Some thoughts on Love

I don't think there is a topic in human civilization on which more has been written than the concept of love. Song writers, poets, novelists, dramatists, psychologists, philosophers and even theologians, spiritual wirters have all written about it. The word is on the mind of teenage girls, boys all the time, and may be on the mind of women, men (perhaps more on the mind and hearts of girls and women than on those of boys and men) though slightly less often. No one has not thought about it at one time or another in his or her life. Everyone is affected by it, whether they have it or whether they lack it. All kinds of problems arise because of erroneous or misunderstanding of what that word means and how one is to deal with this most powerful and most complex of all human emotions at different stages of one's life and as a result cause  themselves far more misery than need be. What is love? I try to find out. I consulted the Wikipedia. Here's what I found.

Love is first of all an emotion of strong affection and personal attachment. Philosophically, love is a virtue which involves kindness, compassion and affection and religiously, it is not just a virtue but forms the basis of all being ( God is love) and is the foundation of all divine law (the golden rule: " do unto others whatever it is that you would have others do unto you".)

Love can refer to a variety of feeling states and attitudes like pleasure or appetite (love of things like chocolates, flowers and all related in one way or another to our senses like sight, sound, smell, taste, touch) or attachment and commitment to and identification with an object, principle or goal (philia) or to intense interpersonal attraction ( I love my husband, wife, lover). It may involve a passionate and intense romantic attraction or attachment to the object of one's love and at its height, may involve sexual desire for physical intimacy and union(eros) in which we long to possess the object of our love. In less intense form, it may also involve emotional closeness eg. love of our fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters or storge (familial love) in which case, the desire for physical possession is absent but the desire for emotional possession or attachment may sometimes still be quite strong. Then there may be a more disinterested form of love called Platonic love (arete) which defines the kind of love which may exist between friends or philia and in an extreme case to the kind of impersonal love which extends to everyone and everything in the world  or agape eg. the love of St. Francis of Assisi for Nature and everything in it, its plants, its animals, birds, fishes and all other creatures, the great love or compassion of the Buddha for all sentient beings.  This diversity of uses and meanings, combined with the complexity of the feelings involved, makes love unusually difficult to define, even compared to other emotional states. Therefore when we talk about love, we may mean some one or more of such different kinds of loves. 

As our ancestors and we ourselves are animals, it is impossible to consider love without taking a look at our body and examine the chemical and physiological basis of love. As mammals, we have certain drives like hunger, thirst, mating. Brain scan studies show that when infatuated by love, people's brain show the kind of activity pattern that we find also in the mentally sick ie. confused. Love creates activity in the same area of the brain where hunger, thirst, and drug cravings create activity. New love, therefore, could possibly be more physical than emotional. Over time, this reaction to love mellows, and different areas of the brain are activated, primarily ones involving long-term commitments. Helen Fisher thus analyzes the experience of erotic love into three overlapping stages: lust, attraction and attachment. Lust exposes people to others; romantic attraction encourages people to focus their energy on mating; and attachment can involve tolerating and caring (caritas) for the spouse (or indeed the children) long enough to rear the children from birth to adulthood. 

In the lustful stage, which is the first stage, there is a sudden increased release of hormones such as testosterone for men and estrogen for women which make us feel attracted to the object of our physical and romantic love, usually a member of the opposite sex. The biological object for the release of such chemical is to promote, encourage and facilitate the ultimate evolutionary objective of mating and procreation These effects rarely last more than a few weeks or months. Attraction is a more individualised desire for a particular member of the oppoiste sex as the object of our eventual mating and develops out of the initial lustful desire and expresses itself as a commitment and attachment to a specific target of our physical and then emotional attachment. When people are in the stage of we normally describe as "falling in love", there is an increased and persistent secretion of such hormones within the brain of hormones such as pheromones, dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin which acts more or less like amphetamine, which stimulate the brain's own pleasure centre, the physiological effects of which may be increased heart beat, loss of appetite, insomnia, an intense feeling of muscular tension. Research indicates that this state may generally last from one and a half to three years. 

To ensure that our attraction will last so as to increase the chance of mating and procreation, we develop emotional attachment to the specific target of our physical love. Such attachment bonds us to the object of our "love" in a kind of emotional relationship which may last many years and even decades. Such attachment is generally manifiested by an open public declaration and acknowledgement of our desire for long term commitments such as engagement, and then marriage and taking up the responsibility of raising the children of this union of love. Such attachment may be facilitated if the parties share certain common interest, hobbies, sports, likes and dislikes. It has been linked to higher levels of the chemicals like oxytocin (which encourages caring and nurturing behavior) and vasopressein to a greater degree than short-term relationships have.Enzo Emmnuele and others have shown that when people fall in love, they show higher levels of certain protein molecules known as the nerve growth factor (NGF) which may revert to their former level after a year or so.

Main article: Chemical basis for love

Simplified overview of the chemical basis of love.

Although it is sometimes said that "love" is an international language, different words have been used by different cultures to describe the kind of feelings we refer to as "love" and such words may overlap in what they mean in different contexts, even within the same culture, the meaning of the word "love" may also have undergone changes. Thus the modern conception of romantic or courtly love dates from the Middle Ages although there is also evidence of its existence even earlier in the form of ancient love poetry. Although love usually refers to love of another person, it may also refer to love of the self in narcissism. It is thus difficult to give a universal defintion of love. But whilst the word cannot be defined positively in a fashion applicable to all places and at all times, it is possible to define it negatively by saying what it is not. As a general expression of positive sentiment (a stronger form of like), love is commonly contrasted with hatred or apathy or indifference and may further be contrasted with lust which connotes a more purely physical sexual craving more like appeitite for food than the caring, intimacy, sharing, and bonding, commitment which accompany romantic love and also different from the close relationship between friends which normally lack of any desire for any overt sexual intimacy.

 

Two hands forming the outline of a heart shape.

 

Different people have emphasized different aspects of love thus Virgil says that "love conquers all", the Beatles say that "all you need is love"; St. Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, says that to love is "to will the good of another" and Bertrand Russell thinks of love as an absolute not a relative value and Leibnitz says that to love is "to be delighted by the happiness of another."

In the past, the people who have reflected most on the concept of love are poets, writers, theologians and philosophers. Originally, people thought of love as caused by attraction of opposites. But social scientists have found that whilst it may have some biological basis in that in certain immune systems, it is found that people with the most diverse immune systems (orthogonal immune system) tend to like each other more but in general, people like mates who are similar to themselves and physical availability and proximity play much more important roles in mate seleciton than were previously thought. Great advances in our understanding of the nature and function of love have been made in the last century by evolutionary biologists, neuroscientists, anthropologists and psychologists, social or individual. Therefore we now have various theories or models of love. Robert Sternberg, a noted psychologist, thinks that all love have three components in his triangular theory of love:  intimacy (two people sharing intimate personal details about their lives, likes, dislikes, history etc usually present in romantic love and friendship), commitment (both expecting the relationship to last for a substantial period of time or until death), passion ( sexual attaction and desire for physical intimacy eg. in infatuation and romantic love). All forms of love consists merely of these three elements in different combination and strength. The American psychologist Zick Rubin, however, defines love through his psychometrics with three elements of attachment, caring, and intimacy. M Scott Peck (The Road Less Travelled) thinks that love has two elements: altruism and narcissism and that love is "concern for the spiritual growth of another" and that love is more an activity than a feeling. And other psychologists have found that all forms of longer term emotional relationship like attachment, bonding, trust, commitment etc. are modelled basically on the primary relationship between the mother and the child during infancy fist explored by John Bowlby.

Thus love is an emotion having biological, hormonal, psychological, social and cultural bases. It is therefore impossible to completely understand this complex emotion without taking into account all the relevant factors. Of course, the above is only an extremely simplified and schematic description of love. In practice, love is much much more complex because of differences in the sexual orientation, family upbringing, education, exposure to different kinds of role models, the intricacies of personal pyschology and even the day to day level of hormones, especially in the case of women whose emotions and moods may undergo violent up or down swings according to the time of the month or whether they are in teenage, maturity, menopause etc. But it provides a relatively sound framework against which the intricate details of personal psychology may be viewed and analyzed.