essay on what is true love

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.

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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?

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Understanding True Love

Categories: Relationship

About this sample

Words: 380 |

Published: Apr 11, 2019

Words: 380 | Page: 1 | 2 min read

Works Cited

Beck, A. (1988). Love is never enough: How couples can overcome misunderstandings, resolve conflicts, and solve relationship problems through cognitive therapy. New York: Harper Perennial.
Cohen, L. (1992). The Future. In The Future (p. 13). Columbia Records.
Epstein, M. (2009). The nature of love: A philosophical exploration. Oxford University Press.
Fisher, H. (2017). Anatomy of love: A natural history of mating, marriage, and why we stray. WW Norton & Company.
Fromm, E. (1956). The art of loving. Harper & Row.
Johnson, S. (2008). Hold me tight: Seven conversations for a lifetime of love. Little, Brown.
Rumi. (2004). The Essential Rumi (Coleman Barks, Trans.). HarperCollins.
Schwartz, B. (2016). The paradox of choice: Why more is less. HarperCollins.
Sue, D. W., & Sue, D. (2015). Counseling the culturally diverse: Theory and practice. John Wiley & Sons.
Whelan, M. (2013). Love 2.0: How our supreme emotion affects everything we feel, think, do, and become. Penguin.

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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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Wonderly, M., 2016, “On Being Attached”, Philosophical Studies , 173: 223–42.
–––, 2017, “Love and Attachment”, American Philosophical Quarterly , 54: 235–50.

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

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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.

Works-Cited List

Boyer, Janet. “What Is Love?” 1999. Web.

Moseley, Alex. “ Philosophy of Love ”. From The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2001. Web.

“Social Psychology, Interpersonal Relations,” 2008. Web.

Chicago (A-D)
Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2022, May 12). Can One Really Define Love? https://ivypanda.com/essays/what-is-love/

"Can One Really Define Love?" IvyPanda , 12 May 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/what-is-love/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Can One Really Define Love'. 12 May.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Can One Really Define Love?" May 12, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/what-is-love/.

1. IvyPanda . "Can One Really Define Love?" May 12, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/what-is-love/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Can One Really Define Love?" May 12, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/what-is-love/.

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What Is True Love? Figuring Out If You’ve Found The One

The concept of true love has intrigued poets, philosophers, and everyday individuals for centuries. It’s a term that evokes deep emotion and brings images of fairy tales, romantic movies, and eternal commitment. But what does it really mean? How do you know if you’ve found “the one”? True love is often more complex and multifaceted than the romanticized portrayals in pop culture.

This article will explore the concept of true love, providing insights to help you determine if you’ve found that special connection and offer guidance to nurture and grow that love in your relationship.

Characteristics of true love

While each relationship and connection will vary, some key characteristics of true love often include the following.

Mutual respect

In true love, both partners recognize and value each other’s individuality, opinions, and feelings. They listen without judgment and show consideration for each other’s needs and wishes. Respect in true love means treating each other with kindness and honor, even in disagreements.

Deep connection

True love fosters a connection that goes beyond the superficial. It’s a bond that often involves understanding each other’s core values, beliefs, and life goals. This connection creates a sense of companionship, where both partners feel they’re on the same team, working towards common dreams.

Trust and honesty

Trust is the bedrock of true love. It means believing in each other’s integrity and having faith in each other’s intentions. Honesty, in turn, nurtures this trust. Being truthful with each other strengthens the bond, even if the truth is difficult to face at times.

Empathy is the ability to deeply understand each other’s feelings. In true love, partners try to understand each other’s perspectives, feelings, and needs, providing support and compassion. Empathy helps partners to be more patient and tolerant with each other.

Unconditional support

True love means standing by each other’s side. Whether in success or failure, happiness or distress, partners in true love support each other’s highs and lows without conditions or reservations.

Commitment is a conscious choice to stay together and make the relationship work, even during challenging times. It’s not just about loyalty; it’s about actively investing in the relationship and nurturing it.

Common growth

True love often encourages personal growth and self-improvement. Partners in a loving relationship motivate each other to become better individuals, supporting each other’s ambitions and helping each other reach their full potential.

Acceptance means embracing each other’s flaws and imperfections. True love doesn’t seek to change the other person but accepts them for who they are, acknowledging that nobody is perfect.

How to know if you’ve found “the one”

Recognizing that you’ve found “the one” can seem like a profound realization, yet it might be elusive or challenging to put into words. Let’s explore some signs that may indicate you’ve found that special person with whom you have a deep, meaningful connection.

Comfort and safety

When you’re with “the one,” you might feel a sense of ease, comfort, and safety. You can be your authentic self without fear of judgment or criticism. There’s generally a feeling of home, a place where you’re understood and accepted.

Research suggests that feelings of love reduce stress and provide various health benefits, including lower blood pressure, better sleep, and more .

Healthy communication

Communication with “the one” often feels natural and effortless. Even in disagreements, you find ways to understand each other and reach compromises. Your conversations are meaningful, and you’re not afraid to discuss your feelings, fears, or dreams. If you are not seeing eye-to-eye, you want to make an effort to reach a mutual understanding while remaining respectful during the conversation.

Same goals and dreams

You and “the one” likely have aligned life goals and a vision for the future. Whether it’s career paths, family planning, or personal growth, you work together towards these goals, supporting each other along the way.

You overcome challenges together

Life is not without its challenges, but with “the one,” you face them together. Instead of tearing you apart, hardships tend to strengthen your bond. You become a team that can weather any storm, learning and growing from each experience.

Mutual admiration and inspiration

You admire each other’s qualities and find inspiration in each other’s strengths. There’s usually mutual respect and encouragement that pushes both of you to be better individuals.

Intuition and gut feeling

Sometimes, knowing you’ve found “the one” is an intuitive feeling, a deep inner knowing that this person is right for you. It’s a connection that feels different, more profound than other relationships.

Your happiness is their happiness

You find joy in each other’s happiness and strive to make each other’s lives more fulfilling. Your partner’s successes feel like your own, and you celebrate them together.

They make you want to be a better person

Being with “the one” encourages you to grow and improve yourself. You feel motivated to be the best version of yourself, not out of pressure but because of their positive influence on you.

You think long-term

When envisioning your future, your partner is an integral part of it. You make plans together, considering each other’s needs and desires, and see a lasting future together.

How can you tell if you’ve found your true love? Navigate relationships with therapy

The difference between infatuation and true love.

Love is a complex and multifaceted emotion that can take various forms. Two of the most commonly confused types are infatuation and true love. While they might seem similar at first glance, especially during the early stages of a relationship, they are fundamentally different in many ways.

When determining whether you are experiencing infatuation or true love, keep a lookout for these differences.

Characteristics of infatuation:

Duration - Infatuation is often a short-lived, intense emotion. It can feel overwhelming and all-consuming but typically fades over time.
Focus - The focus of infatuation is often more on the self and how the other person makes you feel. It’s about the pleasure, excitement, and gratification the relationship brings you.
Idealization - Infatuation often involves placing the other person on a pedestal, ignoring their flaws, and creating an idealized image of them. This can lead to unrealistic expectations.
Emotional Roller Coaster - Infatuation can bring intense highs but also significant lows. The mood of the relationship can change dramatically and unpredictably.
Physical Attraction - Infatuation often centers around physical attraction and desire. While these elements can be present in true love, they are typically more pronounced and prioritized in infatuation.

Characteristics of true love:

Duration - True love grows over time, deepening and becoming more profound. It’s a lasting connection that continues to thrive as you grow together.
Focus - The focus of true love extends beyond self-gratification. It’s about mutual growth, support, respect, and understanding. Both partners are invested in each other’s happiness and well-being.
Acceptance - True love means accepting each other’s imperfections and loving the whole person, flaws and all. It’s a more grounded and realistic view of each other.
Stability - True love brings stability and consistency to the relationship. While there may be ups and downs, they are typically navigated with mutual respect and communication, avoiding extreme emotional swings.
Emotional and Intellectual Connection - True love involves a deep emotional and intellectual connection that goes beyond physical attraction. It’s about common values, goals, and a genuine understanding of each other.

Nurturing true love in your relationship

Even if you consider your partner your true love, keeping a relationship takes time, effort, and commitment. Making sure you keep communicating with regular, open, and honest communication can be important to understanding each other’s needs as you grow together.

Spending quality time together can also help foster closeness in a relationship over time. You can do this by engaging in the same activities and hobbies or simply enjoying each other’s company.

In addition to this, regularly expressing gratitude and appreciation can help keep the love fresh and vibrant and each partner feeling valued in the relationship.

As you progress in your relationship, therapists or relationship coaches can offer professional insights and guidance tailored to your unique relationship.

Benefits of online therapy in relationships

Online therapy for relationships offers increased availability and flexibility for individuals and couples, allowing you to seek professional guidance regardless of location and schedule. The convenience of being in your own home can create a relaxed environment conducive to open communication while also potentially reducing costs. Online platforms, like Betterhelp and Regain, often provide additional tools and resources to supplement therapy sessions.

The benefits extend to long-distance relationships, providing joint sessions and ongoing support even when partners are in different locations. From addressing daily challenges to deeper relationship concerns, online therapy’s location independence, affordability, comfort, and specialized help make it a valuable resource in the modern, connected world. It breaks down barriers to entry and ensures that more individuals and couples have the therapeutic support they need.

The efficacy of online therapy has been an area of growing interest and study in mental health care, particularly as technology continues to advance. Research suggests that online therapy, also known as teletherapy, can be just as effective as traditional in-person therapy for relationship counseling .

Efficacy of online therapy

“As someone who had sought counseling/therapy for the first time, I had serious doubts about the effectiveness of online therapy, but my first meeting with Susan took out those doubts immediately. Over the last six months, Susan has not only given me tools to help me establish boundaries but has given me a new perspective on relationships and life in general. After a few sessions, I was able to turn a corner and have a new outlook on my interactions with others. I wholeheartedly recommend Susan and hope to work with her again in the future.”

“I am so happy I got paired with Ruthie Brooks. My sessions with her have been a positive and insightful experience. As a result, I can see my relationships improving and I have a better understanding of myself. She is very professional, kind, and great at what she does.”

What are the signs of true love?

True love is felt differently from person to person. Research suggests that a person’s culture, upbringing, and personal beliefs can significantly influence what they consider to be signs of love. However, evidence suggests some common themes regarding how love is perceived. Most people consider receiving compliments, feeling appreciated, receiving a gift, or being granted an act of kindness as signs of love. Depending on who is witnessing them, many other loving acts may also be perceived as signs of true love.

How rare is true love?

It is likely not possible to quantify how often true love happens in the world. The definition of “true love” is highly subjective, varying considerably from person to person. Some might equate love with preservation, feeling most loved when their partner provides safety. Others might consider love to mean acceptance, feeling the strongest connection to those who understand and accept them as they are. Regardless of how true love is defined, it is likely possible, even if its rarity is uncertain.

How do you tell if a man loves you?

Ultimately, the best way to know if a man loves you is to have a conversation about how both of you feel. While there are certain signs that a man may be into you , like wanting to spend more time with you, trying to make you smile, and being vulnerable, there is no way to be sure of his feelings without an honest discussion. If you feel like you are his priority and that communicating with him is easy, it is more likely that he has feelings for you. You may wish to consider inquiring about his feelings as long as you are ready to express yours.

How do you tell if a girl loves you?

Arguably, the best way to tell if a girl loves you is to discuss your feelings openly and inquire about hers. There may be signs, like if she tries to support you, allows you to be vulnerable, and seeks time with you, but likely the only way to be certain is with an honest conversation. Don’t be afraid to broach the subject if you think she might have strong feelings for you. If you don’t want the relationship to continue, it’s important to address her feelings respectfully and kindly. On the other hand, if you hope she has feelings for you, discussing your thoughts might bring renewed relief and understanding to you both.

What kind of love is real love?

“Real love” is likely different for everybody, but for most healthy adults with secure attachment styles , love often has the following components:

Long-lasting. True love, which is separate from infatuation or a “crush,” tends to grow over time as partners get to know each other's positive and negative qualities.
Focus. True love tends to be focused on both partners’ mutual growth rather than what one person can get from the other.
Acceptance. Real love tends to be based on acceptance, wherein both partners know, understand, and accept each other, flaws and all.
Stability. Up and downs occur in every relationship, but healthy relationships based on true love have downs that are navigated with respect, empathy, and kindness.
Deep Connection. Real love likely involves a deep emotional and intellectual connection based on more than physical attraction. Mutual core values, goals, and mutual understanding are all a part of true love.

What makes you fall in love with someone?

Love is a complex neurochemical process that involves several biological and psychological factors. Lust, or infatuation, tends to be mediated by the sex hormones testosterone and estrogen before moving on to more stable attraction, which is promoted through dopamine and norepinephrine. Long-term attachment is often attributed to hormones like oxytocin and vasopressin.

Although love is chemically mediated, psychological and personality factors also play a role. In addition, social factors like proximity, or how much time two people spend together, are likely also important. Researchers are still determining the exact formula for love, but two people with similar interests who spend a lot of time together are potential candidates.

For The Girl That You Love: Lyrics And Songs To Send Her Medically reviewed by Karen Foster , LPC
What Does Unconditional Love Mean? Medically reviewed by April Brewer , DBH, LPC
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Baby don't hurt me

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

This love quiz was medically reviewed by Ivy Kwong, LMFT.

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

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The Variety of Values: Essays on Morality, Meaning, and 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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Relationships

Is There Really True Love?

To find true love, focus on giving, not receiving..

Posted December 23, 2017 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

Why Relationships Matter
Find a therapist to strengthen relationships

Is there an emotional bond that deserves to be called true love? Is true love possible? In their 1986 hit song, the Judds sang: “Grandpa, take me back to yesterday ... Did lovers really fall in love to stay and stand beside each other come what may?”

The lyrics reflect the declining stability of marital relationships over four decades. Although the U.S. divorce rate declined slightly three years in a row from 2013 to 2016, typical marriages still have only about a 50% chance of lasting. For years, marriage rates declined, in part because young adults have waited longer to get married. Many say that they don’t intend to ever get married.

The belief that love is true when it lasts is not an outdated concept. In her 2015 song, True Love , Ariana Grande describes how her relationship grew into true love from kisses to a commitment to last forever. But how can a person know that a relationship will last forever? Lovers don’t expect that even a genuine relationship will consist only of passionate positive emotions. In 1960, Buddy Holly’s song, True Love Ways , was released posthumously. Written as a wedding gift for his wife, Holly’s song predicted: “Sometimes we’ll sigh; sometimes we’ll cry ... Throughout the days our true love ways will bring us joys to share with those who really care.”

Looking back on his marriage in his song, Remember When , Alan Jackson recounts the ups and downs over the years: “There was joy, there was hurt ... We came together, fell apart and broke each other’s hearts.” Despite it all, Jackson anticipated: “We won’t be sad, we’ll be glad for all the life we’ve had.”

Do conflicting emotions characterize or define true love? In her 2012 song, True Love , pop artist Pink expresses the mixed emotions of her relationship: “Sometimes I hate every single stupid word you say ... At the same time, I wanna hug you.” In fact, Pink explains: “I really hate you so much, I think it must be true love,” because “nothing else can break my heart like true love ... And no one else can break my heart like you.” Despite hurt and heartbreak, Pink identifies her feelings as true love because “without you I’m incomplete.”

In his song, All of Me , dedicated to his fiancée, John Legend also admits to complex emotions: “You’re my downfall, you’re my muse. My worst distraction, my rhythm and blues.” But ultimately completeness is the core of his relationship: “You’re my end and my beginning. Even when I lose I’m winning, ‘cause I give you all of me and you give me all of you.” Do we know a love is true when we don’t feel complete without our lover?

Research suggests that people share a common image of what it means to be loved. Key characteristics of knowing someone loves you include: support without expectation of anything in return, compassion in difficult times, quality time together, being told you are loved, feeling special and appreciated, and being forgiven for something you did wrong. By contrast, people agree that we don’t feel loved when someone is possessive or tries to control us.

But what does it mean to love with a pure or true love? Research has documented a number of different types of love: eros or romantic, ludus or game-playing, storge or friendship , pragma or logical, mania or possessive, and agape or altruistic . Physical attraction and intimacy are central to eros, permissiveness and variety of partners characterize ludus, companionship and stability are the foundation of storge, and compatibility in social and personal characteristics is the core of pragma. Mania is obsessive, dependent, jealous and intensely emotional, whereas agape is altruistic, all-giving, and selfless with no expectation of love in return.

How we love others can vary for different relationships and in various situations. But does one style of loving represent what we envision as true love? While each style illustrates our yearning to find the right person who will satisfy our need to be loved, one—agape—reveals our capacity for what might come closest to pure love. Rather than being concerned with how a relationship benefits us, agape is focused on the best interests of the one we love. It is the love that puts the other first. Researchers identify this style as one in which a person tries to always help their lover through difficult times, sacrifice their own wishes to let their lover achieve theirs, endure all for the sake of their lover, and suffer in place of their lover.

This love is expressed in Freddy Fender’s hit recording of Before the Next Teardrop Falls : “If he brings you happiness , then I wish you all the best. It’s your happiness that matters most of all.” Beyond the emotional, the essence of this selfless love is behavioral commitment: “But if he ever breaks your heart, if the teardrops ever start, I’ll be there before the next teardrop falls.”

The benefits of agape have been highlighted by research. Selfless caring is associated with deep love, intimate communication, relationship satisfaction, loyalty and commitment. Couples in agape relationships are likely to deal more effectively with stress by supporting each other and by dealing with problems jointly, promoting their sense of “ we-ness .” Employing healthy coping strategies can deepen commitment and strengthen satisfaction with the relationship.

But are there costs to loving in such a selfless way? What are the psychological consequences of altruistic love? One would anticipate that the strong commitment and deep bond would mean great emotional pain if the relationship fails. As expected, research suggests that the end of such a rich committed relationship can result in feelings of profound loss and sadness. The more rewarding the love, the greater loss. Taking the risk of one day having to pay such a price is inherent in the essential nature of agape as all-giving and selfless.

Is it realistic to think that we can love in such an all-giving, non-demanding way? Research suggests that this style is rarely, if ever, fully actualized. It might well be the ideal we can hope for and strive toward. In searching for true love, we need to redirect our focus and energy from receiving to giving. Research shows that those who practice other-directed love are less likely to ever have to pay the hefty price. Perhaps there is such a thing as true love, and perhaps it can last.

Cooper, L. R., & Kurstin, G. (2012). True love [Recorded by Pink (Lily Rose Cooper)]. On The Truth About Love [CD]. New York, NY: RCA Records.

Galinha, I. C., Oishi, S., Pereira, C. R., Wirtz, D., & Esteves, F. (2014). Adult attachment, love styles, relationship experiences and subjective well-being: Cross-cultural and gender comparison between Americans, Portuguese, and Mozambicans. Social Indicators Research , 119 , 823-852.

Grande, A. (2015). True Love. On Christmas & Chill [Digital Release on iTunes]. Republic Records.

Hammock, G., & Richardson, D. S. (2011). Love attitudes and relationship experience. The Journal of Social Psychology , 151 , 608-624.

Heaven, P. C. L., Da Silva, T., Carey, C., & Holen, J. (2004). Loving styles: Relationships with personality and attachment styles. European Journal of Personality , 18 , 103-113.

Hendrick, C., & Hendrick, S. (1986). A theory and method of love. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 50 , 392-402.

Holly, B., & Petty, N. (1960). True love ways [Recorded by B. Holly]. On The Buddy Holly Story , Volume 2 [Vinyl]. New York, NY: Coral Records.

Jackson, A. (2003). Remember when. On Greatest Hits Volume II [CD]. New York, NY: Arista Records.

Keith, V., & Peters, B. (1974). Before the next teardrop falls [Recorded by F. Fender]. On Before the Next Teardrop Falls [Vinyl]. Nashville, TN: Dot Records.

Legend, J. (2013). All of me. On Love in the Future [CD]. New York, NY: GOOD Music.

O’Hara, J. (1986). Grandpa, tell me ‘bout the good ol’ days [Recorded by The Judds]. On Rockin’ with the Rhythm [CD]. New York, NY: RCA Records.

Oravecz, Z., Muth, C., & Vandekerckhove, J. (2016). Do people agree on what makes one feel loved? A cognitive psychometric approach to the consensus on felt love. PLOS ONE . DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0152803

Sharma, S., & Ahuja, K. K. (2014). Does love last forever? Understanding an elusive phenomenon among dating and married couples. Journal of Psychosocial Research , 9 , 153-162.

Vedes, A., Hilpert, P., Nussbeck, F. W., Randall, A. K., Bodenmann, G., & Lind, W. R. (2016). Love styles, coping, and relationship satisfaction: A dyadic approach. Personal Relationships , 23 , 84-97.

Krystine Batcho, Ph.D. , is a professor at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York.

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What Is True Love?

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B.A., Art History and Creative Writing, University of Pennsylvania

It’s not uncommon to find yourself wondering if you’ve found true love. After all, you may have intensely strong feelings of affection and adoration toward your partner, but how do you know if these sentiments actually qualify as true love? Fortunately, there are eight key indicators that can help you determine if what you’ve found is true love or if it’s too good to be true.

What does true love really mean? In order to figure out if you’ve found true love, it’s important to first understand what true love actually entails. Essentially, true love means that you have an unwavering, unbreakable and unparalleled fondness and devotion for your partner. It's also defined by an emotional as well as physical connection with him or her that runs immeasurably deep, and life without your significant other would be practically unthinkable.

What are the signs of true love? If you’re unsure that what you’re experiencing is in fact true love, it’s important to look for these eight essential indicators.

1. You care about this person unconditionally. A tell-tale sign that you’ve found true love is that you absolutely and undeniably adore your partner with no strings attached. In other words, no matter what circumstances may befall you and through good times as well as bad, you support and deeply care for this person. Unconditional love is at the very heart of what true love means and entails.

2. You fully accept your partner. An additional indicator of true love is that you understand and accept your partner for the person who he or she truly is. You’re not trying to change your mate, fix him or her and/or turn him or her into a different person. Rather, you fully accept, appreciate and adore your partner, flaws and all.

3. You can talk about anything. When you’ve found true love, it means that you can candidly and honestly discuss anything with this person. True love implies that you’re completely truthful with your mate, aren’t holding back different aspects of your past and are able to fully open up to him or her. You share an intimacy that’s emotional as well as physical, and your loving connection is stronger because of your willingness and ability to be open and vulnerable around each other.

4. You’re completely yourself with this person. When you’ve found true love, you’re able to be totally authentic with your partner. You’re not pretending to be someone you’re not, feigning interests, passions or pastimes and/or acting in a way that doesn’t reflect the real you. Being yourself in your relationship is essential to experiencing true love.

5. You respect each other. In order to experience true love, it also means that there’s a high level of respect, kindness and compassion between you and your partner. You can empathize with one another, see each other’s point of view and are able to resolve conflicts and squabbles in a way that’s constructive and respectful of each other’s well-being.

6. You have similar values. In order to experience true love, your morals and values have to be aligned with those of your partner. While you may have your differences, such as where you grew up, your religious background or simply your obsession with football, true love means that you’re on the same page when it comes to distinguishing right from wrong. In a word, having similar principles is a principle component of true love.

7. Your happiness levels feed off of each other. If you’re wondering if you’ve found true love, it’s important to pay close attention to your true feelings and emotions. Does making this person happy make you happy in return? Does surprising him or her or doing favors for your partner give you a rush of joy as well? When you and your partner both have a mutual desire to bring happiness and contentment to one another, you should be happy to know that you're experiencing true love.

8. You’re a team. When you’ve found true love, it means that you’re fully committed, dedicated and devoted to each other. With true love, you and your partner work together as one unit to enrich each other’s lives for the better. And rather than behaving in a selfish or egotistical way, you think in terms of “we” instead of “me.” When it comes to true love, your mate is really your teammate.

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Essays About Love: 20 Intriguing Ideas for Students

Love can make a fascinating essay topic, but sometimes finding the perfect topic idea is challenging. Here are 20 of the best essays about love.

Writers have often explored the subject of love and what it means throughout history. In his book Essays in Love , Alain de Botton creates an in-depth essay on what love looks like, exploring a fictional couple’s relationship while highlighting many facts about love. This book shows how much there is to say about love as it beautifully merges non-fiction with fiction work.

The New York Times published an entire column dedicated to essays on modern love, and many prize-winning reporters often contribute to the collection. With so many published works available, the subject of love has much to be explored.

If you are going to write an essay about love and its effects, you will need a winning topic idea. Here are the top 20 topic ideas for essays about love. These topics will give you plenty to think about and explore as you take a stab at the subject that has stumped philosophers, writers, and poets since the dawn of time.

For help with your essays, check out our round-up of the best essay checkers .

1. Outline the Definition of Love

2. describe your favorite love story, 3. what true love looks like, 4. discuss how human beings are hard-wired for love, 5. explore the different types of love, 6. determine the true meaning of love, 7. discuss the power of love, 8. do soul mates exist, 9. determine if all relationships should experience a break-up, 10. does love at first sight exist, 11. explore love between parents and children, 12. discuss the disadvantages of love, 13. ask if love is blind, 14. discuss the chemical changes that love causes, 15. outline the ethics of love, 16. the inevitability of heartbreak, 17. the role of love in a particular genre of literature, 18. is love freeing or oppressing, 19. does love make people do foolish things, 20. explore the theme of love from your favorite book or movie.

Defining love may not be as easy as you think. While it seems simple, love is an abstract concept with multiple potential meanings. Exploring these meanings and then creating your own definition of love can make an engaging essay topic.

To do this, first, consider the various conventional definitions of love. Then, compare and contrast them until you come up with your own definition of love.

One essay about love you could tackle is describing and analyzing a favorite love story. This story could be from a fiction tale or real life. It could even be your love story.

As you analyze and explain the love story, talk about the highs and lows of love. Showcase the hard and great parts of this love story, then end the essay by talking about what real love looks like (outside the flowers and chocolates).

Essays About Love: What true love looks like?

This essay will explore what true love looks like. With this essay idea, you could contrast true love with the romantic love often shown in movies. This contrast would help the reader see how true love looks in real life.

An essay about what true love looks like could allow you to explore this kind of love in many different facets. It would allow you to discuss whether or not someone is, in fact, in true love. You could demonstrate why saying “I love you” is not enough through the essay.

There seems to be something ingrained in human nature to seek love. This fact could make an interesting essay on love and its meaning, allowing you to explore why this might be and how it plays out in human relationships.

Because humans seem to gravitate toward committed relationships, you could argue that we are hard-wired for love. But, again, this is an essay option that has room for growth as you develop your thoughts.

There are many different types of love. For example, while you can have romantic love between a couple, you may also have family love among family members and love between friends. Each of these types of love has a different expression, which could lend itself well to an interesting essay topic.

Writing an essay that compares and contrasts the different types of love would allow you to delve more deeply into the concept of love and what makes up a loving relationship.

What does love mean? This question is not as easy to answer as you might think. However, this essay topic could give you quite a bit of room to develop your ideas about love.

While exploring this essay topic, you may discover that love means different things to different people. For some, love is about how someone makes another person feel. To others, it is about actions performed. By exploring this in an essay, you can attempt to define love for your readers.

What can love make people do? This question could lend itself well to an essay topic. The power of love is quite intense, and it can make people do things they never thought they could or would do.

With this love essay, you could look at historical examples of love, fiction stories about love relationships, or your own life story and what love had the power to do. Then, at the end of your essay, you can determine how powerful love is.

The idea of a soul mate is someone who you are destined to be with and love above all others. This essay topic would allow you to explore whether or not each individual has a soul mate.

If you determine that they do, you could further discuss how you would identify that soul mate. How can you tell when you have found “the one” right for you? Expanding on this idea could create a very interesting and unique essay.

Essays About Love: Determine if all relationships should experience a break-up

Break-ups seem inevitable, and strong relationships often come back together afterward. Yet are break-ups truly inevitable? Or are they necessary to create a strong bond? This idea could turn into a fascinating essay topic if you look at both sides of the argument.

On the one hand, you could argue that the break-up experience shows you whether or not your relationship can weather difficult times. On the other hand, you could argue that breaking up damages the trust you’re working to build. Regardless of your conclusion, you can build a solid essay off of this topic idea.

Love, at first sight is a common theme in romance stories, but is it possible? Explore this idea in your essay. You will likely find that love, at first sight, is nothing more than infatuation, not genuine love.

Yet you may discover that sometimes, love, at first sight, does happen. So, determine in your essay how you can differentiate between love and infatuation if it happens to you. Then, conclude with your take on love at first sight and if you think it is possible.

The love between a parent and child is much different than the love between a pair of lovers. This type of love is one-sided, with care and self-sacrifice on the parent’s side. However, the child’s love is often unconditional.

Exploring this dynamic, especially when contrasting parental love with romantic love, provides a compelling essay topic. You would have the opportunity to define this type of love and explore what it looks like in day-to-day life.

Most people want to fall in love and enjoy a loving relationship, but does love have a downside? In an essay, you can explore the disadvantages of love and show how even one of life’s greatest gifts is not without its challenges.

This essay would require you to dig deep and find the potential downsides of love. However, if you give it a little thought, you should be able to discuss several. Finally, end the essay by telling the reader whether or not love is worth it despite the many challenges.

Love is blind is a popular phrase that indicates love allows someone not to see another person’s faults. But is love blind, or is it simply a metaphor that indicates the ability to overlook issues when love is at the helm.

If you think more deeply about this quote, you will probably determine that love is not blind. Rather, love for someone can overshadow their character flaws and shortcomings. When love is strong, these things fall by the wayside. Discuss this in your essay, and draw your own conclusion to decide if love is blind.

When someone falls in love, their body feels specific hormonal and chemical changes. These changes make it easier to want to spend time with the person. Yet they can be fascinating to study, and you could ask whether or not love is just chemical reactions or something more.

Grab a science book or two and see if you can explore these physiological changes from love. From the additional sweating to the flushing of the face, you will find quite a few chemical changes that happen when someone is in love.

Love feels like a positive emotion that does not have many ethical concerns, but this is not true. Several ethical questions come from the world of love. Exploring these would make for an interesting and thoughtful essay.

For example, you could discuss if it is ethically acceptable to love an object or even oneself or love other people. You could discuss if it is appropriate to enter into a physical relationship if there is no love present or if love needs to come first. There are many questions to explore with this love essay.

If you choose to love someone, is heartbreak inevitable? This question could create a lengthy essay. However, some would argue that it is because either your object of affection will eventually leave you through a break-up or death.

Yet do these actions have to cause heartbreak, or are they simply part of the process? Again, this question lends itself well to an essay because it has many aspects and opinions to explore.

Literature is full of stories of love. You could choose a genre, like mythology or science fiction, and explore the role of love in that particular genre. With this essay topic, you may find many instances where love is a vital central theme of the work.

Keep in mind that in some genres, like myths, love becomes a driving force in the plot, while in others, like historical fiction, it may simply be a background part of the story. Therefore, the type of literature you choose for this essay would significantly impact the way your essay develops.

Most people want to fall in love, but is love freeing or oppressing? The answer may depend on who your loved ones are. Love should free individuals to authentically be who they are, not tie them into something they are not.

Yet there is a side of love that can be viewed as oppressive, deepening on your viewpoint. For example, you should stay committed to just that individual when you are in a committed relationship with someone else. Is this freeing or oppressive? Gather opinions through research and compare the answers for a compelling essay.

You can easily find stories of people that did foolish things for love. These stories could translate into interesting and engaging essays. You could conclude the answer to whether or not love makes people do foolish things.

Your answer will depend on your research, but chances are you will find that, yes, love makes people foolish at times. Then you could use your essay to discuss whether or not it is still reasonable to think that falling in love is a good thing, although it makes people act foolishly at times.

Most fiction works have love in them in some way. This may not be romantic love, but you will likely find characters who love something or someone.

Use that fact to create an essay. Pick your favorite story, either through film or written works, and explore what love looks like in that work. Discuss the character development, storyline, and themes and show how love is used to create compelling storylines.

If you are interested in learning more, check out our essay writing tips !

Bryan Collins is the owner of Become a Writer Today. He's an author from Ireland who helps writers build authority and earn a living from their creative work. He's also a former Forbes columnist and his work has appeared in publications like Lifehacker and Fast Company.

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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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Essays on Love: Exploring the Depths of Human Connection

Love is a complex and multifaceted emotion that has been explored and celebrated in various forms of art throughout history. From Shakespeare’s famous sonnets to the latest blockbuster movie, love’s impact can be seen and felt in all corners of the world. But what exactly is love? Is it a feeling, an experience, or something deeper? How do we define it, and what prompts us to seek and nurture connections with others?

These are just a few of the questions that have fascinated philosophers, poets, and scientists for centuries. Love, in its essence, is a fundamental aspect of human existence that goes beyond simple attraction or affection. It encompasses a wide range of emotions, from the joy and fulfillment of finding a life partner to the vulnerability and pain that can come with a broken heart.

In academic papers and essays on love, there are various topics one can choose to write about. From exploring the different types of love, such as romantic love, platonic love, and familial love, to delving into the impact of love on mental and physical health, the possibilities are endless. The choice of topic will depend on your own interests and the purpose of your essay.

When writing a 500-word essay, a 5-paragraph structure works perfectly. Start with a strong hook or a thought-provoking quotation to grab the reader’s attention. Then, in the body paragraphs, you can use examples, anecdotes, or research to support your thesis statement and explore your ideas further. Finally, conclude by summarizing your main points and leaving the reader with a final thought or call to action.

One of the great benefits of writing essays on love is that it allows you to touch upon topics that are frequently left unexplored in everyday conversations. Love is a universal experience, yet it is often talked about in vague terms without delving into its complexities. By writing about love, you have the opportunity to bring these nuanced discussions to the forefront and deepen your understanding of this powerful emotion.

So, whether you wish to write a personal reflection on a past love, analyze the cultural and societal influences on our perception of love, or explore the future of love in an increasingly digital world, there is a wealth of material to draw from. The important thing is to choose a topic that you are passionate about and that will allow you to showcase your unique perspective.

In the following essays, we will delve into various aspects of love, including the role of vulnerability in creating fulfilling connections, the ways in which love can be a force for personal growth and change, and the impact of love in different cultures and time periods. Each essay will present a different lens through which to view and understand love, providing you with new insights and perspectives to consider.

So get ready to dive into the depths of human connection, as we explore the many ways in which love shapes and defines our lives. Whether you are a seasoned writer or just starting out, these essays on love will provide you with the tools and inspiration to write thought-provoking and impactful papers that will be sure to leave a lasting impression.

Download this collection of essays on love now and see for yourself the power of words and the art of writing in capturing the essence of love.

Bonus tip: If you are struggling to find the perfect topic for your love essay, try writing a 250-words essay on “What Love Means to Me.” This exercise will help you reflect on your own experiences and perceptions of love and can serve as a great starting point for further exploration.

The Power of Love Essays

When writing love essays, it is important to choose a topic that resonates with you personally. Whether you are exploring the love within a family, the love shared between friends, or the romantic love between partners, selecting a topic that you have a deep connection with will allow you to write with extra attention and authenticity.

The thesis statement is an essential part of your essay, as it states the main argument or focus of your paper. In love essays, the thesis statement often explores the definition of love, how it affects individuals and society, and its role in fulfilling human needs for connection and vulnerability.

In order to support your thesis statement, it is crucial to do thorough research on the topic. You can choose to include scientific studies, cultural examples, or personal experiences that add depth and credibility to your essay. By including a variety of sources, your love essay will be well-rounded and comprehensive.

When crafting your essay, consider using prompts or writing exercises to inspire your writing. Such prompts may ask you to define what love means to you, discuss a time when you felt loved, or explore the role of love in a specific context or culture. These prompts can provide a framework for your essay and help you stay focused on your main points.

As you write your love essay, keep in mind the impact that love has on both individuals and society as a whole. Love can inspire, heal, and bring people together, but it can also be a source of pain and vulnerability. By delving into the complexities of love, your essay will paint a picture of its power and significance in our lives.

Finally, to give your readers a bonus, you can include examples of famous love essays or provide a sample love essay of your own. This will allow your readers to see how others have approached the topic and give them inspiration for their own writing.

Examples of Love Essays That Explore the Depths of Human Connection

One way to hook the reader’s attention is by starting with an anecdotal or personal story about love. For example, you could write about a time when you felt a deep connection with someone, whether it was a romantic partner, a friend, or a family member. By sharing your own experience, you give the reader a glimpse into the world of love and human connection.

In academic writing, it is important to have a clear thesis statement that outlines the main argument of your essay. When writing about love, you could choose a thesis statement that explores the idea that love is a necessary and fulfilling human experience. This statement can be supported by research on the health benefits of love and the importance of social connections for overall well-being.

One way to support your thesis is by using examples from famous movies or literature that depict love and its impact on relationships. For example, you could write about how the movie “The Notebook” portrays a deep and enduring love between the two main characters, and how their love transforms both of their lives.

In addition to using examples from popular culture, you can also draw inspiration from your own life and relationships. Think about the people you love and the ways in which they have enriched your life. Consider writing about a specific moment or experience that encapsulates the depth and power of love.

When writing about love, it is important to consider the different dimensions of human connection. Love can be romantic, platonic, familial, or even self-directed. By exploring these different types of love, you can paint a more comprehensive picture of the complexities of human relationships.

For those who wish to delve deeper into the topic of love, it is also possible to write a longer essay, such as a 500-word essay. This length allows for a more in-depth exploration of the topic and can provide more room for personal reflection and analysis.

Understanding the Different Types of Love Essays

Defining love: academic essays on love.

If you’re looking to delve into the academic aspects of love, you might choose to write an essay that explores the definition of love. In this type of essay, you can examine the various theories and philosophical perspectives on love, such as the different types of love according to the ancient Greeks or the psychological aspects of falling in love. This type of essay typically requires research and the inclusion of credible sources to support your arguments.

The Power of Love: Anecdotal Essays

Anecdotal essays on love provide a more personal and experiential perspective. In this type of essay, you have the freedom to share your own experiences and explore the power of love in your life. You can recount personal stories of love and its impact, discussing how it has shaped your relationships, changed your worldview, or enriched your life. Anecdotal essays allow you to connect with readers on an emotional level and provide a glimpse into the essence of love.

Exploring Love in Literature and Art

Love has been a recurring theme in literature and art for centuries. Writing an essay on love in literature or art allows you to explore how this universal human emotion has been portrayed throughout history. You can analyze famous works of literature, such as Shakespeare’s plays or Jane Austen’s novels, and examine how love is depicted and its significance in those works. Alternatively, you can delve into the world of art and discuss how artists have captured the essence of love through various mediums, such as painting, sculpture, or film.

Love in the Modern World: Essays on Modern Relationships

In the modern world, love and relationships have taken on new complexities and challenges. Essays on modern relationships can explore topics such as the impact of technology on love, online dating, or the changing dynamics of long-term partnerships. You can discuss the role of vulnerability, communication, and compromise in modern relationships, offering insights and reflections on what makes them fulfilling and how they differ from relationships in the past.

Whether you wish to write a 500-word essay or a 25-page thesis on love, there is a type of love essay that will capture your attention and inspire you. Love is a vast and boundless subject, and the ideas and topics you can explore are endless. Choose a type of love essay that resonates with you, and dive into this fascinating world that touches us all.

As a bonus, we’ve created a free download of 20 inspiring love essay topics that can serve as a starting point for your writing. These topics cover a wide range of love-related themes, from unconditional love and the pain of love to the ideal partner and the role of love in a shared future. Download this resource for instant inspiration and choose the topic that speaks to you the most.

Exploring Romantic Love, Familial Love, and Platonic Love in Essays

1. romantic love.

One of the most commonly explored forms of love in essays is romantic love. Romantic love is often depicted as passionate, intense, and all-consuming. Writers use their words to paint a picture of love’s essence, often touching on the vulnerability, joy, pain, and deep connection that comes with romantic relationships. They may analyze the science behind love’s attraction or share personal experiences and insights into the complexities of love.

For example, in the famous essay “On Love” by Alain de Botton, he explores the idea of an ideal partner and questions the societal expectations and pressures that shape our perception of love. He argues that true love requires a deep understanding of oneself and the ability to accept and love another person for who they truly are.

2. Familial Love

Another form of love frequently explored in essays is familial love. Familial love refers to the deep and unconditional bond between family members, such as between parents and children or among siblings. Writers may reflect on their own experiences with familial love, examining the unique dynamics, unconditional support, and selflessness that often characterize these relationships.

In her essay “This I Believe,” Maya Angelou writes about the love she received from her grandmother, who taught her the importance of love and taught her how to be a strong and confident woman. Through this touching personal story, Angelou highlights the transformative power of familial love.

3. Platonic Love

Essays on love also frequently explore platonic love, which is characterized by deep affection and connection without any romantic or sexual components. Platonic love often exists between close friends and can be just as profound and meaningful as romantic or familial love.

In the essay “The Four Loves,” C.S. Lewis discusses the concept of true friendship and the value of platonic love. He argues that platonic love is a higher form of love that transcends the physical and material aspects of a relationship, focusing instead on the deep emotional and intellectual connection between individuals.

Exploring different forms of love in essays provides readers with a broader understanding of the complexities of human connection and the many ways in which love manifests in our lives. Whether it’s through personal stories, philosophical musings, or academic research, essays on love offer a blueprint for understanding and navigating the intricate world of relationships.

Love Essay Topics That Will Spark Inspiration

What is the essence of love?
The impact of love on relationships
Love in the world of science
The art of love: How does it work?
The definition of love: A philosophical perspective
Exploring the depth of human connection through love
The role of love in fulfilling relationships
Love and family: The importance of shared experiences
Why do people fall in love?
The feeling of love: A 500-word picture
Love in literature: Analysis of famous love stories
The impact of technology on modern-day relationships
Is love a choice or a feeling?
Love at first sight: A myth or reality?
The different ways people express their love
Love in the digital age: Can it be genuine?
The role of love in personal growth and development
The connection between love and happiness
Unrequited love: The pain and longing
The evolution of love through the ages
Love and forgiveness: Can they coexist?
The role of love in shaping our individual identities
Love in times of crisis: How does it sustain us?
The importance of self-love in forming healthy relationships
Love in different cultures and societies
The future of love: What will it look like?

These topics provide a blueprint for writing an engaging and thought-provoking love essay. Choose a topic that resonates with you and allows you to explore the depths of human connection. Remember to use examples and real-life experiences to support your points. Whether you’re writing an academic paper or a personal essay, these topics will help you create a powerful piece that will leave a lasting impression on your reader’s mind.

As a bonus, here are 3 sample topic hooks to get you started:

“Love is a powerful force that can transcend boundaries and bring people together. In this essay, we will explore the impact of love on relationships and how it shapes our lives.”
“Have you ever wondered what love really means? In this essay, we will delve into the essence of love and try to answer this age-old question.”
“Love is like a touch of magic that can transform lives. In this essay, we will examine the role of love in personal growth and development.”

Feel free to use these hooks as inspiration for your own love essay. Remember to stay true to your own voice and ideas, and have fun exploring the wonderful world of love!

Download here to get a ready-made 25 love essay topics guide written by our experienced writers. Without any tools or academic papers, it’s an easy and free way to find your next topic!

From Love and Relationships to the Power of Self-Love

When we think of love, the first thing that often comes to mind is the romantic love between partners. This type of love is often characterized by attraction, passion, and deep emotional connection. It is the kind of love that makes your heart race and gives you butterflies in your stomach. Many essays have been written about the essence of romantic love and how it can shape our lives.

But love is not just limited to romantic relationships. There are many different types of love that we experience in our lives. For example, the love we feel for our family and friends is equally important and meaningful. These types of love are often characterized by a deep sense of care and concern for the well-being of others.

Another important aspect of love is self-love, which is the idea of having a positive regard for oneself. It is about accepting and valuing who you are as a person and taking care of your own needs. Self-love is crucial for personal growth and happiness. It allows us to set healthy boundaries, prioritize our own well-being, and cultivate a positive self-image.

The Power of Self-Love

Self-love is not selfish; it is a necessary component of a healthy and fulfilling life. When we love ourselves, we are better equipped to love others and build strong, meaningful relationships. It allows us to bring our best selves to our interactions with others and to form deep connections based on mutual respect and understanding.

Self-love is also important for overcoming challenges and setbacks in life. It gives us the strength and resilience to bounce back from difficult situations and to keep moving forward. When we love and believe in ourselves, we have the power to achieve our goals and create the life we desire.

Choosing to prioritize self-love is not always easy, especially in a world that often tells us we need to be perfect. But it is a choice that we must consciously make if we want to live a life filled with love and happiness.

Tips for Practicing Self-Love

Practicing self-love is a lifelong journey that requires effort and commitment. Here are a few tips to help you on your path to self-love:

Take care of your physical and mental health. Prioritize self-care activities that nourish your body and mind.
Set boundaries and learn to say no. It is important to prioritize your own needs and not overextend yourself.
Celebrate your accomplishments, no matter how small. Acknowledge your strengths and achievements on a regular basis.
Surround yourself with positive and supportive people who uplift and encourage you.
Practice self-compassion. Treat yourself with the same kindness and understanding that you would offer to a loved one.

What is the main theme of the article?

The main theme of the article is the exploration of the depths of human connection through essays on love.

Are there any examples of love essays provided in the article?

Yes, the article provides examples of love essays that readers can choose from for inspiration.

Why should I read essays on love?

Reading essays on love can provide a deeper understanding of human connection and the various emotions and experiences associated with love.

What are some possible topics for love essays?

Some possible topics for love essays can include the different types of love, the challenges of love, the impact of love on personal growth, and the role of love in relationships.

How can reading love essays inspire me?

Reading love essays can inspire you by offering new perspectives, insights, and experiences that can help you reflect on your own emotions and relationships.

What is the main focus of the essay?

The main focus of the essay is exploring the depths of human connection through the lens of love. The essay delves into different aspects of love, including its definition, various types of love, and its impact on human relationships.

What are some examples of love mentioned in the essay?

The essay gives examples of different types of love, such as romantic love, familial love, and platonic love. It discusses the love between a couple in a romantic relationship, the love between family members, and the love between friends.

By Alex Koliada, PhD

Alex Koliada, PhD, is a well-known doctor. He is famous for studying aging, genetics, and other medical conditions. He works at the Institute of Food Biotechnology and Genomics. His scientific research has been published in the most reputable international magazines. Alex holds a BA in English and Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California , and a TEFL certification from The Boston Language Institute.

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I’m going boysober for a month. Here’s what that means and why I’m doing it

I’m listening to my favorite podcast, “Savage Love,” as I churn the elliptical machine at my gym.

Exercise is an effort. I’ve just endured the first sexual encounter I’ve had since ending a long-term relationship six months ago, and I’m still shaken from the ick of it. As I try to redirect my angst into my workout, Dan Savage introduces his guest, comedian Hope Woodard, who’s created a stir by coining a new dating phenomenon: boysober.

My interest piqued, I up my pace and turn up the volume. Both my blood and my brain are pumped as I take in the idea.

What does 'boysober' mean?

Boysober is a yearlong decision to abstain from all-things dating as an act of self-care — including sex.

The conversation between Savage and Woodard is lively and meandering, so the exact definition of boysober is fuzzy. But what is clear: Boysober centers on women reclaiming autonomy over their bodies and reallocating their lost time, energy and mental space from dating into more meaningful pursuits. Of course, it’s not just cisgender women who can benefit from the boysober movement — Woodard has explained that the term is inclusive of people of any gender or sexual orientation.

A boysober year gives space to reflect, heal, and focus on what one wants next — from a relationship and for oneself. The movement began as a monthly comedy show in Brooklyn run by Woodard, and has expanded into a social media movement, especially among Gen Z women.

Woodard explained that while she consented to all the sex she’s had — a lot of it, according to her — she often said yes because she “was never really given the permission to say no.” Boysober is an antidote to the false narrative that it was her responsibility to validate men’s emotions, thoughts and feelings with sex.

“I’m a little bit angry at myself and angry at all the sex that I’ve had that I feel like I didn’t choose,” Woodard said in a New York Times interview .” For the first time ever, I just feel like I have ownership over my body.”

But don’t call it celibacy.

“I hate ‘celibacy’ so much, because I don’t want to give credence to anyone saying you’re more lovable or respectable or better if you’re not having sex,” Woodard said. “Boysober is about taking time to pause, reflect and reprioritize — not to gain male approval.”

Celibacy comes with religious overtones of purity culture, and it’s often involuntary. Boysober? That’s a choice.

And loads of women are choosing it.

Including me, sort of.

Why I’m going boysober

Boysober is a Gen Z’s version of sex positivity, and I’m here for it. Young women are looking up from lifetimes of unfulfilling sexual and romantic encounters, and they’re opting out.

But at 53 years old, the term itself feels … disingenuous for me. I choose man sober as my mission instead. I’ve lived through decades of dating norms, and that affords me a perspective I think these 20-something women still need to gain.

I remember that dating is supposed to be fun .

It hasn’t been, for them or me.

After coming out of a long-term relationship, I expected my re-entry into the world of dating would be bumpy. But I’ve been jostled so hard, I’ve lost my center of gravity, immersed in a landscape of dating vocabulary I never wanted to grasp. I’ve been love bombed , benched, breadcrumbed , ghosted , and given the ick , without knowing what many of these terms were until they happened.

Add to this mess a seemingly endless drone of “hellos” and “hi beautifuls” in my dating app inbox, and me spending thankless hours trying to find a semblance of spark within a miasma of men.

I became a dopamine addict, feral for the rush of another new message, only to be disappointed yet again. Most of my energy and focus got sucked into a dating vortex.

I wanted it to stop, but feared if I gave up, it might be for good. By my age, many women opt out, determining the proverbial juice isn’t worth the search for a squeeze. In my experience, one rarely meets a suitable suitor in the wild over 50. So it’s do the work, or resign oneself to never finding a partner.

I’m not handing in my resignation.

But a mansober month made it OK to take a break.

A month seemed sufficient to regain my sense of buoyancy, and shift focus back to the things that make me, me. I vowed to write, sing, organize, exercise, go to shows, read books, cook and spend time with friends. I’d pushed these pastimes aside in favor of endless swiping, countless lackluster conversations, and a few mostly miserable dating experiences.

March 1 rolled around and I joyously jumped back into myself.

How’s my mansober month going?

I’m three weeks into my mansober journey. No conclusions so far, but I do feel a clarity, and with it, a calmer heart and clearer headspace.

I feel more connected to my own desires and what I want from relationships. Woodward spoke of this sensation in her “Savage Love” interview, stating, “I’m really enjoying living with desire and not so quickly acting on it. Instead I’m asking, what does it look like, to let yourself think and desire and wonder?” Observing my own has helped me see how destabilizing it was to share desire with a partner who didn’t share my values.

And best of all, I’m having so much fun. My life is abuzz with activities. I’ve been to birthday parties, live shows, karaoke, a play, even a gala. I’ve been more present as a parent. I’ve mentored new writers. It’s been amazing. I still haven’t exercised much, though. Even this was illuminating; taking a mansober month clarified that I can’t blame everything on dating. I’m better at making time for things I want to do versus things I should do. That one’s on me.

Woodard concluded her "Savage Love" interview with a slightly paradoxical message: Unlike alcohol sobriety, boysober isn’t an absolute. “You’re not sober if someone is taking up your brain space,” she said. But she sees a distinction between “taking up brain space” and putting yourself out there and flirting. That’s because the goal isn’t to quit dating forever. It’s to discover how to show up best in the world, including as a romantic or sexual partner.

“I’m not so interested in cutting men or love completely out. I want to find a way to navigate it better,” she said.

Yes, this. It’s where I’m heading once my mansober month ends.

I’m not ready to jump back into dating apps, maybe ever. But I do think I’ll try new ways to meet men. I even signed up for a speed dating event on the day my sobriety ends. I nearly didn’t do it, because it seemed like jumping in too quickly. But I decided I should, as a show of optimism.

I still believe romantic love and partnership is out there for me.

Being mansober has given me the tools to seek it, without sacrificing the best parts of myself to the quest.

Dana DuBois is a GenX word nerd living in the Pacific Northwest who enjoys storytelling at the intersection of relationships, music, and parenting. She’s the founder and editor of Pink Hair & Pronouns , a pub for parents of gender-nonconforming kids, and Three Imaginary Girls , a music ‘zine. Em-dashes, Oxford commas, and well-placed semicolons make her heart happy. You can read her work on Medium and Substack .

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IMAGES

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COMMENTS

The Concept of True Love
In essence it is a self-sacrificing act wherein a person puts another person's happiness and well-being above their own. For example in the poem "To my Dear and Loving Husband" by Anne Bradstreet she compares her love for her spouse as "more than whole mines of gold or all the riches that the East doth hold" (Bradstreet, 1).
True Love: What Love Is and What It Is Not
Avoid the "tit for tat" mentality. Love is an action each of us must choose for ourselves. When we start measuring what we do for each other, we create expectations and breed resentment instead of staying in touch with how good it feels to be loving toward someone else. Support the things that light your partner up.
Essay on Love: Definition, Topic Ideas, 500 Words Examples
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.
Understanding True Love: [Essay Example], 380 words
Get original essay. Love exists in things, plants, nature not just in people or not just in romance. Buddhists refer it to as "Indra's net" which connect all of us and all the things in this world. It means that everything we do the effect, other people, even the tiniest little things. According to me "Love is taking care of other ...
Love
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 ...
Can One Really Define Love?
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.
The Psychology of Love: Theories and Facts
What is love? Love is an emotion of strong affection, tenderness, or devotion toward a subject or object. When you love a person you experience pleasurable sensations in their presence and are ...
The Ordinary Concept of True Love
The first holds that the ordinary concept of true love picks out love that is highly prototypical. The second, that it picks out love that is especially good or valuable. The third, that people distinguish between psychological states that are "real" or not, and that it picks out love that is real. Two experiments provide evidence against ...
(PDF) The Ordinary Concept of True Love
The first holds that the ordinary concept of true love picks out love that is highly prototypical. The second, that it picks out love that is especially good or valuable. The third, that people ...
What Is True Love? Figuring Out If You've Found The One
Focus - The focus of true love extends beyond self-gratification. It's about mutual growth, support, respect, and understanding. Both partners are invested in each other's happiness and well-being. Acceptance - True love means accepting each other's imperfections and loving the whole person, flaws and all.
What Is Love?
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.
The Importance of Love
Wolf, Susan, 'The Importance of Love', The Variety of Values: Essays on Morality, Meaning, and Love (2015; online edn, Oxford Academic, 18 Dec. 2014), ... But, as one of my friends pointed out to me, it's not true—you can't choose your friends either. At least much of the time, once you've got your friends, you've got them for life ...
Essay about Meaning of True Love
Essay about Meaning of True Love. This essay sample was donated by a student to help the academic community. Papers provided by EduBirdie writers usually outdo students' samples. As human being man is born in this world full of longing, he has this need, that desires to be satisfied, the need for love, C.S. Lewis in his book 'Four Loves ...
Is There Really True Love?
For years, marriage rates declined, in part because young adults have waited longer to get married. Many say that they don't intend to ever get married. The belief that love is true when it ...
What is True Love?
The best definition of love Is "a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person." Love is typically felt between, family members, friends and significant others. In this paper I will define why people fall in love, based on biblical influences, lust, and similarities. 711 Words.
What Is True Love?
When you've found true love, it means that you're fully committed, dedicated and devoted to each other. With true love, you and your partner work together as one unit to enrich each other's lives for the better. And rather than behaving in a selfish or egotistical way, you think in terms of "we" instead of "me.".
Essays About Love: 20 Intriguing Ideas For Students
It could even be your love story. As you analyze and explain the love story, talk about the highs and lows of love. Showcase the hard and great parts of this love story, then end the essay by talking about what real love looks like (outside the flowers and chocolates). 3. What True Love Looks Like.
Essay on Love for Students and Children
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.
What Is True Love Argumentative Essay Example (400 Words)
Charles Argument Essay Many people have wondered can true love last forever. I agree and disagree that true love can last forever because true love is how you feel and feelings can always change. True love is described in three words - infatuation, lust, and friendship/companionship. True love can be disproved by infatuation.
Essays on Love: Exploring the Depths of Human Connection
Romantic Love. One of the most commonly explored forms of love in essays is romantic love. Romantic love is often depicted as passionate, intense, and all-consuming. Writers use their words to paint a picture of love's essence, often touching on the vulnerability, joy, pain, and deep connection that comes with romantic relationships.
Definition Essay: What Is True Love?
True love is the kind of love that will carry you through the roller coaster ride of emotions and possible hardships that can be overcome together. The experiences of love throughout life tends to be somewhat complicated, but worth it in the end when you find that special someone.…. 620 Words. 3 Pages.
Definition Essay About True Love
True love is the kind of love that will carry you through the roller coaster ride of emotions and possible hardships that can be overcome together. The experiences of love throughout life tends to be somewhat complicated, but worth it in the end when you find that special someone.…. 620 Words. 3 Pages.
What Is Boysober? What the Celibacy Trend Means and Why I'm ...
Coined by comedian Hope Woodard and discussed on Dan Savage's "Savage Love" podcast, boysober is the newest dating trend — sort of. Or, as I prefer to call it, mansober. IE 11 is not supported.
Dateline Philippines
Stay up to date with the biggest stories of the day with ANC's 'Dateline Philippines' (18 March 2024)

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

Definition: Essay on Love

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Love Essay Examples: Choose Your Sample for Inspiration

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What is love essay: 500 words

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1. Preliminary Distinctions

4. Love as Valuing

5. Emotion Views

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Can One Really Define Love? Essay

Works-Cited List

What Is True Love? Figuring Out If You’ve Found The One

Characteristics of true love

Mutual respect

Deep connection

Trust and honesty

Unconditional support

Common growth

How to know if you’ve found “the one”

Comfort and safety

Healthy communication

Same goals and dreams

You overcome challenges together

Mutual admiration and inspiration

Intuition and gut feeling

Your happiness is their happiness

They make you want to be a better person

You think long-term

How can you tell if you’ve found your true love? Navigate relationships with therapy

Nurturing true love in your relationship

Benefits of online therapy in relationships

Efficacy of online therapy

What are the signs of true love?

How rare is true love?

How do you tell if a man loves you?

How do you tell if a girl loves you?

What kind of love is real love?

What makes you fall in love with someone?

How to Know When You Love Someone

Is Love Influenced By Biology or Culture?

Negative Emotions Associated With Love

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

Zick Rubin's Scales of Liking and Loving

Are There Different Types of Love?

Robert Sternberg's Triangular Theory of Love

Is Love an Emotion?

How Love Impacts Your Mental Health

Tips for Cultivating Love

History of Love

11 The Importance of Love

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Is There Really True Love?

What Is True Love?

Essays About Love: 20 Intriguing Ideas for Students

1. Outline the Definition of Love