality involved in ceasing to love a person whom one once loved immensely, although the person has not changed.

However, as LaFollette (1996, p. 63) correctly points out,

reason is not some external power which dictates how we should behave, but an internal power, integral to who we are.… Reason does not command that we love anyone. Nonetheless, reason is vital in determining whom we love and why we love them.

That is, reasons for love are pro tanto : they are a part of the overall reasons we have for acting, and it is up to us in exercising our capacity for agency to decide what on balance we have reason to do or even whether we shall act contrary to our reasons. To construe the notion of a reason for love as compelling us to love, as Thomas does, is to misconstrue the place such reasons have within our agency. [ 17 ]

Most philosophical discussions of the justification of love focus on question (1) , thinking that answering this question will also, to the extent that we can, answer question (2) , which is typically not distinguished from (3) . The answers given to these questions vary in a way that turns on how the kind of evaluation implicit in love is construed. On the one hand, those who understand the evaluation implicit in love to be a matter of the bestowal of value (such as Telfer 1970–71; Friedman 1993; Singer 1994) typically claim that no justification can be given (cf. Section 4.2 ). As indicated above, this seems problematic, especially given the importance love can have both in our lives and, especially, in shaping our identities as persons. To reject the idea that we can love for reasons may reduce the impact our agency can have in defining who we are.

On the other hand, those who understand the evaluation implicit in love to be a matter of appraisal tend to answer the justificatory question by appeal to these valuable properties of the beloved. This acceptance of the idea that love can be justified leads to two further, related worries about the object of love.

The first worry is raised by Vlastos (1981) in a discussion Plato’s and Aristotle’s accounts of love. Vlastos notes that these accounts focus on the properties of our beloveds: we are to love people, they say, only because and insofar as they are objectifications of the excellences. Consequently, he argues, in doing so they fail to distinguish “ disinterested affection for the person we love” from “ appreciation of the excellences instantiated by that person ” (p. 33). That is, Vlastos thinks that Plato and Aristotle provide an account of love that is really a love of properties rather than a love of persons—love of a type of person, rather than love of a particular person—thereby losing what is distinctive about love as an essentially personal attitude. This worry about Plato and Aristotle might seem to apply just as well to other accounts that justify love in terms of the properties of the person: insofar as we love the person for the sake of her properties, it might seem that what we love is those properties and not the person. Here it is surely insufficient to say, as Solomon (1988, p. 154) does, “if love has its reasons, then it is not the whole person that one loves but certain aspects of that person—though the rest of the person comes along too, of course”: that final tagline fails to address the central difficulty about what the object of love is and so about love as a distinctly personal attitude. (Clausen 2019 might seem to address this worry by arguing that we love people not as having certain properties but rather as having “ organic unities ”: a holistic set of properties the value of each of which must be understood in essential part in terms of its place within that whole. Nonetheless, while this is an interesting and plausible way to think about the value of the properties of persons, that organic unity itself will be a (holistic) property held by the person, and it seems that the fundamental problem reemerges at the level of this holistic property: do we love the holistic unity rather than the person?)

The second worry concerns the fungibility of the object of love. To be fungible is to be replaceable by another relevantly similar object without any loss of value. Thus, money is fungible: I can give you two $5 bills in exchange for a $10 bill, and neither of us has lost anything. Is the object of love fungible? That is, can I simply switch from loving one person to loving another relevantly similar person without any loss? The worry about fungibility is commonly put this way: if we accept that love can be justified by appealing to properties of the beloved, then it may seem that in loving someone for certain reasons, I love him not simply as the individual he is, but as instantiating those properties. And this may imply that any other person instantiating those same properties would do just as well: my beloved would be fungible. Indeed, it may be that another person exhibits the properties that ground my love to a greater degree than my current beloved does, and so it may seem that in such a case I have reason to “trade up”—to switch my love to the new, better person. However, it seems clear that the objects of our loves are not fungible: love seems to involve a deeply personal commitment to a particular person, a commitment that is antithetical to the idea that our beloveds are fungible or to the idea that we ought to be willing to trade up when possible. [ 18 ]

In responding to these worries, Nozick (1989) appeals to the union view of love he endorses (see the section on Love as Union ):

The intention in love is to form a we and to identify with it as an extended self, to identify one’s fortunes in large part with its fortunes. A willingness to trade up, to destroy the very we you largely identify with, would then be a willingness to destroy your self in the form of your own extended self. [p. 78]

So it is because love involves forming a “we” that we must understand other persons and not properties to be the objects of love, and it is because my very identity as a person depends essentially on that “we” that it is not possible to substitute without loss one object of my love for another. However, Badhwar (2003) criticizes Nozick, saying that his response implies that once I love someone, I cannot abandon that love no matter who that person becomes; this, she says, “cannot be understood as love at all rather than addiction” (p. 61). [ 19 ]

Instead, Badhwar (1987) turns to her robust-concern account of love as a concern for the beloved for his sake rather than one’s own. Insofar as my love is disinterested — not a means to antecedent ends of my own—it would be senseless to think that my beloved could be replaced by someone who is able to satisfy my ends equally well or better. Consequently, my beloved is in this way irreplaceable. However, this is only a partial response to the worry about fungibility, as Badhwar herself seems to acknowledge. For the concern over fungibility arises not merely for those cases in which we think of love as justified instrumentally, but also for those cases in which the love is justified by the intrinsic value of the properties of my beloved. Confronted with cases like this, Badhwar (2003) concludes that the object of love is fungible after all (though she insists that it is very unlikely in practice). (Soble (1990, Chapter 13) draws similar conclusions.)

Nonetheless, Badhwar thinks that the object of love is “phenomenologically non-fungible” (2003, p. 63; see also 1987, p. 14). By this she means that we experience our beloveds to be irreplaceable: “loving and delighting in [one person] are not completely commensurate with loving and delighting in another” (1987, p. 14). Love can be such that we sometimes desire to be with this particular person whom we love, not another whom we also love, for our loves are qualitatively different. But why is this? It seems as though the typical reason I now want to spend time with Amy rather than Bob is, for example, that Amy is funny but Bob is not. I love Amy in part for her humor, and I love Bob for other reasons, and these qualitative differences between them is what makes them not fungible. However, this reply does not address the worry about the possibility of trading up: if Bob were to be at least as funny (charming, kind, etc.) as Amy, why shouldn’t I dump her and spend all my time with him?

A somewhat different approach is taken by Whiting (1991). In response to the first worry concerning the object of love, Whiting argues that Vlastos offers a false dichotomy: having affection for someone that is disinterested —for her sake rather than my own—essentially involves an appreciation of her excellences as such. Indeed, Whiting says, my appreciation of these as excellences, and so the underlying commitment I have to their value, just is a disinterested commitment to her because these excellences constitute her identity as the person she is. The person, therefore, really is the object of love. Delaney (1996) takes the complementary tack of distinguishing between the object of one’s love, which of course is the person, and the grounds of the love, which are her properties: to say, as Solomon does, that we love someone for reasons is not at all to say that we only love certain aspects of the person. In these terms, we might say that Whiting’s rejection of Vlastos’ dichotomy can be read as saying that what makes my attitude be one of disinterested affection—one of love—for the person is precisely that I am thereby responding to her excellences as the reasons for that affection. [ 20 ]

Of course, more needs to be said about what it is that makes a particular person be the object of love. Implicit in Whiting’s account is an understanding of the way in which the object of my love is determined in part by the history of interactions I have with her: it is she, and not merely her properties (which might be instantiated in many different people), that I want to be with; it is she, and not merely her properties, on whose behalf I am concerned when she suffers and whom I seek to comfort; etc. This addresses the first worry, but not the second worry about fungibility, for the question still remains whether she is the object of my love only as instantiating certain properties, and so whether or not I have reason to “trade up.”

To respond to the fungibility worry, Whiting and Delaney appeal explicitly to the historical relationship. [ 21 ] Thus, Whiting claims, although there may be a relatively large pool of people who have the kind of excellences of character that would justify my loving them, and so although there can be no answer to question (2) about why I come to love this rather than that person within this pool, once I have come to love this person and so have developed a historical relation with her, this history of concern justifies my continuing to love this person rather than someone else (1991, p. 7). Similarly, Delaney claims that love is grounded in “historical-relational properties” (1996, p. 346), so that I have reasons for continuing to love this person rather than switching allegiances and loving someone else. In each case, the appeal to both such historical relations and the excellences of character of my beloved is intended to provide an answer to question (3) , and this explains why the objects of love are not fungible.

There seems to be something very much right with this response. Relationships grounded in love are essentially personal, and it would be odd to think of what justifies that love to be merely non-relational properties of the beloved. Nonetheless, it is still unclear how the historical-relational propreties can provide any additional justification for subsequent concern beyond that which is already provided (as an answer to question (1) ) by appeal to the excellences of the beloved’s character (cf. Brink 1999). The mere fact that I have loved someone in the past does not seem to justify my continuing to love him in the future. When we imagine that he is going through a rough time and begins to lose the virtues justifying my initial love for him, why shouldn’t I dump him and instead come to love someone new having all of those virtues more fully? Intuitively (unless the change she undergoes makes her in some important sense no longer the same person he was), we think I should not dump him, but the appeal to the mere fact that I loved him in the past is surely not enough. Yet what historical-relational properties could do the trick? (For an interesting attempt at an answer, see Kolodny 2003 and also Howard 2019.)

If we think that love can be justified, then it may seem that the appeal to particular historical facts about a loving relationship to justify that love is inadequate, for such idiosyncratic and subjective properties might explain but cannot justify love. Rather, it may seem, justification in general requires appealing to universal, objective properties. But such properties are ones that others might share, which leads to the problem of fungibility. Consequently it may seem that love cannot be justified. In the face of this predicament, accounts of love that understand love to be an attitude towards value that is intermediate between appraisal and bestowal, between recognizing already existing value and creating that value (see Section 4.3 ) might seem to offer a way out. For once we reject the thought that the value of our beloveds must be either the precondition or the consequence of our love, we have room to acknowledge that the deeply personal, historically grounded, creative nature of love (central to bestowal accounts) and the understanding of love as responsive to valuable properties of the beloved that can justify that love (central to appraisal accounts) are not mutually exclusive (Helm 2010; Bagley 2015).

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Aristotle , Nicomachean Ethics , translated by W.D. Ross.
• Moseley, A., “ Philosophy of Love ,” in J. Fieser (ed.), Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

character, moral | emotion | friendship | impartiality | obligations: special | personal identity | Plato: ethics | Plato: rhetoric and poetry | respect | value: intrinsic vs. extrinsic

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Before You Write a Love Essay, Read This to Get Examples

The day will come when you can’t escape the fate of all students: You will have to write a what is love essay.

No worries:

Here you’ll find tons of love essay topics and examples. No time to read everything? Scroll down to get a free PDF with original samples.

Definition: Essay on Love

First, let’s define what is love essay?

The most common topics are:

• Definition of love
• What is love?
• Meaning of love

Why limit yourself to these hackneyed, general themes? Below, I’ll show how to make your paper on love original yet relevant to the prompt you get from teachers.

Love Essay Topics: 20 Ideas to Choose for Your Paper

Your essay on love and relationship doesn’t have to be super official and unemotional. It’s ok to share reflections and personal opinions when writing about romance.

Often, students get a general task to write an essay on love. It means they can choose a theme and a title for their paper. If that’s your case,  feel free to try any of these love essay topics:

• Exploring the impact of love on individuals and relationships.
• Love in the digital age: Navigating romance in a tech world.
• Is there any essence and significance in unconditional love?
• Love as a universal language: Connecting hearts across cultures.
• Biochemistry of love: Exploring the process.
• Love vs. passion vs. obsession.
• How love helps cope with heartbreak and grief.
• The art of loving. How we breed intimacy and trust.
• The science behind attraction and attachment.
• How love and relationships shape our identity and help with self-discovery.
• Love and vulnerability: How to embrace emotional openness.
• Romance is more complex than most think: Passion, intimacy, and commitment explained.
• Love as empathy: Building sympathetic connections in a cruel world.
• Evolution of love. How people described it throughout history.
• The role of love in mental and emotional well-being.
• Love as a tool to look and find purpose in life.
• Welcoming diversity in relations through love and acceptance.
• Love vs. friendship: The intersection of platonic and romantic bonds.
• The choices we make and challenges we overcome for those we love.
• Love and forgiveness: How its power heals wounds and strengthens bonds.

Love Essay Examples: Choose Your Sample for Inspiration

Essays about love are usually standard, 5-paragraph papers students write in college:

• One paragraph is for an introduction, with a hook and a thesis statement
• Three are for a body, with arguments or descriptions
• One last passage is for a conclusion, with a thesis restatement and final thoughts

Below are the ready-made samples to consider. They’ll help you see what an essay about love with an introduction, body, and conclusion looks like.

What is love essay: 250 words

Lao Tzu once said, “Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength while loving someone deeply gives you courage.” Indeed, love can transform individuals, relationships, and our world.

A word of immense depth and countless interpretations, love has always fascinated philosophers, poets, and ordinary individuals. This  emotion breaks boundaries and has a super power to change lives. But what is love, actually?

It’s a force we feel in countless ways. It is the warm embrace of a parent, filled with care and unwavering support. It is the gentle touch of a lover, sparking a flame that ignites passion and desire. Love is the kind words of a friend, offering solace and understanding in times of need. It is the selfless acts of compassion and empathy that bind humanity together.

Love is not confined to romantic relationships alone. It is found in the family bonds, the connections we forge with friends, and even the compassion we extend to strangers. Love is a thread that weaves through the fabric of our lives, enriching and nourishing our souls.

However, love is not without its complexities. It can be both euphoric and agonizing, uplifting and devastating. Love requires vulnerability, trust, and the willingness to embrace joy and pain. It is a delicate balance between passion and compassion, independence and interdependence.

Finally, the essence of love may be elusive to define with mere words. It is an experience that surpasses language and logic, encompassing a spectrum of emotions and actions. Love is a profound connection that unites us all, reminding us of our shared humanity and the capacity for boundless compassion.

What is love essay: 500 words

A 500-word essay on why I love you

Trying to encapsulate why I love you in a mere 500 words is impossible. My love for you goes beyond the confines of language, transcending words and dwelling in the realm of emotions, connections, and shared experiences. Nevertheless, I shall endeavor to express the depth and breadth of my affection for you.

First and foremost, I love you for who you are. You possess a unique blend of qualities and characteristics that captivate my heart and mind. Your kindness and compassion touch the lives of those around you, and I am grateful to be the recipient of your unwavering care and understanding. Your intelligence and wit constantly challenge me to grow and learn, stimulating my mind and enriching our conversations. You have a beautiful spirit that radiates warmth and joy, and I am drawn to your vibrant energy.

I love the way you make me feel. When I am with you, I feel a sense of comfort and security that allows me to be my true self. Your presence envelops me in a cocoon of love and acceptance, where I can express my thoughts, fears, and dreams without fear of judgment. Your support and encouragement inspire me to pursue my passions and overcome obstacles. With you by my side, I feel empowered to face the world, knowing I have a partner who believes in me.

I love the memories we have created together. From the laughter-filled moments of shared adventures to the quiet and intimate conversations, every memory is etched in my heart. Whether exploring new places, indulging in our favorite activities, or simply enjoying each other’s company in comfortable silence, each experience reinforces our bond. Our shared memories serve as a foundation for our relationship, a testament to the depth of our connection and the love that binds us.

I love your quirks and imperfections. Your true essence shines through these unique aspects! Your little traits make me smile and remind me of the beautiful individual you are. I love how you wrinkle your nose when you laugh, become lost in thought when reading a book, and even sing off-key in the shower. These imperfections make you human, relatable, and utterly lovable.

I love the future we envision together. We support each other’s goals, cheering one another on as we navigate the path toward our dreams. The thought of building a life together, creating a home filled with love and shared experiences, fills my heart with anticipation and excitement. The future we imagine is one that I am eager to explore with you by my side.

In conclusion, the reasons why I love you are as vast and varied as the universe itself. It is a love that defies logic and surpasses the limitations of language. From the depths of my being, I love you for the person you are, the way you make me feel, the memories we cherish, your quirks and imperfections, and the future we envision together. My love for you is boundless, unconditional, and everlasting.

A 5-paragraph essay about love

I’ve gathered all the samples (and a few bonus ones) in one PDF. It’s free to download. So, you can keep it at hand when the time comes to write a love essay.

Ready to Write Your Essay About Love?

Now that you know the definition of a love essay and have many topic ideas, it’s time to write your A-worthy paper! Here go the steps:

• Check all the examples of what is love essay from this post.
• Choose the topic and angle that fits your prompt best.
• Write your original and inspiring story.

Any questions left? Our writers are all ears. Please don’t hesitate to ask!

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Definition Essay: Love

Love is something that means very different things to different people. For some, love can be purely romantic, or even purely sexual. For others, real love is utterly unconditional and only truly exists between family members, or between people and a deity. And for some people, love is fluid, ever changing, and everywhere, and is felt for family, friends, partners, pets, and even inanimate objects, dead artists, and fictional characters. None of these people would be right or wrong, but one thing is certain: love is the most powerful force in the entire universe.

Between partners of any description, be they married or cohabiting, boyfriend and girlfriend, straight or gay, young or old, love is a relationship of mutual understanding and respect. Marriages and partnerships are often built on common ground that people find when they first meet; this can be as deep as sharing religious, philosophical or religious beliefs, or as simple as finding that you love the same film, book, or band.

This kind of love is often reliant on some kind of ‘chemistry’: that strange feeling that they give you in the pit of your stomach, and the feeling that nothing in the world is more important to you than enjoying the moment you’re in together. Some people feel that they experience love at first sight, where they know from the minute they set eyes on each other that they want to to be with that person, but something built on common interests and understanding must be stronger.

A parent’s love for a child can also often be described as love at first sight, but this is very strong because it comes from a natural instinct to protect our offspring. This love can often start before the baby is even born: you only have to look at the pride and excitement of many parents-to-be when they have their scans and feel their baby kick for the very first time. This kind of love is also felt by a child for its mother; it is unconditional for at least the first few years of life, and can also be felt between siblings.

It is the strength of this feeling that makes love the most powerful emotion that most of us will ever experience. People can do some dreadful things out of hate and fear, but love can push us to do much, much worse. And it is often love that can cause us to hate, whether it’s out of jealousy, or anger because our loved one has been hurt. Love, ultimately, is a sacrifice, whatever the relationship, and it must be the most powerful force in the universe because as human beings, we make true sacrifices for nothing less.

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Defining Love: a Deep Dive into its Meaning and Significance

This essay about the multifaceted nature of love explores how it is interpreted and experienced through biological, philosophical, artistic, psychological, and cultural lenses. It describes love as a mix of emotions, behaviors, and beliefs essential for human connection and survival. By examining the diverse ways love influences individual behaviors and societal norms, the text illuminates its profound impact on personal development and the broader human experience.

How it works

Love defies simple definition; it is a rich tapestry woven from emotional threads that vary in intensity and color. It is a universally recognized yet deeply personal experience, influencing vast societal structures and individual emotional landscapes. This essay aims to unpack the essence of love, exploring its various meanings and the significant roles it plays across different contexts.

At its foundation, love is an amalgamation of emotions, attitudes, and actions characterized by affection, loyalty, respect, and care for another being. From a biological perspective, love serves as a fundamental mechanism for humans to form bonds and communities, enhancing survival and promoting the continuity of generations.

This evolutionary lens views love as a strategy for reproductive success and nurturing, ensuring the protection and development of offspring.

Philosophers have long debated love, considering it a vital component of ethical life and human purpose. For example, Plato elevated the concept of love in his dialogues, presenting it as a pursuit of ideal beauty and truth beyond mere physical attraction. Aristotle focused on the virtuous aspects of love seen in friendships where individuals desire good things for each other selflessly. Contemporary philosophers like Iris Murdoch regard love as an act of moral perception that allows one to see others more clearly and honestly, fostering a profound understanding and connection.

In the arts, love frequently emerges as a central theme, reflecting and shaping cultural attitudes towards relationships. Literature, film, and music explore the depths of love’s joy and anguish, its capacity to empower and to devastate. Shakespeare’s works, for instance, dissect the layers of love from youthful infatuation to the deep, enduring bonds of loyalty and companionship. Modern storytelling continues to explore these themes, reflecting current societal views and the timeless nature of love itself.

Psychologically, love is seen as critical to individual development and well-being. Theories such as attachment theory emphasize the importance of forming strong emotional bonds from early childhood, which dictate the nature of future relationships. Robert Sternberg’s triangular theory of love identifies three key elements—intimacy, passion, and commitment—that combine in various forms to create different types of relationships, from friendships to passionate, long-term commitments.

Cultural interpretations of love vary widely. In some societies, love is primarily viewed as a foundation for marriage and family, while in others, it is celebrated as a force that defies societal constraints. These cultural narratives shape how individuals express and experience love, influencing social norms and personal expectations.

Regardless of the perspective from which it is viewed, love profoundly affects human behavior and societal structures. It inspires acts of great kindness and can lead to profound despair. It fosters resilience and reveals vulnerabilities. Love not only enhances personal fulfillment and emotional health but also helps to define what it means to be human.

By examining love through various lenses—biological, philosophical, artistic, psychological, and cultural—we gain a deeper appreciation of this complex emotion and its impact on our lives. Love, in all its forms, shapes our identities, influences our societies, and molds our understanding of human connections.

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Do You Know What Love Really Is?

Is it just a second-hand emotion?

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Emily is a board-certified science editor who has worked with top digital publishing brands like Voices for Biodiversity, Study.com, GoodTherapy, Vox, and Verywell.

Verywell / Laura Porter

• How Do You Know You're Feeling Love for Someone?

Is Love Influenced By Biology or Culture?

How to show love to another person.

• Tips for Cultivating

Negative Emotions Associated With Love

Take the love quiz.

When it comes to love, some people would say it is one of the most important human emotions . Love is a set of emotions and behaviors characterized by intimacy, passion, and commitment. It involves care, closeness, protectiveness, attraction, affection, and trust.

Many say it's not an emotion in the way we typically understand them, but an essential physiological drive. 

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

There are countless songs, books, poems, and other works of art about love (you probably have one in mind as we speak!). Yet despite being one of the most studied behaviors, it is still the least understood. For example, researchers debate whether love is a biological or cultural phenomenon.

How Do You Know You're Feeling Love for Someone?

What are some of the signs of love? Researchers have made distinctions between feelings of liking and loving another person.

Zick Rubin's Scales of Liking and Loving

According to psychologist Zick Rubin, romantic love is made up of three elements:

• Attachment : Needing to be with another person and desiring physical contact and approval
• Caring : Valuing the other person's happiness and needs as much as your own
• Intimacy : Sharing private thoughts, feelings, and desires with the other person

Based on this view of romantic love, Rubin developed two questionnaires to measure these variables, known as Rubin's Scales of Liking and Loving . While people tend to view people they like as pleasant, love is marked by being devoted, possessive, and confiding in one another. 

Are There Different Types of Love?

Yup—not all forms of love are the same, and psychologists have identified a number of different types of love that people may experience.

These types of love include:

• Friendship : This type of love involves liking someone and sharing a certain degree of intimacy.
• Infatuation : This form of love often involves intense feelings of attraction without a sense of commitment; it often takes place early in a relationship and may deepen into a more lasting love.
• Passionate love : This type of love is marked by intense feelings of longing and attraction; it often involves an idealization of the other person and a need to maintain constant physical closeness.
• Compassionate/companionate love : This form of love is marked by trust, affection, intimacy, and commitment.
• Unrequited love : This form of love happens when one person loves another who does not return those feelings.

Robert Sternberg's Triangular Theory of Love

Specifically, psychologist Robert Sternberg developed his well-regarded triangular theory of love in the early 1980s. Much research has built upon his work and demonstrated its universality across cultures.

Sternberg broke love into three components—intimacy, passion, and commitment—that interact to produce seven types of love .

Love is most likely influenced by both biology and culture. Although hormones and biology are important, the way we express and experience love is also influenced by our own conceptions of love.

Some researchers suggest that love is a basic human emotion just like happiness or anger, while others believe that it is a cultural phenomenon that arises partly due to social pressures and expectations. 

Research has found that romantic love exists in all cultures, which suggests that love has a strong biological component. It is a part of human nature to seek out and find love. However, culture can significantly affect how individuals think about, experience, and display romantic love.

Is Love an Emotion?

Psychologists, sociologists, and researchers disagree somewhat on the characterization of love. Many say it's not an emotion in the way we typically understand them, but an essential physiological drive. On the other hand, the American Psychological Association defines it as "a complex emotion." Still, others draw a distinction between primary and secondary emotions and put love in the latter category, maintaining that it derives from a mix of primary emotions.

There is no single way to practice love. Every relationship is unique, and each person brings their own history and needs. Some things that you can do to show love to the people you care about include:

• Be willing to be vulnerable.
• Be willing to forgive.
• Do your best, and be willing to apologize when you make mistakes.
• Let them know that you care.
• Listen to what they have to say.
• Prioritize spending time with the other person.
• Reciprocate loving gestures and acts of kindness.
• Recognize and acknowledge their good qualities.
• Share things about yourself.
• Show affection.
• Make it unconditional.

How Love Impacts Your Mental Health

Love, attachment, and affection have an important impact on well-being and quality of life. Loving relationships have been linked to:

• Lower risk of heart disease
• Decreased risk of dying after a heart attack
• Better health habits
• Increased longevity
• Lower stress levels
• Less depression
• Lower risk of diabetes

Tips for Cultivating Love

Lasting relationships are marked by deep levels of trust, commitment, and intimacy. Some things that you can do to help cultivate loving relationships include:

• Try loving-kindness meditation. Loving-kindness meditation (LKM) is a technique often used to promote self-acceptance and reduce stress, but it has also been shown to promote a variety of positive emotions and improve interpersonal relationships. LKM involves meditating while thinking about a person you love or care about, concentrating on warm feelings and your desire for their well-being and happiness.
• Communicate. Everyone's needs are different. The best way to ensure that your needs and your loved one's needs are met is to talk about them. Helping another person feel loved involves communicating that love to them through words and deeds. Some ways to do this include showing that you care, making them feel special, telling them they are loved , and doing things for them.
• Tackle conflict in a healthy way . Never arguing is not necessarily a sign of a healthy relationship—more often than not, it means that people are avoiding an issue rather than discussing it. Rather than avoid conflict, focus on hashing out issues in ways that are healthy in order to move a relationship forward in a positive way. 

As Shakespeare said, the course of love never did run smooth. Love can vary in intensity and can change over time. It is associated with a range of positive emotions, including happiness, excitement, life satisfaction, and euphoria, but it can also result in negative emotions such as jealousy and stress.

No relationship is perfect, so there will always be problems, conflicts, misunderstandings, and disappointments that can lead to distress or heartbreak.

Some of the potential pitfalls of experiencing love include:

• Increased stress
• Obsessiveness
• Possessiveness

While people are bound to experience some negative emotions associated with love, it can become problematic if those negative feelings outweigh the positive or if they start to interfere with either person's ability to function normally. Relationship counseling can be helpful in situations where couples need help coping with miscommunication, stress, or emotional issues.

History of Love

Only fairly recently has love become the subject of science. In the past, the study of love was left to "the creative writer to depict for us the necessary conditions for loving," according to Sigmund Freud . "In consequence, it becomes inevitable that science should concern herself with the same materials whose treatment by artists has given enjoyment to mankind for thousands of years," he added.  

Research on love has grown tremendously since Freud's remarks. But early explorations into the nature and reasons for love drew considerable criticism. During the 1970s, U.S. Senator William Proxmire railed against researchers who were studying love and derided the work as a waste of taxpayer dollars.

Despite early resistance, research has revealed the importance of love in both child development and adult health.  

Our fast and free love quiz can help you determine if what you've got is the real deal or simply a temporary fling or infatuation.

Burunat E. Love is not an emotion .  Psychology . 2016;07(14):1883. doi:10.4236/psych.2016.714173

Karandashev V. A Cultural Perspective on Romantic Love .  ORPC. 2015;5(4):1-21. doi:10.9707/2307-0919.1135

Rubin Z. Lovers and Other Strangers: The Development of Intimacy in Encounters and Relationships: Experimental studies of self-disclosure between strangers at bus stops and in airport departure lounges can provide clues about the development of intimate relationships . American Scientist. 1974;62(2):182-190.

Langeslag SJ, van Strien JW. Regulation of Romantic Love Feelings: Preconceptions, Strategies, and Feasibility .  PLoS One . 2016;11(8):e0161087. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0161087

• Sorokowski P, Sorokowska A, Karwowski M, et al.  Universality of the triangular theory of love: adaptation and psychometric properties of the triangular love scale in 25 countries .  J Sex Res . 2021;58(1):106-115. doi:10.1080/00224499.2020.1787318

American Psychological Association. APA Dictionary of Psychology .

Wong CW, Kwok CS, Narain A, et al. Marital status and risk of cardiovascular diseases: a systematic review and meta-analysis .  Heart . 2018;104(23):1937‐1948. doi:10.1136/heartjnl-2018-313005

Robards J, Evandrou M, Falkingham J, Vlachantoni A. Marital status, health and mortality .  Maturitas . 2012;73(4):295‐299. doi:10.1016/j.maturitas.2012.08.007

Teo AR, Choi H, Valenstein M. Social Relationships and Depression: Ten-Year Follow-Up from a Nationally Representative Study . PLoS One . 2013;8(4):e62396. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0062396

Roberson PNE, Fincham F. Is relationship quality linked to diabetes risk and management?: It depends on what you look at . Fam Syst Health. 2018;36(3):315-326. doi:10.1037/fsh0000336

He X, Shi W, Han X, Wang N, Zhang N, Wang X. The interventional effects of loving-kindness meditation on positive emotions and interpersonal interactions .  Neuropsychiatr Dis Treat . 2015;11:1273‐1277. doi:10.2147/NDT.S79607

Freud S. The Freud Reader . New York: W. W. Norton & Company; 1995.

Winston R, Chicot R. The importance of early bonding on the long-term mental health and resilience of children . London J Prim Care (Abingdon). 2016;8(1):12-14. doi:10.1080/17571472.2015.1133012

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

What is love?

Associate professor in Social Psychology / Relationship Science, Deakin University

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Gery Karantzas receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is the founder of relationshipscienceonline.com

Deakin University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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From songs and poems to novels and movies, romantic love is one of the most enduring subjects for artworks through the ages. But what about the science?

Historical, cultural and even evolutionary evidence suggests love existed during ancient times and across many parts of the world. Romantic love has been found to exist in 147 of 166 cultures looked at in one study.

The complexity of love has much to do with how people experience it differently and how it can change over time.

Read more: Friday essay: finding spaces for love

Like, love, or ‘in love’?

Psychological research over the past 50 years has investigated the differences between liking someone, loving someone and being “in love”.

Liking is described as having positive thoughts and feelings towards someone and finding that person’s company rewarding. We often also experience warmth and closeness towards the people we like. In some instances we choose to be emotionally intimate with these people.

When we love someone we experience the same positive thoughts and experiences as when we like a person. But we also experience a deep sense of care and commitment towards that person.

Being “ in love ” includes all the above but also involves feelings of sexual arousal and attraction. However, research into people’s own views of love suggests that not all love is the same.

Passionate vs companionate love

Romantic love consists of two types: passionate and companionate love. Most romantic relationships, whether they be heterosexual or same sex , involve both these parts.

Passionate love is what people typically consider being “in love”. It includes feelings of passion and an intense longing for someone, to the point they might obsessively think about wanting to be in their arms.

The second part is known as companionate love . It’s not felt as intensely, but it’s complex and connects feelings of emotional intimacy and commitment with a deep attachment toward the romantic partner.

How does love change over time?

Research looking at changes in romantic love over time typically finds that although passionate love starts high, it declines over the course of a relationship.

There are various reasons for this.

As partners learn more about each other and become more confident in the long-term future of the relationship, routines develop. The opportunities to experience novelty and excitement can also decline, as can the frequency of sexual activity . This can cause passionate love to subside.

Although a reduction in passionate love is not experienced by all couples, various studies report approximately 20-40% of couples experience this downturn. Of couples who have been married in excess of ten years, the steepest downturn is most likely to occur over the second decade .

Life events and transitions can also make it challenging to experience passion. People have competing responsibilities which affect their energy and limit the opportunities to foster passion. Parenthood is an example of this.

Read more: Love by design: when science meets sex, lust, attraction and attachment

In contrast, companionate love is typically found to increase over time.

Although research finds most romantic relationships consist of both passionate and companionate love, it’s the absence or reductions in companionate love, moreso than passionate love, that can negatively affect the longevity of a romantic relationship.

But what’s the point of love?

Love is an emotion that keeps people bonded and committed to one another. From an evolutionary psychology perspective, love evolved to keep the parents of children together long enough for them to survive and reach sexual maturity .

Read more: What is this thing called love?

The period of childhood is much longer for humans than other species. As offspring rely on adults for many years to survive and to develop the skills and abilities needed for successful living, love is especially important for humans.

Without love, it’s difficult to see how the human species could have evolved .

A biological foundation too

Not only is there an evolutionary foundation to love, love is rooted in biology. Neurophysiological studies into romantic love show that people who are in the throes of passionate love experience increased activation in brain regions associated with reward and pleasure.

Read more: Love lockdown: the pandemic has put pressure on many relationships, but here's how to tell if yours will survive

In fact, the brain regions activated are the same as those activated by cocaine.

These regions release chemicals such as oxytocin, vasopressin and dopamine, which produce feelings of happiness and euphoria that are also linked to sexual arousal and excitement.

Interestingly, these brain regions are not activated when thinking about non-romantic relationships such as friends. These findings tell us that liking someone is not the same as being in love with someone.

What’s your love style?

Research has found three primary styles of love. First coined by psychologist John Lee , the love styles are eros, ludus and storge. These styles include people’s beliefs and attitudes about love and act as a guide for how to approach romantic relationships.

This style of love refers to erotic love and is focused on physical attraction and engaging in sex, the quick development of strong and passionate feelings for another and intense intimacy.

This style involves being emotionally distant and often involves “game-playing”. It’s not surprising people who endorse this love style are unlikely to commit, feel comfortable ending relationships and often start a new relationship before ending the current one.

Storge is often regarded as a more mature form of love. Priority is given to having a relationship with a person who has similar interests, affection is openly expressed and there is less emphasis on physical attractiveness. People high on storge love are trusting of others and are not needy or dependent on others.

Or is a mixture more your style?

You may see yourself in more than one of these styles.

Evidence suggests some people possess a mixture of the three main love styles; these mixtures were labelled by Lee as mania, pragma and agape.

Read more: Darling, I love you ... from the bottom of my brain

Manic love includes intense feelings for a partner as well as worry about committing to the relationship. Pragmatic love involves making sensible relationship choices in finding a partner who will make a good companion and friend. Agape is a self-sacrificing love that is driven by a sense of duty and selflessness.

Why do you love the way you do?

A person’s love style has little to do with their genetics . Rather, it’s associated with the development of personality and a person’s past relationship experiences.

Some studies have found people who are high on dark traits, such as narcissism, psychopathy and machiavellianism, endorse more of a ludus or pragma love style.

Read more: There are six styles of love. Which one best describes you?

People who have an insecure attachment style , involving a high need for validation and preoccupation with relationship partners, endorse more mania love, while those who are uncomfortable with intimacy and closeness do not endorse eros love.

No matter the differences in the way love is experienced, one thing remains common for all: we as humans are social animals who have a deep fascination for it.

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Can One Really Define Love? Essay

What is love? It seems to be as baffling as the question “What is the meaning of life?” Liking and attraction seem to be of lesser degree when compared to love yet attraction is also closely associated with friendship. These are three concepts that mean lot of things to different people.

When it comes to love, one will encounter countless lines that attempt to define it. We all have heard that love is blind. Love is what makes the world go round. Love is all there is. Novels, poems, short stories and songs, all kinds of literature have immortalized love. Why? Plato said it right: At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet. Since the beginning of time, love has been there to propel people who fall in it to do crazy – or at least extraordinary things. Those who stumble into it go into a trance, seeing everything or everyone who stands against it as a threat to their happiness.

The dictionary says that love is the passionate devotion to another being but its essence must not be entirely confined to its lexical meaning. The New Testament alone exemplifies three types of love. The romantic, sexual love or eros , the love of friendship or phileo , and the unconditional love of the Divine or agape . While the first two may come easily for most people, agape does not because it is the unconditional love that is usually ascribed to the Divine. (Boyer, 1999).

Some hold that love is nothing but a physical response to another whom the agent feels physically attracted to. Physical determinists for example, consider love to be an extension of the chemical-biological constituents of the human creature and is explicable according to such processes. Others who consider love to be an aesthetic response hold that love is knowable through the emotional and conscious feeling that it provokes and it cannot be captured in rational or descriptive language but by metaphor or by music. The spiritualist vision of love incorporates mystical as well as traditional romantic notions of love, but rejects the behaviorist or physical determinist’s explanations. (Moseley, 2001).

Love may be defined in any way imaginable to man and may differ from one person to another. Hence, although each of us has his own way of looking at love, it can’t nevertheless be denied that love is universal and everyone, anywhere can feel it.

Levels of physical attractiveness can influence people in so many powerful ways. A person’s characteristics based on an individual’s perception of physical attractiveness can either add to one’s status or stigmatize them. Males and females have different cognitive schemas about the attractiveness of the opposite sex. This is because one’s gender determines the how the person will view their own attractiveness and how that person will view another one’s physical attractiveness. There are several theories that apply to physical attraction and one of this is the reinforcement theory. This means that when a person is paired with a stimulus that elicits a positive effect or reward, the result is increased liking of that person. One can begin to like a physically attractive person because he is pleasing to look at which is your own personal reward. Meanwhile, the attractive person also gets the benefits of being attractive because once a positive reward is associated with an individual; your liking of them will increase.

There are actually three factors that influence attraction. One of this is proximity. It seems that people tend to like those that are closer to them By this we mean, of greater proximity rather than those far from them. This is because if people are close to each other, they often see each other. Perhaps because they are able to nurture relationships with each other. It is difficult for people to cultivate relationships when they are far apart. (Social Psychology, Interpersonal Relations).

One other factor is physical attractiveness. According to Robert B Cialdini, an influential psychologist, physical attractiveness is an important component in degree of influence. He stipulates that physically attractive people have a huge social advantage in our culture. They are better liked, more persuasive, more frequently helped, and seen as possessing better personality traits and intellectual capabilities (Cialdini 1984). This is what some experts call the halo effect. This happens when positive characteristics of a person, spell the way a person is viewed by others (Henricks, Chris, et. al, 1998). There is the notion that people who are above average in physical attractiveness is also above average in other aspects as well.

Sometimes this can be a disadvantage too. The physically attractive people may think that things are being done for them just because they look good rather than their innate attributes. (Social Psychology, Interpersonal Relations).The third factor in attraction is similarity. People who are similar in tastes and likes tend to attract each other. When they find that they have a lot of commonalities, they tend to go together. It is like the saying that says, “birds of the same feather, flock together.” People are interested in establishing relationships with others who are similar to themselves. In this connection, if the goal of attraction is partnership, and apart of this partnership is sharing life with someone else, then it is wise to choose a partner with similar background and interests. The person who is similar with another one in terms of interests, then, there would be less problems since there is a meeting of minds. They will want to do the same activities and share the same hobbies as you do. (Social Psychology, Interpersonal Relations).

One way to get someone to like you is to like them. This action is called a reciprocity norm. This means that whatever is done to you should be done in return. The value of indebtedness comes into play here. When someone does something for us, often we feel indebted to that person, so the action is often reciprocated. Many great thinkers today find that whatever good feelings you give to others will return back to you. In the context of the reciprocity norm, it means that the way to get someone to like us is to like them first. What you give will come back to you a hundredfold.

Sternberg has a theory of love, which involves 3 dimensions: passion, intimacy, and commitment. He suggests that the combination of these dimensions can be used to classify different types of love or mutually good feelings. So, Sternberg is suggesting that not all loving relationships are created equal. I might suggest that true love – the love that creates a special and precious relationship between two people – is one that would have all 3 of Sternberg’s dimensions (Social Psychology, Interpersonal Relations).

Love in its many forms is a way of bringing joy into our lives, and we all treasure the moments of love that we know and have known. Loving is a way of giving, both to the person receiving and the one giving. Through loving, a person becomes closer to himself as he shares himself to another one and opens the way for sharing. The meaning of love is limitless because love is relative from person to person. How one would see it would be different from how another would. Love teaches us in different ways. It remains a mystery, a puzzle that must be left to work out on its own – or better yet, just left to retain its mystique.

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The word “love” has gone through various dictionary definitions throughout the eons. According to the Harvard Crimson, “The roots of the word “love” can be traced back to the Indo-European root leubh, meaning “to care” or “to desire,” approximated from words including the Latin lubet, “it pleases” and the Sanskrit lubhyati, “he desires.” Along with “love,” related English words like “libido” and “belief” also descend from *lebuh. According to The Bloomsbury Dictionary of Words, while the word “love” initially meant “find pleasing,” it later took on associations with “praise,” “trust” and “belief”’ (Cocola, Jim). This follows a common pattern in romantic relationships that begins with pleasure, progresses to admiration, and finally becomes about trust. We can look at history to see that humanity has considered love to be, in essence, a variety of virtues and feelings. To say one sentence about love is seemingly impossible. That is why is important to differentiate between the types of love we humans experience.

What constitutes “pure love” is highly debatable. Religious or spiritual people will say “pure love” is that love which is divinely inspired or related to the divine. Other people will say friendship is the truest love of all. While others will say unconditional love is the only pure form of love. There is no consensus on what constitutes “pure love,” however there are similarities between the definitions. Most ideas about what “pure love” is circles around the concept of something transcendent. This variety of love is commonly above attachment, hate, codependency, and other forms of limitations.

Perhaps the most famous depictions of love in the western world are discussed by Plato, Aristotle, and other historical sources. We can say there are seven flavors of love: romantic love, friendship, familial love, universal love, uncommitted love, practical love, and self-love. Romantic love is marked by passion and sometimes lust between people to create a bond. Love based on friendship, on the other hand, can be said to be shared goodwill, companionship, trust, and more. In a similar vein, familial love is carved out of dependency and familiarity, and is almost automatic. Another type of love that is commonly inbuilt is universal love. This slice of love is based on feeling care for God, strangers, nature, and other encompassing factors. It can also relate to altruism, where we want to help others in need, even if we do not know them well, or do not expect something in return. A more baser type of love is uncommitted love, which involves teasing, flirting, seducing, and sex without attachments. The opposite comes in the form of shared interests and duties with practical love. Often, people are drawn towards each other based on activities, hobbies, professions, and other factors. This can form a strong bond between two or more people at a time. Lastly, self-love is controversial. It can be said to be healthy with self-affirmation and self-confidence, but unhealthy with narcissism and vanity (“These Are the 7 Types of Love”).

All of these types of loves intermix in our lives. It is difficult to find someone who does not have all these flavors of love present in his or her experience of reality. However, it is up to us to determine the most significant type of love and to search for it. Commonly, figuring out what this most important flavor of love is will indicate what we need to do with our lives, how we need to act, and how we want to construct our family and work lives. Therefore, knowing what love is to you is not only a philosophical pursuit but also a practical one.

A definition essay sometimes can get confused with a description writing. That’s why it’s essential to check out some samples before starting your work. Some best assignment writer sites can provide you with a whole collection of similar examples.

Works Cited

Cocola, Jim. “Redefining Love.” The Harvard Crimson, www.thecrimson.com/article/1998/2/9/redefining-love-pi-adore-you-i/.

“These Are the 7 Types of Love.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201606/these-are-the-7-types-love.

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11 The Importance of Love

• Published: December 2014
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Ask anyone to name the most important things in life, and “love” will come up in almost every answer. Yet academic philosophers have historically given relatively little attention to the subject. This chapter takes up the basic questions “What is love?” and “What is so great about it?” After canvassing the wide variety of relationships that are plausibly characterized as loving, the chapter rejects definitions that focus on desires to benefit or be with the beloved as well as definitions that associate love with an “arresting awareness” of the beloved’s value. Rather, the chapter suggests that the only thing all serious loves may have in common is the fact that they involve caring, deeply and personally, about the objects of love for their own sake. As such, the chapter proposes, love provides an orientation in the world that roots us motivationally to it.

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What Is Love? Great Definitions from 400 Years of Great Literature

By maria popova.

After those collections of notable definitions of art , science , and philosophy , here comes a selection of poetic definitions of a peculiar phenomenon that is at once more amorphous than art, more single-minded than science, and more philosophical than philosophy itself. Gathered here are some of the most memorable and timeless insights on love , culled from several hundred years of literary history — enjoy.

Kurt Vonnegut , who was in some ways an extremist about love but also had a healthy dose of irreverence about it , in The Sirens of Titan :

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

Anaïs Nin , whose wisdom on love knew no bounds, in A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller, 1932-1953 :

What is love but acceptance of the other, whatever he is.

Stendhal in his fantastic 1822 treatise on love :

Love is like a fever which comes and goes quite independently of the will. … there are no age limits for love.

C. S. Lewis , who was a very wise man , in The Four Loves :

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

Lemony Snicket in Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t Avoid :

Love can change a person the way a parent can change a baby — awkwardly, and often with a great deal of mess.

Susan Sontag , whose illustrated insights on love were among last year’s most read and shared articles , in As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 :

Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.

Charles Bukowski , who also famously deemed love “a dog from hell,” in this archival video interview :

Love is kind of like when you see a fog in the morning, when you wake up before the sun comes out. It’s just a little while, and then it burns away… Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality.

Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream :

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind.

Ambrose Bierce , with the characteristic wryness of The Devil’s Dictionary :

Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage.

Katharine Hepburn in Me : Stories of My Life :

Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get — only with what you are expecting to give — which is everything.

Philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell , he of great wisdom , in The Conquest of Happiness :

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky puts it even more forcefully in The Brothers Karamazov :

What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in a letter to his ten-year-old daughter explaining the importance of evidence in science and in life:

People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside, otherwise you’d never be confident of things like ‘My wife loves me’. But this is a bad argument. There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves you. All through the day when you are with somebody who loves you, you see and hear lots of little tidbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn’t purely inside feeling, like the feeling that priests call revelation. There are outside things to back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the voice, little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence.

Paulo Coelho in The Zahir: A Novel of Obsession :

Love is an untamed force. When we try to control it, it destroys us. When we try to imprison it, it enslaves us. When we try to understand it, it leaves us feeling lost and confused.

James Baldwin in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non-fiction, 1948-1985 :

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

Haruki Murakami in Kafka on the Shore :

Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who’s in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It’s like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven’t seen in a long time.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in Airman’s Odyssey: Night Flight / Wind Sand & Stars / Flight to Arras :

Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.

Honoré de Balzac , who knew a thing or two about all-consuming love , in Physiologie Du Mariage :

The more one judges, the less one loves.

Louis de Bernières in Corelli’s Mandolin :

Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don’t blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being “in love”, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.

E. M. Forster in A Room with a View :

You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.

English novelist Iris Murdoch , in Existentialists and Mystics :

Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.

But perhaps the truest, if humblest, of them all comes from Agatha Christie , who echoes Anaïs Nin above in her autobiography :

It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them.

Archival postcards courtesy the New York Public Library

— Published January 1, 2013 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/01/01/what-is-love/ —

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Love — The Many Faces of Love

The Many Faces of Love

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Published: Feb 7, 2024

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Table of contents

The beginning of love, early stages of love, obstacles and challenges, the power of love, the dark side of love, different forms of love.

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Essay on Love for Students and Children

500+ words essay on love.

Love is the most significant thing in human’s life. Each science and every single literature masterwork will tell you about it. Humans are also social animals. We lived for centuries with this way of life, we were depended on one another to tell us how our clothes fit us, how our body is whether healthy or emaciated. All these we get the honest opinions of those who love us, those who care for us and makes our happiness paramount.

What is Love?

Love is a set of emotions, behaviors, and beliefs with strong feelings of affection. So, for example, a person might say he or she loves his or her dog, loves freedom, or loves God. The concept of love may become an unimaginable thing and also it may happen to each person in a particular way.

Love has a variety of feelings, emotions, and attitude. For someone love is more than just being interested physically in another one, rather it is an emotional attachment. We can say love is more of a feeling that a person feels for another person. Therefore, the basic meaning of love is to feel more than liking towards someone.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Need of Love

We know that the desire to love and care for others is a hard-wired and deep-hearted because the fulfillment of this wish increases the happiness level. Expressing love for others benefits not just the recipient of affection, but also the person who delivers it. The need to be loved can be considered as one of our most basic and fundamental needs.

One of the forms that this need can take is contact comfort. It is the desire to be held and touched. So there are many experiments showing that babies who are not having contact comfort, especially during the first six months, grow up to be psychologically damaged.

Significance of Love

Love is as critical for the mind and body of a human being as oxygen. Therefore, the more connected you are, the healthier you will be physically as well as emotionally. It is also true that the less love you have, the level of depression will be more in your life. So, we can say that love is probably the best antidepressant.

It is also a fact that the most depressed people don’t love themselves and they do not feel loved by others. They also become self-focused and hence making themselves less attractive to others.

Society and Love

It is a scientific fact that society functions better when there is a certain sense of community. Compassion and love are the glue for society. Hence without it, there is no feeling of togetherness for further evolution and progress. Love , compassion, trust and caring we can say that these are the building blocks of relationships and society.

Relationship and Love

A relationship is comprised of many things such as friendship , sexual attraction , intellectual compatibility, and finally love. Love is the binding element that keeps a relationship strong and solid. But how do you know if you are in love in true sense? Here are some symptoms that the emotion you are feeling is healthy, life-enhancing love.

Love is the Greatest Wealth in Life

Love is the greatest wealth in life because we buy things we love for our happiness. For example, we build our dream house and purchase a favorite car to attract love. Being loved in a remote environment is a better experience than been hated even in the most advanced environment.

Love or Money

Love should be given more importance than money as love is always everlasting. Money is important to live, but having a true companion you can always trust should come before that. If you love each other, you will both work hard to help each other live an amazing life together.

Love has been a vital reason we do most things in our life. Before we could know ourselves, we got showered by it from our close relatives like mothers , fathers , siblings, etc. Thus love is a unique gift for shaping us and our life. Therefore, we can say that love is a basic need of life. It plays a vital role in our life, society, and relation. It gives us energy and motivation in a difficult time. Finally, we can say that it is greater than any other thing in life.

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Read our detailed notes below on the essay “Of Love” by Francis Bacon. Our notes cover Of Love by Francis Bacon summary and explanation.

Of Love by Francis Bacon Summary

Bacon opens the essay by claiming that the love or romance shown on the stage, plays, and theatres is highly unrealistic, far from reality. On stage, love is portrayed as a noble trait leading to joy and excitement. It often brings tragedy and sorrow. However, in the real life, love does the real disasters by bringing dark and foreboding. History has a record that all the great, noble, and worthier man who has done something great in the life have refused this week passion and keep themselves and their business away from such things.

Bacon illustrates the example of Marcus Antonius, a member of Roman royalty who was given a chance to rule over 1/3rd of the empire, and Appius Claudius, the second member of royalty who was given the other 1/3rd of empire, to explain the destructing effects of love. The former was the man of ambition and power, however, amorous, impulsive, and restrained. He had little or no control over his heart and wandered in pursuit of love and lust. While Claudius was a sober, sage and wise man of great wisdom. He never brought himself disgrace while rushing towards quixotic desire.

Bacon quotes the Greek philosopher Epicurus who promoted self-control, self-discipline, and restraint in one’s life. He warned his followers against chasing the worldly desires and says that “we are sufficient for one another”. By this, he conveys a message that one must live his life fully, without indulging into conflicts with others. One should not avenge other and must restrain himself from other such misdeeds. He expresses his disproval for a man of great worth who bowed in front of a woman he loves and makes themselves small and miserable.

Bacon, furthermore, talks about the unfettered love that destroys the man. He says that such love devalues the man and make them insignificant in front of others. Moreover, Bacon argues about romantic poetry in which the writer exaggerates the beauty of his beloved unnecessary. To him, such exaggeration is only suitable for romance and writing; they are not applicable in practical life. A paramour who detriments his discriminating influence to transfer flattering words to his woman evidently negotiates with his intellect, and judging power. A proud man will never make his beloved to rule over him by pouring sugarcoated words on her. For Bacon, a wise man must not love as it is impossible to be wise and to love at the same time.

In an unrequited love, the praises and compliment of a man for his beloved woman appear to be a weakness of his character. Moreover, when her woman doesn’t feel responding the paramour, she treats his love as a pitiable weakness of his character. The love of man can result in two things: either the woman will respond to him in the same way or will create an inward feeling of insignificant in a woman for the man. So, Bacon warns, the man before falling in love should understand one thing that it doesn’t harm anything but man’s self-esteem.

Those who see the world as nothing but a place to fulfill their carnal desires destroy themselves. They losses both affluence and wisdom in search or sexual pleasures in the world. Bacon argues that such passions are overwhelmed in the period of prosperity than of adversity. Carnal pleasures get accentuated in the time of both happiness and distress and can be called as “child of folly”. However, these sensual pleasure when are uncontrolled can lead to the destruction of business, wealth, and health.

The army men seem to have a special attraction for love as they have for the wine. Bacon discusses the men’s nature and argues that men have a special inclination towards love for other. He makes his love universal by expanding it towards everyone, no matter such love gentle and kind and people who have some spiritual and religious belonging have this kind of love. In the end, Bacon says that the love that arises from marriage is the root cause of mankind’s creation, while love in friendship makes it perfect but lust corrupts it and embarrass it.

Of Love by Francis Bacon Literary Analysis

The essay “Of Love” is an argumentative essay written by Sir Francis Bacon. Bacon in this essay argues about the various ills of falling in love. He particularly argues about the carnal pleasures and its consequences.

Sir Francis Bacon is a well-known English Essayist and philosopher. He devoted himself to writing along with scientific work and wrote sixty essays. This essay, Of Love, is regarding the love. Love, in today’s world, have influenced a large number of people. The objective of Bacon in this essay is to demonstrate the effect of love on all kinds of people. No matter who you are, you will fall in love with somebody and this love will definitely have an effect on you, and sometimes love makes one do senseless things.

Bacon then talks about the sensual love that drains one’s intelligence. For some people, love is nothing but a source of Carnal pleasure. However, such love if lasted long has hard consequences.

Bacon then talks about the noble and kind love the spiritual people possess. They don’t love a single person or group of people but the entire universe. They are more inclined towards every creation in the universe. Another kind of noble love that Bacon argues about is the love between husband and wife. This love is further dignified with the love of friends.

Conciseness, straightforwardness, wittiness, and compact opinions are the merits that Bacon’s essay cover. The methodical way of inscription makes his essay logical and rational. The subject matter that he argues about is taken from real life experiences and is a hot topic of discussion in every time. The readers find his essay more welcoming and pleasurable. The use of the Latin proverb in his essay shows his high knowledge regarding the Latin language, and it also adds colors to his writing.

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The Definition of Love, Essay Example

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Words: 603

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Thesis statement

Love is a precious gift from God to humankind without it life lacks purpose and meaning

Multiple definition modes of love

The term lave has a variety of definitions to the extent that a precise definition is not practical and makes it the most difficult aspect to define. The definition of love ranges from biblical perspective to every day application. The biblical definition of love is that it is patient and kind. The bible also elaborates that love does not envy, boast, express pride, rudeness, self seeking, not easily angered and never keeps a track record of wrongs.  Etymology of love can be traced to the beginning of English language and the earliest writings in English of 8 th century

Love definition and synonyms, example and illustration

Love can be defined as a noun in which case it means a passionate feeling involving a deep affection. A good example in this case is the babies filling extreme feelings of love to their parents. The synonyms of love in this context include fondness, endearment, intimacy, tenderness, feelings of attachment and deep affection.

Love can also be used as a noun in the context of a person or item that a person loves. Existing synonyms in this context include a loved one, sweetheart, honey, dear, beloved, my angel, sweet among others.

Love can also be defined from the context of a verb in which case it expresses a feeling of deep romantic as well as a sexual attachment to a person.  For example, “I love you so much”. The existing synonyms in this context include a feeling of deep affection, adore, worship, idolize, and devoted to, care for and others.

A good example of negation in love is “you are aware that when I hate you, it is for the reason that I love you to the extent of passion which unhinges my soul.”

Formal definition of love

The formal definition of love is profound tender and a passionate affection of one person to another. The formal definition also denotes love as an intense affection, some feelings of being attracted to another person leading to sexual desire and an expression of fondness as well as enthusiasm. Love can also be attributed to deeper meaning that expresses some feelings, choice or state of mind. To some persons, the implication of love is an absolute devotion as well as an endless adoration. On the other hand, some people interpret love in terms of a temporary feeling which can easily disappear after some time. Other people still interpret love in terms of fairy-tale and to some others; love is perceived as a dream come true.

Love is a complex aspect comprising of several splendid features and humans can hardly live without love despite how much they can try. All people have something that they hold dearly to, be it a toy for a child, a pet for an adult or a significant someone. A good example in this respect is a favorite toy to a child to which the child has a deep affection for. A pet owner on the other hand shows a deep adoration to the pet to the extent that the animal has a strong feeling of safety.

The more efforts put in identification of universal definition to love, the more confusion is created within the existing meanings to love that can be given by different people. All the meanings attributed to love by different people have uniqueness to each other. For example, devotion, loyalty, respect, affection, passion, warmth can all be used to refer to love. Some of these terms are sturdy thus demands higher echelons of commitment and attention while others are relatively subtle.

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• Relationships

To Find Love and Meaning in Life, First Find Your Purpose

Chasing your passion often comes with personal and professional benefits..

Posted May 9, 2024 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

• Why Relationships Matter
• Find counselling to strengthen relationships
• Studies have found that purposeful people are more attractive overall than those who have no sense of purpose.
• The first step toward finding your purpose is believing you have one.
• A higher sense of purpose often results in more positive relationship outcomes.

What motivates and has meaning for you, helps you set goals , and makes you feel your life is moving in a clear forward direction? If you can easily answer those questions, if you believe your life has meaning and that you have a reason for being right here, right now, you’re much more likely on track to find your unique purpose in life and a path to success and happiness than someone who feels no particular calling or direction.

To find your purpose, start with the understanding that a purposeful life is a life filled with meaning and direction. Finding purpose requires self-reflection on your past life experiences and how they have affected you, opening yourself up to diverse ideas and experiences, and, ultimately, actively participating in your most meaningful areas of interest.

A small study led by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis found that narrowing down life’s many options to those that motivate you, and leave you feeling satisfied and positive about yourself, not only helps you find people to whom you are attracted but also helps them find you. And that may well include a long-term romantic partner, if that’s what you seek.

After setting up fake profiles on a dating app of people who appeared to have a strong sense of purpose as well as people with no real sense of purpose beyond themselves, the researchers asked 119 men and women to read and rank each on their attractiveness as romantic partners. Overall, the researchers reported, profiles of people called to a higher purpose—wanting to help others (i.e., volunteering community service), following a strong creative drive (i.e., having a passion for acting, writing, dancing or visual arts), focusing on financial goals (i.e., pursuing wealth) or strongly centering their lives around relationships with loved ones—were perceived to be more attractive as potential romantic partners than those who expressed no particular purpose at all.

The highest rank for potential partners went to profiles of individuals most focused on their relationships, followed by those with a creative profile, and then those who were committed to helping others. Interestingly, the profiles primarily focused on finances were ranked lower in appeal than any of the others.

According to Robert Sternberg’s triangular theory of love, intimacy, passion, and commitment are three components necessary for successful consummate, or complete, love. Other types and stages of love, from friendship and infatuation to romantic and companionate love, contain and often survive on just one or two of these components. In any case, commitment must be a component of any relationship if it is to be sustained.

Earlier studies have shown that those who have a higher sense of purpose, regardless of the category of purpose, report more positive relationship outcomes than those who don’t feel purposeful or are not pursuing a broader purpose in life. Research suggests this could be because highly purposeful people are also highly motivated people who invest more in their personal relationships and are therefore more committed to taking steps to resolve inevitable conflicts and sustain the intimacy and passion felt in a healthy, consummate relationship. Someone with a lesser sense of purpose may feel less invested in a romantic relationship and therefore be less motivated to take those same steps to protect that relationship.

But the benefits of having and feeling purpose extend well beyond finding like-minded thinkers and a near-perfect partner. Purposeful people have also been found to have better time management skills, better emotional regulation , less negativity and reactivity in stressful situations, and greater overall life satisfaction than those who feel little to no purpose in life. The purposeful are more resilient when faced with setbacks, and motivated to find the time and resources necessary to reach their goals, both personal and professional.

D’Ottone IC, Pfund GN, Hill PL. Purposeful Partners: Potential Relationship Quality and Sense of Purpose. International Journal of Applied Positive Psychology, 2023

Yemiscigil A, Yilmaz MS, Lee MT. How to Find Your Purpose. Harvard Business Review. September 15, 2023

Pfund GN. Hill PL. The Multifaceted Benefits of Purpose in Life. The International Forum for Logotherapy.(2018) 41; 27-37

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NYT Modern Love essayist navigates her grief with support from Walpole writing group

Writing can be a lonely activity, and you could say the same thing about processing grief. But Tina Hedin of Keene found community in a local writing group. It’s there that she started working on an essay about her grief after her daughter’s death. That essay recently appeared in the New York Times’ Modern Love section.

NHPR's Morning Edition host Rick Ganley spoke with Hedin about how writing can connect people who are grieving.

Your essay's called "We Didn't Know It Was the Last Time." Can you tell us about the essay for listeners who have not read that yet?

I think of it as an essay where the past and the present are happening at the same time. In my own experience of grief, that's a state that I find myself in a lot – where I'm in the present, but memories of the past are triggered by some little event and come rushing back.

And that's what happened the day that I'm describing in the story. I was at the gym. I saw a young woman there who reminded me of my daughter. It was Christmas season. I saw a picture on my phone that day taken of my daughter, and it took me back so vividly to the last days that we were together with her, and I describe that in my story.

And the experience of writing about that made me reflect on a more universal experience. Often we don't get a chance to know when something is the last time, when it's the last time we're with our loved one. Or we do something that we think is ordinary, and then in retrospect, it's incredibly precious and special because it will never happen again.

Writing isn't your job professionally, but you belong to a Walpole writing group. How did that help you navigate your grief after your daughter Kiki died?

I didn't expect to share the things that I was writing initially, but I did have a place to share them with my group. And as the months went by and I did get feedback from others, I realized that sharing my writing with other people who have experienced grief could give others what I got from reading.

Initially, after Kiki died, I was just desperate to find writing by others who had gone through the loss of a child, who were experiencing that kind of grief, and I was in hopes of feeling a connection, feeling not alone in this terrible experience.

What's been the response from readers to your essay? The New York Times obviously has a huge reach.

It's been pretty mind blowing for me. I woke up at 3 a.m. in the morning that it came out, too excited to sleep. And I went online, and I saw that I already had emails from Switzerland, and Dubai and the Netherlands – people around the world that had read it. At this point, I'm still trying to work my way through them.

Many of them are from parents who have lost a child. Many of them are from people experiencing grief and loss. Our grief is universal. Each loss is unique and precious to that person. And I really do feel honored that so many people have taken the time to reach out, especially considering that that was my hope in writing in the first place – was to connect with other people.

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Ivan Specht decided to employ his love of math during pandemic, which led to contact-tracing app, papers, future path

Part of the commencement 2024 series.

A collection of stories covering Harvard University’s 373rd Commencement.

Ivan Specht started at Harvard on track to study pure mathematics. But when COVID-19 sent everyone home, he began wishing the math he was doing had more relevance to what was happening in the world.

Specht, a New York City native, expanded his coursework, arming himself with statistical modeling classes, and began to “fiddle around” with simulating ways diseases spread through populations. He got hooked. During the pandemic, he became one of only two undergraduates to serve on Harvard’s testing and tracing committee, eventually developing a prototype contact-tracing app called CrimsonShield.

Specht took his curiosity for understanding disease propagation to the lab of computational geneticist Pardis Sabeti , professor in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard and member of the Broad Institute, known for her work sequencing the Ebola virus in 2014 . Specht, now a senior, has since co-authored several studies around new statistical methods for analyzing the spread of infectious diseases, with plans to continue that work in graduate school.

“Ivan is absolutely brilliant and a joy to work with, and his research accomplishments already as an undergraduate are simply astounding,” Sabeti said. “He is operating at the level of a seasoned postdoc.”

His senior thesis, “Reconstructing Viral Epidemics: A Random Tree Approach,” described a statistical model aimed at tackling one of the most intractable problems that plague infectious disease researchers: determining who transmitted a given pathogen to whom during a viral outbreak. Specht was co-advised by computer science Professor Michael Mitzenmacher, who guided the statistical and computational sections of his thesis, particularly in deriving genomic frequencies within a host using probabilistic methods.

Specht said the pandemic made clear that testing technology could provide valuable information about who got sick, and even what genetic variant of a pathogen made them sick. But mapping paths of transmission was much more challenging because that process was completely invisible. Such information, however, could provide crucial new details into how and where transmission occurred and be used to test things such as vaccine efficacy or the effects of closing schools. 

Specht’s work exploited the fact that viruses leave clues about their transmission path in their phylogenetic trees, or lines of evolutionary descent from a common ancestor. “It turns out that genome sequences of viruses provide key insight into that underlying network,” said the joint mathematics and statistics concentrator.

Uncovering this transmission network goes to the heart of how single-stranded RNA pathogens survive: Once they infect their host, they mutate, producing variants that are marked by slightly different genetic barcodes. Specht’s statistical model determines how the virus spreads by tracking the frequencies of different viral variants observed within a host.  

As the centerpiece of his thesis, he reconstructed a dataset of about 45,000 SARS-CoV-2 genomes across Massachusetts, providing insights into how outbreaks unfolded across the state.

Specht will take his passion for epidemiological modeling to graduate school at Stanford University, with an eye toward helping both researchers and communities understand and respond to public health crises.

A graphic designer with experience in scientific data visualization, Specht is focused not only on understanding outbreaks, but also creating clear illustrations of them. For example, his thesis contains a creative visual representation of those 45,000 Massachusetts genomes, with colored dots representing cases, positioned nearby other “dots” they are likely to have infected.

Specht’s interest in graphics began in middle school when, as an enthusiast of trains and mass transit, he started designing imagined subway maps for cities that lack actual subways, like Austin, Texas . At Harvard, he designed an interactive “subway map” depicting a viral outbreak.

As a member of the Sabeti lab, Specht taught an infectious disease modeling course to master’s and Ph.D. students at University of Sierra Leone last summer. His outbreak analysis tool is also now being used in an ongoing study of Lassa fever in that region. And he co-authored two chapters of a textbook on outbreak science in collaboration with the Moore Foundation.

Over the past three years, Specht has been lead author of a paper in Scientific Reports and another in Cell Patterns , and co-author on two others, including a cover story in Cell . His first lead-author paper, “The case for altruism in institutional diagnostic testing,” showed that organizations like Harvard should allocate COVID-19 testing capacity to their surrounding communities, rather than monopolize it for themselves. That work was featured in The New York Times .

During his time at Harvard, Specht lived in Quincy House and was design editor of the Harvard Advocate, the University’s undergraduate literary magazine. In his free time he also composes music, and he still considers himself a mass transit enthusiast.

In the acknowledgements section of his thesis, he credited Sabeti with opening his eyes to the “many fascinating problems at the intersection of math, statistics, and computational biology.”

“I could fill this entire thesis with reasons I am grateful for Professor Sabeti, but I think they can be summarized by the sense of wonder and inspiration I feel every time I set foot in her lab.”

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