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When you think of love, what comes into your mind? Is it the butterflies in your stomach racing, the comfort of a life partner, or the warmness of family and friends?
Most importantly, a common question arises, “is love an emotion, or it may be something much more enduring and profound?”. Many things in our lives are defined by love: art, relationships, mental health, and so on.
In this blog post, we’ll explore the essence of love and how to nourish it in your life. We’ll take a closer look at the nature of love and will find the answer to a common question “Is Love an Emotion?”.
Let’s get started!
What Is Love? Let’s Explore It!
Before we find the answer of “Is love an emotion?”, let’s first understand what love actually is. Can it be reduced to one feeling? Is it a neurochemical process in your brain? Does it come from a single influence, or does it draw from many?
Love is notoriously hard to define and for good reason. Love is not like fear or happiness or anger, which can be recognized by a set of physiological reactions. Love isn’t just a feeling in your chest, it is a commitment, an action and sometimes a conscious choice.
Psychologically, love is when you feel close, care about, and are committed to someone. Biologically, it’s tied to chemical reactions in your brain, like the release of the so-called love hormone oxytocin. And culturally? What love means to you is very different depending on where you’ve grown up and how.
Is Love an Emotion?
Photo Credit: Sudhanshu Ji Maharaj
That’s where things get interesting now. Some psychologists say that love isn’t an emotion. Most emotions are fleeting, right? Anger, joy, sadness, fear! But love doesn’t just disappear like that. Love endures.
People who see love as a drive or state as opposed to an emotion compare it to hunger or thirst. Like how you feel you have to eat when you’re hungry, you might feel compelled to form deep emotional bonds to fill your need for connection.
Although love isn’t in the same class as anger and fear, love undoubtedly tugs on your emotions.
- When you’re in love, you feel happiness.
- When you lose it, you feel grief
- When it’s threatened, you feel jealousy.
The interplay is so complex that love is so fascinating.
Love as a Series of Actions (Not a Feeling)
Love isn’t just a feeling, it’s a series of actions. What does that mean? The choices you make every day are an active showing of love to others. If you nurture love, it grows, but if you don’t, it dies. Do you want to strengthen your connection with your partner or the people you love?
Here are actions you can consciously take:
- Be thinking and speaking in terms of us, not I: This change brings unity and mutual respect to a relationship.
- Be trustworthy: A relationship takes strong consistency and honesty.
- Develop and express empathy: It deepens connections to understand someone else’s feelings.
- Disagree without fighting: Conflict doesn’t mean you don’t love someone, it means how you resolve it.
If you approach love as something more than just a fleeting emotion, you will realize that it’s more than that. Love takes work, intention, and action that demonstrate your commitment.
Key Characteristics of Love: What Truly Defines It?
Now you know that love isn’t an emotion, it’s time to find out what makes it different. Love is the only emotion that activates your mind, body, and your sense of purpose. For example:
- Love is enduring: Love is one emotion that doesn’t come and go, even when things change.
- Love is selfless: You tend to put the other person’s needs before your own.
- Love grows: Love is something that doesn’t go away with time and effort, unlike fear or anger.
These characteristics are grounding because they show us why love is so much more than ‘a feeling.’ Now let’s explore what shapes love in your life.
3 Psychological Theories of Love
For decades, science and psychology have been trying to unravel the mystery of love. A number of interesting theories are very compelling because they offer fascinating insights into how we perceive love, how it comes about, and how it keeps relationships together.
- Rubin’s Scales of Liking and Loving
You’ve heard it before: “I like you, but I don’t love you.” This very distinction was explored by psychologist Zick Rubin. He suggested that love is attachment (need to be close), caring (equally valuing someone as yourself) and intimacy (sharing of private thoughts and feelings).
Rubin’s scales measure these factors in relationships, so we can tell liking from loving. Interesting, isn’t it?
- Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love
Psychologist Robert Sternberg took things further with his Triangular Theory of Love, which breaks love into three components:
- Intimacy is first defined as the feeling of closeness, connection and bonding with your partner. It’s the emotional glue that keeps a friendship or deeper connection together.
- Second, passion draws in physical attraction and the spark that happens in romantic love, the excitement and appetite that sometimes provokes love to appear electric.
- There’s also commitment, that is your decision to stay with someone, and keep the relationship, even in its difficult moments.
The relationships take the form depending on the combination of these three components. For instance, if intimacy functions alone without passion or commitment, you have what’s closer to friendship, a warm, supportive, but non romantic bond.
However, infatuation is about passion and not intimacy and commitment. Then there’s empty love, love based on commitment, maybe in a long term relationship that has become distant, where intimacy and passion are lost.
- Love as a Motivation
For psychologist and biologist Enrique Burunat, love is a physiological drive. Once he likened it to hunger or sleep, an inescapable part of human biology. But it pushes you to create the relationships that are necessary for reproduction and emotional health.
Is Love Influenced by Biology or Culture?
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The psychological side of love is only one piece of the puzzle. To fully appreciate its nature, we need to look at what lies beneath its biology and cultural conditioning.
- Biological Foundations of Love
Love is hardwired into our biology, as science says. Key players are hormones such as the bonding hormone oxytocin and the pleasure chemical dopamine. These chemicals make us feel attached, rewarded, and connected.
You can see from brain scans that pleasure centers activate when you recognize someone you love neatly. The evolutionary theory also stands by love as a survival mechanism. The more pair bonding, the better chance the species has at raising successful offspring.
- Cultural Conditioning of Love
Biology isn’t the whole picture. What we expect from love is also a matter of culture. Imagine other cultural norms: in some cultures, marriage is idealized as purely practical, in others as romantic.
Relationships don’t look anything like the way Hollywood romantic comedies portray love’s “perfect happy endings,” and even that affects the way you view relationships.
Love is a product of nature and nurture. Biology gives you the capacity to love, but what culture teaches you how to interpret it and how to express it.
Understanding the Impact of Love on Mental Health
Photo Credit: Akua Mind Body
Now we understand what love is, it’s time to concentrate on what is the impact of love on your mental health. The effect of love on your mental health is profound; it influences your happiness, your life satisfaction. In fact, love does more than just work your heart; it has a huge effect on your mental health.
Here’s some food for thought:
- 52% lower risk of heart disease for those in healthy long-term relationships (Source: American Heart Association).
- 77% of partnered people report major life satisfaction levels, compared to 59% of singles (Source: Pew Research Center).
- If you are in a stable relationship, you’re more likely to take care of yourself and live longer.
When love is one sided or unbalanced feelings like jealousy and possessiveness tend to creep in. These challenges have to be addressed constructively.
Final Thoughts!
Love is more than an emotion. It’s a tangled mess of feelings, actions, and intentions. Love is felt from the tenderest of relationships to the most steadfast of long term bonds.
You now know love a little better, so go on and taste all the flavours of love. The presence of love in your life can be in the form of romantic, platonic or self love and all this should be cherished!
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