What Is Love? (No, Really. What Is It?)

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Is love an emotion, a drive, or something else? It's a centuries-old debate.


 Post published by Berit Brogaard D.M.Sci., Ph.D on Feb 14, 2015 in The Mysteries of Love

There is little dispute among most people that love is an emotion. Social psychologist Phillip Shaver and colleagues asked students (link is external) how confident they were that items on a list of more than 100 emotion-related words referred to actual emotions, and “love” was the one that students were most confident signified a true emotion.

To many of us, the idea that love is an emotion is so obvious as to be banal. This view, however, has surprisingly limited popularity among philosophers and scientists, who also find baffling most people's fondness for the view that love involves more than one person. Aristotle thought of love as a union, saying, "Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.” (Diogenes Laërtius, Third Century AD).

" You can love someone without anticipating or desiring that a union will come into existence, because—sadly—love isn’t always sufficient for initiating or continuing a relationship. “To blindly follow the heart is the maxim of fools," philosopher Aaron Smuts observes. "

"Anthropologist Helen Fisher holds that romantic love is never an emotion or feeling. It’s a drive, just like sex and attachment. Fisher’s argument is that romantic love is associated with increased activation of neurons in the midbrain that secrete dopamine, and since the dopamine system is a more primitive system than the emotional brain and the cortical system, romantic love is not an emotion."

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