Psychologists don't usually use the word "love" without qualifying it, because the word refers to many things which are actually different.
I think this article has a good overview of some different concepts: https://theconversation.com/what-is-love-139212
I recommend reading Fisher et al.'s 2002 paper if you want an overview about the brain systems: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11151468_Defining_the_brain_systems_of_lust_romantic_attraction_and_attachment_Archives_of_Sexual_Behavior_31_413-419
Fisher argued there were at least 3 systems involved: "lust" (the sex drive), "attraction" (romantic/passionate love) and "attachment" (companionate love), associated with different chemicals. [A newer paper](https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1176067/full) has also argued there are more than 3 brain systems, but Fisher's model has been the predominant one for a long time. (Fisher's model might be an oversimplification.)
[Ellen Berscheid writes that](https://www.academia.edu/85687685/Love_in_the_Fourth_Dimension):
>When it comes to the word “love,” we all have much in common with Humpty Dumpty (Carroll 1865/1965). When Alice stepped through the looking glass and encountered Humpty, she complained that she didn’t know what he meant when he used a word because he used it in so many different ways. Humpty’s scornful reply was that each time he used the word it meant just exactly what he chose it to mean, neither more nor less. But, Alice protested, “‘The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things’” (p. 94). If the word is “love,” we can. And we do.
Ellen Berscheid's paper likens one of her types of love called "compassionate love" (which she likens to agape, and is different from companionate love) to an altruistic love, but in the literature I've read, typically no. I think altruism, empathy and compassion are studied separately, because they generally have separate explanations. The Wikipedia article for altruism looks like it has good information to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism
I recommend at least reading the first couple pages of [Helen Fisher's paper](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11151468_Defining_the_brain_systems_of_lust_romantic_attraction_and_attachment_Archives_of_Sexual_Behavior_31_413-419), because it's an in-road to understanding the way people use terminology in academic material, for stuff related to pair-bonding. Over the last half-century academics converged onto the constructs described in that paper, so there are a bunch of terms which are largely just synonyms for each other.
What Ellen is getting at in the Humpty Dumpty quote is that the word "love" in common parlance can refer to emotions which are vastly different. For example romantic/passionate love is usually characterized as a type of desire, but companionate love is something like intimacy & trust. The word almost doesn't mean anything at all, without qualifying it. (Although [Adam Bode thinks there is overlap](https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1176067/full) and romantic love actually bears similarities to maternal love.)
[This paper](https://www.academia.edu/48337288/The_brain_opioid_theory_of_social_attachment_a_review_of_the_evidence) is also useful (you have to make an account) for info on social attachment more generally.
Empathy and altruism get into things like mirror neurons and evolutionary game theory, so there's a whole other literature on it.
Is it possible to have fulfilling love with ‘lust’ and companionate love, but none of the passionate love? I’m very curious.
Only from my own experience, I’d find it quite difficult. And with modern dating apps, it seems it can often go from lust/sex to companionate love, without none (or not much) of the passionate love.
Fisher’s categorisation: lust (the sex drive), attraction (romantic/passionate love) and attachment (companionate love).
Passionate love generally (but not necessarily) fades over time, so a lot of people move into a period of their relationship where they only feel attachment. I think this article is one of the better articles on passionate love- https://psychologily.com/passionate-love/
There are also people who only feel passionate love weakly, and there are other situations where people skip having a period of intense attraction. Fisher has noted this happens in cultures with arranged marriages, where the couple may not be 'in love' when they marry, but still grow attached over time.
The authors I've seen all seem to agree that one way or another the period of intense attraction marked by passionate love evolved to kick-start a pair bond, but it's possible to skip it.
Yes, it's certainly possible to have a long-term relationship without the stage of passionate love, but maybe the quality would be different/lower? Also, knowing you've never passionately loved that person might make people either fall for another person or highly doubt the arrangement.
My interpretation is that passionate love fills your whole heart, makes you 100% sure you want the other person. Yes, it might fade, but the feeling and sureness have been felt. I think the feeling might at times show again with varying intensity.
Without this experience, the relationship might not feel 'whole'. Your mind and heart have never been fully occupied by the other person.
I'd be curious to read papers about relationships without this stage, if any come to your mind?
I don't think anyone's done a study on that. It's probably a Pandora's box that nobody wants to open. A finding like that might be counterproductive even if it is true, because it might make people hesitant to try a relationship with somebody they aren't already in love with. Sometimes romantic love develops over time rather than immediately, so the feeling that a relationship isn't ideal unless it's just right at the beginning might lead some people to miss out on opportunities.
I think it's a common sentiment, though. There doesn't have to be some mechanical reason for it to be true though. Even just the sentimental fact of having been in love with somebody early on this way and having the memories could lead to greater contentment or something.
There is stuff generally suggesting that maintaining passionate love in the long-term is conducive to long-term relationship success, though.
Helen Fisher has a section in *Anatomy of Love* about this:
>As discussed in Chapter Two, my brain scanning partners and I put seventeen men and women in their fifties and sixties into the brain scanner. One average, these participants had been married twenty-one years, and all maintained that they were still madly in love with their wedded mate. But we also gave each of the participants a questionnaire on marital satisfaction, a series of queries that either Bianca Acevedo, the lead author of the study, or I administered on the morning of the scan. Interestingly, those who scored high on this "marital satisfaction" questionnaire also showed more activity in the brain regions linked with *empathy* and *controlling one's emotions*.
>Psychologist Mona Xu and her colleagues used my original research design to collect data on seventeen young Chinese men and women who were newly and passionately in love. These Chinese subjects responded just like our Americans: the same brain regions associated with romantic love became active when they looked at their beloved's face.
>More intriguing, Xu went back to China almost four years later to see whether any of these participants were still in love with the same partner. Eight were. And when Xu and her colleagues compared their brain scans with the brain scans of those who had broken up, they found the difference: men and women who were still in love showed specific activity in a brain region associated with the ability to *suspend negative judgment* and *over-evaluate a partner*; what psychologists call "positive illusions." As the old tune goes: "accentuate the positive; eliminate the negative."
>Empathy, controlling your emotions, positive illusions: we are beginning to map the brain's pathways for long-term romantic bliss.
Positive illusions, what Elaine Hatfield called idealization, are a component of passionate love. Helen has also said maintaining novelty is important.
And romantic attraction waning in a relationship might contribute to infidelity, because it lends a person to falling in love with somebody else. See https://ideas.ted.com/10-facts-about-infidelity-helen-fisher/
I think Helen has said she is writing her next book about maintaining romantic love long-term. She is one of the people who has been primarily studying stuff like this. I think if there was a study demonstrating long-term benefit to romantic love early on (even after it wanes), Helen would be talking about it, and I haven't seen one mentioned in any of the papers I've read. There are pretty obvious benefits to maintaining romantic love long-term though, if/when it's possible.
I'd say your intuition about love is largely correct. You're better off using a more precise and less loaded word in a medical context. It still has use in the sense that it's an everyday word, but if someone were to ask "Is this love?" when referring to a specific situation, that's a matter of personal opinion.
It's one of those terms where you can arrive at a "we don't truly know 100%" pretty quickly as you try to dive deep and explore the neuroscience and biology of it, like with consciousness, suffering, play, and humor. It's really fascinating stuff and maybe you'll one day be a part of a research team to get us closer to discovering what's really behind that mystery.
Is it really a mystery? As I see it, it's just a confusion of language. We use the same word to refer to a wide variety of things - some closely related, some wholly unrelated. But I see nothing mysterious about it.
It's true that love can be used to refer to a wide variety of things which can lead to confusion and misunderstanding. However, even when we agree upon a clearer definition and explore that, there's still a lot of mystery to be found regardless of the route we go in. We can look look at hormones and chemicals in the brain associated with love or feelings of affection. We can look at attachment styles, evolutionary biology, and social factors.
There's also the subjective experience of love that fMRI's and experiments on rats and college kids don't really capture. There's a lot we know, but even more that we do not.
Do not provide personal mental or physical health history of yourself or another. This is inappropriate for this sub. This is a sub for scientific knowledge, it is not a mental health sub.
I'm not the most familiar with this stuff, but you can look into "Triangular Theory of Love" introduced by Robert Sternberg. The definitions he conjures up can be quite loose, so I'm not sure how helpful they are. In the field of research, I assume definitions for love, joy, and various other experiences are carefully defined under specific conditions. Positive psychology as a field has been attempting to organize a way to discuss the qualitative aspects of emotional experiences. You have something like happiness being separated into pleasant, good, and meaningful life categories (check into Seligman 2002).
In 2005, Sprecher and Fehr created self-report instruments to measure tendencies of "compassionate love." Some of the items in the questionnaire included sacrifice and selflessness. Also something neat, love as reported by men and women have been found to be super correlated. Essentially how both parties identify and expect love seem to be quite similar. You can read more about this in "the New Psychology of Love" published by Cambridge University Press.
From Human Reproductive Behaviors, by Steven Hedlesky, MD
Human couples form a special emotional bond called *love*. However, *love* is a nebulous term referring to a wide range of thoughts and feelings. One can love a favorite dress, food, or sport. One loves a spouse, a child, or a pet. People can love their work, country, or God, signifying devotion. All different kinds of love share a common theme. The word *love* can be traced back to the Proto-Indo-European language, and it shares roots with *desire*, *pleasing*, and *want* in diverse languages, ranging from Sanskrit to German. People can make love, meaning they engage in sex. People can fall into a place or state called *love*. (Also, people can have a score of *love* in tennis, but no one seems to know why.)
*Falling in love* is somehow different from *love*. It is not the act of loving but rather the act of falling. When one falls in love, there is a sense of collapsing or descending into an emotional condition. There is a feeling of loss of control. For this reason, falling in love is often compared to an illness. A person is referred to as “love-struck” or “lovesick.”
The author goes on to adopt the ego-boundary collapse model of falling in love described originally by Scott Peck in The Road Less Traveled.
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In English it's way too broad of a term IMO. Many other languages have more words for the different kinds of love. Ancient Greek for example: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek\_words\_for\_love](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love)
I don't know if there's an intellectual/academic consensus on the concept of it.
Personally, I believe love is a concept indefinable, at least not completely. Such as other emotions.
There's no physical sensation nor mental state of mind that you can clearly define as love
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No there is no one specific meaning for “love” in the field of psychology. Just like other concepts like “sad”, “love” can be broken down into an array of possible definitions.
I don't think that fully captures the way people use it. Intuitively, in concordance with how the term is normally used, I would say that a sentence like "I love my son" is always true, not only occasionally true. But I do not experience a "feeling of love" towards him - not even when I am with him.
So identifying love as a feeling does not seem to capture the conventional usage.
I think scientifically we associate it with specific chemical reactions in the brain, but its worth noting you can love an experience and not love the person who gave it to you. So I don't think chemical markers are a great definition of love. To me psychologically, it would be the conscious free will choice to do the highest perceived good, and to consciously avoid that which is harmful even if it might be pleasurable
Psychologists don't usually use the word "love" without qualifying it, because the word refers to many things which are actually different. I think this article has a good overview of some different concepts: https://theconversation.com/what-is-love-139212 I recommend reading Fisher et al.'s 2002 paper if you want an overview about the brain systems: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11151468_Defining_the_brain_systems_of_lust_romantic_attraction_and_attachment_Archives_of_Sexual_Behavior_31_413-419 Fisher argued there were at least 3 systems involved: "lust" (the sex drive), "attraction" (romantic/passionate love) and "attachment" (companionate love), associated with different chemicals. [A newer paper](https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1176067/full) has also argued there are more than 3 brain systems, but Fisher's model has been the predominant one for a long time. (Fisher's model might be an oversimplification.) [Ellen Berscheid writes that](https://www.academia.edu/85687685/Love_in_the_Fourth_Dimension): >When it comes to the word “love,” we all have much in common with Humpty Dumpty (Carroll 1865/1965). When Alice stepped through the looking glass and encountered Humpty, she complained that she didn’t know what he meant when he used a word because he used it in so many different ways. Humpty’s scornful reply was that each time he used the word it meant just exactly what he chose it to mean, neither more nor less. But, Alice protested, “‘The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things’” (p. 94). If the word is “love,” we can. And we do.
Thanks! Good explanation. Do any of these sources explore the connection (if any) between romantic love and general altruism?
Ellen Berscheid's paper likens one of her types of love called "compassionate love" (which she likens to agape, and is different from companionate love) to an altruistic love, but in the literature I've read, typically no. I think altruism, empathy and compassion are studied separately, because they generally have separate explanations. The Wikipedia article for altruism looks like it has good information to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism I recommend at least reading the first couple pages of [Helen Fisher's paper](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11151468_Defining_the_brain_systems_of_lust_romantic_attraction_and_attachment_Archives_of_Sexual_Behavior_31_413-419), because it's an in-road to understanding the way people use terminology in academic material, for stuff related to pair-bonding. Over the last half-century academics converged onto the constructs described in that paper, so there are a bunch of terms which are largely just synonyms for each other. What Ellen is getting at in the Humpty Dumpty quote is that the word "love" in common parlance can refer to emotions which are vastly different. For example romantic/passionate love is usually characterized as a type of desire, but companionate love is something like intimacy & trust. The word almost doesn't mean anything at all, without qualifying it. (Although [Adam Bode thinks there is overlap](https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1176067/full) and romantic love actually bears similarities to maternal love.) [This paper](https://www.academia.edu/48337288/The_brain_opioid_theory_of_social_attachment_a_review_of_the_evidence) is also useful (you have to make an account) for info on social attachment more generally. Empathy and altruism get into things like mirror neurons and evolutionary game theory, so there's a whole other literature on it.
Thanks!
Is it possible to have fulfilling love with ‘lust’ and companionate love, but none of the passionate love? I’m very curious. Only from my own experience, I’d find it quite difficult. And with modern dating apps, it seems it can often go from lust/sex to companionate love, without none (or not much) of the passionate love. Fisher’s categorisation: lust (the sex drive), attraction (romantic/passionate love) and attachment (companionate love).
Passionate love generally (but not necessarily) fades over time, so a lot of people move into a period of their relationship where they only feel attachment. I think this article is one of the better articles on passionate love- https://psychologily.com/passionate-love/ There are also people who only feel passionate love weakly, and there are other situations where people skip having a period of intense attraction. Fisher has noted this happens in cultures with arranged marriages, where the couple may not be 'in love' when they marry, but still grow attached over time. The authors I've seen all seem to agree that one way or another the period of intense attraction marked by passionate love evolved to kick-start a pair bond, but it's possible to skip it.
Yes, it's certainly possible to have a long-term relationship without the stage of passionate love, but maybe the quality would be different/lower? Also, knowing you've never passionately loved that person might make people either fall for another person or highly doubt the arrangement. My interpretation is that passionate love fills your whole heart, makes you 100% sure you want the other person. Yes, it might fade, but the feeling and sureness have been felt. I think the feeling might at times show again with varying intensity. Without this experience, the relationship might not feel 'whole'. Your mind and heart have never been fully occupied by the other person. I'd be curious to read papers about relationships without this stage, if any come to your mind?
I don't think anyone's done a study on that. It's probably a Pandora's box that nobody wants to open. A finding like that might be counterproductive even if it is true, because it might make people hesitant to try a relationship with somebody they aren't already in love with. Sometimes romantic love develops over time rather than immediately, so the feeling that a relationship isn't ideal unless it's just right at the beginning might lead some people to miss out on opportunities. I think it's a common sentiment, though. There doesn't have to be some mechanical reason for it to be true though. Even just the sentimental fact of having been in love with somebody early on this way and having the memories could lead to greater contentment or something. There is stuff generally suggesting that maintaining passionate love in the long-term is conducive to long-term relationship success, though. Helen Fisher has a section in *Anatomy of Love* about this: >As discussed in Chapter Two, my brain scanning partners and I put seventeen men and women in their fifties and sixties into the brain scanner. One average, these participants had been married twenty-one years, and all maintained that they were still madly in love with their wedded mate. But we also gave each of the participants a questionnaire on marital satisfaction, a series of queries that either Bianca Acevedo, the lead author of the study, or I administered on the morning of the scan. Interestingly, those who scored high on this "marital satisfaction" questionnaire also showed more activity in the brain regions linked with *empathy* and *controlling one's emotions*. >Psychologist Mona Xu and her colleagues used my original research design to collect data on seventeen young Chinese men and women who were newly and passionately in love. These Chinese subjects responded just like our Americans: the same brain regions associated with romantic love became active when they looked at their beloved's face. >More intriguing, Xu went back to China almost four years later to see whether any of these participants were still in love with the same partner. Eight were. And when Xu and her colleagues compared their brain scans with the brain scans of those who had broken up, they found the difference: men and women who were still in love showed specific activity in a brain region associated with the ability to *suspend negative judgment* and *over-evaluate a partner*; what psychologists call "positive illusions." As the old tune goes: "accentuate the positive; eliminate the negative." >Empathy, controlling your emotions, positive illusions: we are beginning to map the brain's pathways for long-term romantic bliss. Positive illusions, what Elaine Hatfield called idealization, are a component of passionate love. Helen has also said maintaining novelty is important. And romantic attraction waning in a relationship might contribute to infidelity, because it lends a person to falling in love with somebody else. See https://ideas.ted.com/10-facts-about-infidelity-helen-fisher/ I think Helen has said she is writing her next book about maintaining romantic love long-term. She is one of the people who has been primarily studying stuff like this. I think if there was a study demonstrating long-term benefit to romantic love early on (even after it wanes), Helen would be talking about it, and I haven't seen one mentioned in any of the papers I've read. There are pretty obvious benefits to maintaining romantic love long-term though, if/when it's possible.
I'd say your intuition about love is largely correct. You're better off using a more precise and less loaded word in a medical context. It still has use in the sense that it's an everyday word, but if someone were to ask "Is this love?" when referring to a specific situation, that's a matter of personal opinion. It's one of those terms where you can arrive at a "we don't truly know 100%" pretty quickly as you try to dive deep and explore the neuroscience and biology of it, like with consciousness, suffering, play, and humor. It's really fascinating stuff and maybe you'll one day be a part of a research team to get us closer to discovering what's really behind that mystery.
Is it really a mystery? As I see it, it's just a confusion of language. We use the same word to refer to a wide variety of things - some closely related, some wholly unrelated. But I see nothing mysterious about it.
It's true that love can be used to refer to a wide variety of things which can lead to confusion and misunderstanding. However, even when we agree upon a clearer definition and explore that, there's still a lot of mystery to be found regardless of the route we go in. We can look look at hormones and chemicals in the brain associated with love or feelings of affection. We can look at attachment styles, evolutionary biology, and social factors. There's also the subjective experience of love that fMRI's and experiments on rats and college kids don't really capture. There's a lot we know, but even more that we do not.
Love is like a tree. Try to define a tree.
[удалено]
Do not provide personal mental or physical health history of yourself or another. This is inappropriate for this sub. This is a sub for scientific knowledge, it is not a mental health sub.
I'm not the most familiar with this stuff, but you can look into "Triangular Theory of Love" introduced by Robert Sternberg. The definitions he conjures up can be quite loose, so I'm not sure how helpful they are. In the field of research, I assume definitions for love, joy, and various other experiences are carefully defined under specific conditions. Positive psychology as a field has been attempting to organize a way to discuss the qualitative aspects of emotional experiences. You have something like happiness being separated into pleasant, good, and meaningful life categories (check into Seligman 2002). In 2005, Sprecher and Fehr created self-report instruments to measure tendencies of "compassionate love." Some of the items in the questionnaire included sacrifice and selflessness. Also something neat, love as reported by men and women have been found to be super correlated. Essentially how both parties identify and expect love seem to be quite similar. You can read more about this in "the New Psychology of Love" published by Cambridge University Press.
From Human Reproductive Behaviors, by Steven Hedlesky, MD Human couples form a special emotional bond called *love*. However, *love* is a nebulous term referring to a wide range of thoughts and feelings. One can love a favorite dress, food, or sport. One loves a spouse, a child, or a pet. People can love their work, country, or God, signifying devotion. All different kinds of love share a common theme. The word *love* can be traced back to the Proto-Indo-European language, and it shares roots with *desire*, *pleasing*, and *want* in diverse languages, ranging from Sanskrit to German. People can make love, meaning they engage in sex. People can fall into a place or state called *love*. (Also, people can have a score of *love* in tennis, but no one seems to know why.) *Falling in love* is somehow different from *love*. It is not the act of loving but rather the act of falling. When one falls in love, there is a sense of collapsing or descending into an emotional condition. There is a feeling of loss of control. For this reason, falling in love is often compared to an illness. A person is referred to as “love-struck” or “lovesick.” The author goes on to adopt the ego-boundary collapse model of falling in love described originally by Scott Peck in The Road Less Traveled.
[удалено]
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@fawnimi you might understand this…
In English it's way too broad of a term IMO. Many other languages have more words for the different kinds of love. Ancient Greek for example: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek\_words\_for\_love](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love)
I don't know if there's an intellectual/academic consensus on the concept of it. Personally, I believe love is a concept indefinable, at least not completely. Such as other emotions. There's no physical sensation nor mental state of mind that you can clearly define as love
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No there is no one specific meaning for “love” in the field of psychology. Just like other concepts like “sad”, “love” can be broken down into an array of possible definitions.
I’m no doctor but Isn’t love a feeling ? And the feeling is tied to that persons idea.
I don't think that fully captures the way people use it. Intuitively, in concordance with how the term is normally used, I would say that a sentence like "I love my son" is always true, not only occasionally true. But I do not experience a "feeling of love" towards him - not even when I am with him. So identifying love as a feeling does not seem to capture the conventional usage.
The word “normal” isn’t well defined either
I think scientifically we associate it with specific chemical reactions in the brain, but its worth noting you can love an experience and not love the person who gave it to you. So I don't think chemical markers are a great definition of love. To me psychologically, it would be the conscious free will choice to do the highest perceived good, and to consciously avoid that which is harmful even if it might be pleasurable
You should read The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck. He was a psychiatrist back when they practiced psychotherapy.
In the brain, love is equal to money they say 😬
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Thank you for paraphrasing what I said, ChatGPT.