Love is any of a number of emotions and experiences related to a sense of strong affection or profound oneness.<1> Depending on context,
Love can have a wide variety of intended meanings. Romantic love is seen as a deep, ineffable feeling of intense and tender
attraction shared in passionate or intimate attraction and intimate
interpersonal and sexual relationships.<2> Love can also be conceived of as Platonic love,<3> religious love,<4> familial love, and, more casually, great affection for anything considered strongly pleasurable, desirable, or preferred, including activities and foods.<5><2> This diverse range of meanings in the singular word love is often contrasted with the plurality of Greek words for love, reflecting the concept''s depth, versatility, and complexity.
definition of love is the subject of considerable debate, enduring speculation, and thoughtful introspection. Some tackle the difficulty of finding a universal definition for love by classifying it into types, such as passionate love, romantic love, and committed love. However, some of these types of love can be generalized into the category of sexual attraction. In ordinary use, love usually refers to interpersonal love, an experience felt by a person for another person. Love often involves caring for or identifying with a person or thing, including oneself (cf. narcissism). Dictionaries tend to define love as deep affection or fondness.<1> In colloquial use, according to polled opinion, the most favored definitions of love involve altruism, selflessness, friendship, union, family, and bonding or connecting with another.
The different aspects of love can be roughly illustrated by comparing their corollaries and opposites. As a general expression of positive sentiment (a stronger form of like), love is commonly contrasted with hate (or neutral apathy); as a less sexual and more mutual and "pure" form of romantic
attachment, love is commonly contrasted with
lust; and as an interpersonal relationship with romantic overtones, love is commonly contrasted with friendship, although other connotations of love may be applied to close friendships as well.
The very existence of love is sometimes subject to debate. Some categorically reject the notion as false or meaningless.<
citation needed> Others call it a recently-invented abstraction, sometimes dating the "invention" to courtly Europe during or after the Middle Ages.
Others maintain that love really exists, and is not an abstraction, but is undefinable, being essentially spiritual or metaphysical in nature. Some psychologists maintain that love is the action of lending one''s "boundary" or "self-esteem" to another. Others attempt to define love by applying the definition to everyday life.
Cultural differences make any universal definition of love difficult to establish. Expressions of love may include the love for a soul or mind, the love of laws and organizations, love for a body, love for nature, love of food, love of money, love for learning, love of power, love of fame, love for the respect of others, etc. Different people place varying degrees of importance on the kinds of love they receive. Love is essentially an abstract concept, easier to experience than to explain. Because of the complex and abstract nature of love, discourse on love is commonly reduced to a thought-terminating cliché, and there are a number of common proverbs regarding love, from Virgil''s "Love conquers all" to The Beatles'' "All you need is love".
Biology of love
Further information: Interpersonal chemistry
Biological models of sex tend to view love as a mammalian drive, much like hunger or thirst. Helen Fisher, a leading expert in the topic of love, divides the experience of love into three partly-overlapping stages: lust, attraction, and attachment. Lust exposes people to others, romantic attraction encouople to focus their energy on mating, and attachment involves tolerating the spouse long enough to rear a child into infancy.
Lust is the initial passionate sexual desire that promotes mating, and involves the increased release of chemicals such as testosterone and estrogen. These effects rarely last more than a few weeks or months. Attraction is the more individualized and romantic desire for a specific candidate for mating, which develops out of lust as commitment to an individual mate forms. Recent studies in neuroscience have indicated that as people fall in love, the brain consistently releases a certain set of chemicals, including dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin, which act similar to amphetamines, stimulating the brain''s pleasure center and leading to side-effects such as an increased heart rate, loss of appetite and sleep, and an intense feeling of excitement. Research has indicated that this stage generally lasts from one and a half to three years.
Since the lust and attraction stages are both considered temporary, a third stage is needed to account for long-term relationships. Attachment is the bonding which promotes relationships that last for many years, and even decades. Attachment is generally based on commitments such as marriage and children, or on mutual friendship based on things like shared interests. It has been linked to higher levels of the chemicals oxytocin and vasopressin than short-term relationships have.
In 2005, Italian scientists at Pavia University found that a protein molecule known as the nerve growth factor (NGF) has high levels when people first fall in love, but these levels return to as they were after one year. Specifically, four neurotrophin levels, i.e. NGF, BDNF, NT-3, and NT-4, of 58 subjects who had recently fallen in love were compared with levels in a control group who were either single or already engaged in a long-term relationship. The results showed that NGF levels were significantly higher in the subjects in love than as compared to either of the control groups.