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Jul 29, 2024 · Love is confusing. People in the U.S. Google the word “love” about 1.2 million times a month. Roughly a quarter of those searches ask ...
How to use love in a sentence. strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties; attraction based on sexual desire : affection and tenderness felt by lovers… See the full definition
There are 24 meanings listed in OED's entry for the noun love, six of which are labelled obsolete. See ‘Meaning & use’ for definitions, usage, and quotation evidence. love has developed meanings and uses in subjects including. Christianity (Old English) physiology (Old English) law (Old English) classical mythology (Middle English) gambling ...
- Overview
- Etymology
- Psychological theories of love
- Biological theories of love
love, an emotion characterized by strong feelings of affection for another arising out of kinship, companionship, admiration, or benevolence. In a related sense, “love” designates a benevolent concern for the good or welfare of others. The term is also used to refer to sexual attraction or erotic desire toward another. Love as an individual emotion...
The word love is derived from the hypothetical term leubh, a root in Proto-Indo-European (the reconstructed parent of Indo-European languages) meaning care or desire. Leubh eventually developed into Latin libet and Old English lufu, which was both a noun and a verb describing deep affection or being very fond of something.
One prominent psychological theory of love, the triangular theory, was introduced in the 1980s by the American psychologist Robert Sternberg. Sternberg argued that love has three emotional components: intimacy, passion, and decision or commitment. Familiar forms or experiences of love can be understood to consist of a single component, different combinations of two components, or all three components. For example, the love that is characteristic of close friendships or liking consists of intimacy alone; infatuation consists of passion alone; “empty love”—which may exist at an early stage of an arranged marriage or at a later stage of a deteriorating marriage—consists of commitment alone; romantic love consists of intimacy and passion; “companionate” love consists of intimacy and commitment; fatuous love consists of passion and commitment; and consummate, or complete, love consists of a combination of all three components, intimacy, passion, and commitment. Sternberg also held that forms of love consisting of combinations of components tend to last longer than those consisting of single components.
In the 1970s the American social psychologist Zick Rubin developed a conception of love as consisting of attachment, caring, and intimacy and a conception of liking as consisting of closeness, admiration, respect, and warmth. He incorporated these elements into detailed questionnaires of liking and loving whose scalable answers collectively provide a relatively objective measure of the strength and character of liking or loving in a given relationship.
Many biochemists consider love to be a biological process. Positive socializing triggers cognitive and physiological processes that create desirable or beneficial emotional and neurological states. A relationship provides constant triggering of sensory and cognitive systems that prompt the body to seek love and to respond positively to interaction with loved ones and negatively to their absence. Recent biological theories of love, pioneered in evolutionary research by the American anthropologist Helen Fisher, break down love into three biological processes: lust, attraction, and attachment. Lust generally operates through the distribution of the hormones testosterone and estrogen, attraction via the organic compound dopamine and the neurotransmitters norepinephrine and serotonin, and attachment through the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin. For evolutionary biologists, each component of love has an evolutionary basis: lust for encouraging sexual reproduction, attraction for discriminating in favor of healthy mates, and attachment for facilitating familial bonding.
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For additional discussion of love and other emotions from varied scientific perspectives, see emotion.
Feb 13, 2019 · Love is the word used to label the sexual excitement of the young, the habituation of the middle-aged, and the mutual dependence of the old. There is love, of course. And then there's life, its ...
Apr 8, 2005 · Love. First published Fri Apr 8, 2005; substantive revision Wed Sep 1, 2021. 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 ...
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Philosophy of Love. This article examines the nature of love and some of the ethical and political ramifications. For the philosopher, the question “what is love?” generates a host of issues: love is an abstract noun which means for some it is a word unattached to anything real or sensible, that is all; for others, it is a means by which our being—our self and its world—are irrevocably ...
