What is love?

Love is a set of emotions and actions characterized by intimacy, passion, and loyalty. These include care, intimacy, protection, attraction, love, and trust. The intensity of love can change over time. It is associated with a range of positive emotions such as happiness, excitement, life satisfaction, and euphoria, but it can also lead to negative emotions such as jealousy and stress.

When it comes to love, some say it is one of the most important human emotions. However, although it is one of the most studied behaviors, it is still poorly understood. For example, researchers debate whether love is a biological or a cultural phenomenon. Love is influenced by biology and culture. Hormones and biology are important, but the way we express and feel love is also influenced by our personal beliefs about love.

How do you know?

Researchers have distinguished between loving others and being loved.

A vessel of passion and love - Zeke Rubin

According to psychologist Zick Rubin, romantic love has three components.

Attachment: the need for physical contact and approval with others

Caring: Take the happiness and needs of others as your own

Intimacy: sharing personal thoughts, feelings, and needs with others

Based on this view of romantic love, Rubin developed two questionnaires to measure these variables: the Rubin Like and Affection Scales. People think they like the person they like, but love is characterized by mutual loyalty, possessiveness, and trust.

Types of love

Not all types of love are created equal, and psychologists have identified different types of love that people can experience. This type of love includes:

Friendship: This type of love involves liking someone and sharing some intimacy.

Infatuation: This is a type of love that often involves an intense attraction without a feeling of attraction. It often occurs early in a relationship and can escalate into long-term love.

Passionate love: This type of love is characterized by intense feelings of desire and attraction. It often involves the idealization of the other person and the need to maintain lasting physical intimacy.

Compassion/partner love: This type of love is characterized by trust, affection, intimacy, and loyalty.

Unrequited love: This type of love occurs when one person loves another who does not reciprocate their feelings.

The Chemistry and Psychology of Love and Attraction

Is love just psychological or is it physical? Most people see falling in love as a purely emotional or psychological experience. Although psychology and human relationships are often considered to be closely related falling in love is a physical and emotional experience. Even in the early stages of withdrawal, physical symptoms such as palpitations, increased energy, sweaty palms, blurred focus, and dizziness occur.

These physical changes go hand in hand with the emotional changes you feel when you are attracted to or in love with someone. But it's not just the body that experiences these changes when it comes to falling in love. And your brain goes through them.

These signs of physical attraction are caused by changes in the brain. In this case, when you are in love, your brain is full of various neurochemicals that make you feel good.

These include chemicals like dopamine, oxytocin, norepinephrine, and phenylethylamine, all of which play different roles in our body's processes, not just when we're falling in love. For example, dopamine, which is associated with vertigo in the early stages of attraction, also affects several brain functions. This includes aspects such as motivation, learning, attention, and mood. However, dopamine is directly linked to the brain's reward system and the experience of pleasure. In this case, receiving a greater reward from a task usually increases dopamine levels in the brain.