The Concept of Love: Discovering What Does Love Mean to You

I think it is impossible to give a ‘hard’ and ‘concrete’ definition of the concept of love and what the meaning of love is. However, I do strongly believe that love a social construct influenced by our cultural heritage and our underlying biological mechanisms. There is a project known as ‘Love is Project, and the women who ran the project travelled around the world and asked people from all different countries “What does love mean to you?”, and looking at the responses I was amazed.

All these people had such a unique way of describing what love meant to them and what I noticed is that everyone had such a personal take on responding to this question. It gave me a sense that people all over the world have different and often changing idea of what ‘love’ is, depending mainly on one’s own experience, culture and upbringing; it really shapes their beliefs and attitudes toward the concept of ‘Love’. For instance, when I was living in nepal, I encountered hedonists who saw love as nothing beyond the physical however, in other countries, I came across people that saw love only in relation to finding the perfect soulmate or having love for a country and travelling.

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Hence, ‘Love’ is such a subjective concept that actually instantiates itself differently in every person. This you can also see in the social sciences as they have put so much research into love ,yet there is still no one definition that is widely accepted by all social scientists.

They say this because the world love is polysemic in itself and what they mean with this is that the concept of love has multiple meanings instead of just one single word. There are so many social scientists that have done research about this but I really like the explanation by Tim Lomas, who has written an article of the flavours of love. In his article he explains fourteen types of love that are divided into 4 categories that being of non personal, caring, romantic and transcendent. Within non personal love you have love for experience, objects and places; in caring love you have love that involves non romantic forms of affection including friendly love, self love and family love; romantic love includes passionate, playful, possessive, rational and star-crossed love; whereas transcendent love includes compassionate, momentary and reverential love. Each category of love has a fundamental dynamic that motivates a love including appreciation, concern, desire and self transcendence.

All these categories and different underlying fundamental dynamics really shows the complexity of the concept of ‘love’ and the difficulties we have to reach a common discourse of the nature of love as there are infinite ways we can love and be loved. Philosophers also struggle to debate on what love and it’s essence is. According to the greek language, there are three different words for love including, eros, philia and storge. To look a little bit more in depth by what these types of love mean, it is interesting to look at the dialogue between Socrates and Diotima that takes place in Plato’s symposium. In this dialogue it is pointed out that love (eros) is a matter of fecundity, meaning that love has the ability to grow in something new. It all starts with the appreciation for one’s physical beauty, their characteristics, then we start to appreciate one’s beautiful mind, which in turn allows us to see the love of the form of all beauty (the divine/ the good). So in that sense, we love someone because we see some beautiful manifestation of beauty in them. On the other side of the spectrum you have biologists who try to explain what ‘love’ is. For instance, Enrique Burunat, strongly believes that all the terms that humans have tried to associate love with has given a false perception of what love actually is. Nowadays it is seen as a strong emotion you feel towards someone or something, however Enrique explains that it's a physiological drive.

There are many neurochemicals that are related to attraction and bonding between human beings, including dopamine which is a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure. This neurotransmitter is what your brain realses when having sex or when doing drugs etc. Another neurochemical that is involved is adrenaline, a hormone that gives you energy and oxytocin, a hormone that is believed to be associated with feelings of attachment. All of these neurochemicals have one thing in common: they are associated with the human ‘reward pathway system’, which is designed to make us feel good when we do something beneficial for our survival and reproduction. What this shows about love is that attraction and desires are biological and that the concept of love is an idea we made up.