Since the 1960s, about 67% of song lyrics1 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Percentage-of-top-40-songs-referring-to-19-content-categories-by-decade_tbl1_322664390 from top-40s songs have been about love. It’s a popular topic!
Love is the main theme of songs, spiritual discourses, and philosophy.
But why is love such a big deal? And what exactly even is love?
In this article, we’ll get to the bottom of it. We’ll discuss love and how to create more of it in your life.
11 Different Types of Love
There are as many kinds of love as there are connections. Your love for one friend might differ from your love for another. That said, here are some primary categories to think about love.
Romantic love
Romantic usually includes a deep emotional connection, some type of commitment, and often physical attraction. Usually, when people develop feelings of romantic love, they also open up their attachment patterns (which we’ll get to later in this article). And when that happens, look out for jealousy, insecurity, avoidance, and push-pull dynamics.
The ancient Greeks were brilliant philosophers with several words for love.
Eros refers to passionate and romantic love. Ludus is a similar type of love that appears early in relationships and is more akin to a honeymoon period. Conversely, Pragma is a type of love that allows for long-term commitment and healthy, enduring relationships.
Platonic love
Platonic love is the love between friends. It contains mutual respect and admiration and often lacks the complexities of romantic or sexual attraction.
The Greeks called this Philia.
Love for siblings
Sibling love is a unique blend of loyalty, nostalgia, and unconditional support, often peppered with rivalry. Siblings also contain a unique key to each others’ pasts and can help each other understand their childhoods.
Storge is the Greek term for all types of familial love.
Love for one’s teammates
This form of love emerges from shared goals and struggles. It creates a bond that transcends mere cooperation and fosters a sense of unity, resilience, and mutual respect.
This love can occur on sports teams, workplaces, and in warfare. This type of love can be powerful, and it’s what motivated the ferocious warrior culture of ancient Sparta to fight so valiantly; they were happy to sacrifice2 https://www.amazon.com/Warrior-Ethos-Steven-Pressfield/dp/193689100X their life for the soldier by their side.
Love for one’s child
Parental love is a profound, unconditional affection that includes sacrifice, worry, and pride. It’s a type of love that can contain unparalleled depth of care and commitment to nurture and protect one’s offspring.
It’s a type of love encoded in animal DNA where every parent is programmed by nature to help its kin survive.
Love for one’s parents
Loving one’s parents can be complex. It often includes gratitude, respect, and deep affection, shaped by years of care, guidance, support, and an acknowledgment of the foundational role they play in our lives.
And for many, it’s also a relationship that includes plenty of pain, anger and hurt.
Love for a protegé
There is a special type of love a mentor or teacher feels for their protegé. It’s a type of love that tethers itself to the growth and flourishing of the mentee. The mentor may cherish the mentee’s achievements as a reflection of mutual dedication and hope for the future.
Love for a mentor
Similarly, a mentee’s love for their mentor has a unique flavor. It’s rooted in admiration and gratitude. And there can be a deep appreciation for the wisdom, support, and encouragement in shaping one’s personal and professional journey.
Love for a pet
Love for a pet can go very deep. It is a pure and joyful bond that comes about from taking care of another living being. Pets provide unconditional affection and companionship and can bring comfort, laughter, and an unparalleled sense of being understood and accepted without words.
Self-love
Self-love is the ability to accept and care for oneself. Loving oneself deeply can help a person access their heart more and extend more love to others as well.
This is what the ancient Greeks called Philautia.
Spiritual love
Jesus, Buddha, Socrates (and probably every other famous religious leader!) all talked about love.
Many spiritual traditions pursue a type of unconditional love where one cultivates the ability to extend love, care, and compassion to all humans (and living beings) regardless of who they are.
Buddhism uses terms like tonglen and metta to describe this state, and the Greeks called it Agape.
Love and Attachment Theory
Attachment theory is a term developed by psychologist John Bowlby3 http://www.psychology.sunysb.edu/attachment/online/inge_origins%20DP1992.pdf in the 1950s, and our understanding has come a long way since then.
The idea is essentially that each child grows up with a relationship with their caregivers. Depending on how safe, attuned, and reliable their caregivers were in providing love, the child forms one of four types of attachment: anxious, avoidant, fearful, and secure.
This attachment type will follow that child into adulthood and appear in their love life.
Any time we form a connection with another person that reaches a certain threshold of vulnerability, our attachment patterns come out.
Many people don’t realize this, so when they start dating someone, they might all of a sudden feel incredibly anxious and clingy. And many people misinterpret these feelings as love.
When in reality, these feelings are the response of an internalized wounded child who is afraid of losing safety from this new connection that feels similar to a parent.
The four attachment types are:
- Anxious. This is when you are afraid of losing your partner and constantly want more intimacy.
- Avoidant. This is when intimacy often feels overwhelming, and you constantly want more space.
- Fearful. This is when you constantly crave more intimacy, but when you get it, you all of a sudden want more distance.
- Secure. This is when you feel safe and comfortable in intimacy.
If you’d like to read more, here’s a guide on attachment theory. And if you want to know your attachment type, check out this attachment quiz!
If you feel like you often lose track of yourself in relationships to try to please the other person, you might enjoy this goodie:
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How Romantic Love Changes in a Relationship
Cultivating romantic love isn’t a one-and-done thing. Relationships take time to stabilize and go through different chapters of evolution. Here are the main stages of a relationship:
- Stage 1: Honeymoon phase (6 months to 2 years)
The honeymoon phase is the beginning of a relationship where everything feels new, magical, and exciting. This is when you feel your heart race alongside a constant whirling in your stomach.
It’s a time when dopamine and other feel-good chemicals flood your brain, making every moment together exhilarating, and the world seems brighter just because you’re in it together.
- Stage 2: building a foundation (lasts 1 to 3 years)
As the initial euphoria fades, you and your partner embark on the crucial work of building a sturdy foundation.
This stage is about deepening trust, honing communication skills, and starting to function as a cohesive team. In this stage, you lay down the bricks of mutual respect and understanding that will support your relationship’s future.
- Stage 3: sharing identity (lasts 2 to 4 years)
In the sharing identity stage, you’re not just partners but a team facing life’s ups and downs together.
This stage is about sharing dreams, challenges, and identities.
- Stage 4: secure love (if reached, can last indefinitely)
Reaching secure love is a satisfying phase of your relationship where you can feel trust, safety, and mutual appreciation. There’s a profound emotional connection, the comfort of true partnership, and the resilience to face life’s challenges hand in hand.
If you’d like to read more on the topic, check out this article on the stages of a relationship.
What Does Science Say About Love?
The American Psychological Association4 https://dictionary.apa.org/love defines love as “a complex emotion,” and other studies indicate that when we feel love, our brain dumps a handful of neurotransmitters5 https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1218&context=srhonorsprog that make us feel really good.
But, other researchers would say that treating love just like any other emotion simplifies things too much.
Some psychologists6 https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=72678 suggest that it’s more accurate to view love as a psychological need, like hunger or thirst. They argue that love can even function like an addiction and that an absence of love can be devastating.
Why Love is Good For You
Just like fulfilling other needs, when you experience and express love, it can be quite good for your health.
Researchers7 https://healthcare.utah.edu/healthfeed/2023/02/seven-reasons-why-loving-relationships-are-good-you have found that expressing love8 https://news.asu.edu/content/study-expressing-love-can-improve-your-health can:
- Lower stress
- Lower cholesterol
- Lower blood pressure
- Boost your immune system
- Help you live longer
- Help you heal faster from sickness
This happens because expressing affection, not just feeling it, releases positive hormones like oxytocin, which make us feel good and reduce stress. And having loving connections is tied to lower cortisol, which is the stress hormone.
Amazingly, feelings of love might also help you reduce pain! One study9 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0013309 found that when people experienced pain while looking at photos of a romantic partner, the feelings of pain were less than if the photos were of friends or if they were distracted in another way.
2 Psychological Models of Love
Many psychologists have come up with models to understand love. Here are two prominent ones.
Robert Sternberg’s theory of triangular love
Robert Sternberg10 https://www.hofstra.edu/pdf/community/slzctr/stdcsl/stdcsl_triangular.pdf broke down love into three component parts: intimacy, passion, and commitment.
Intimacy
Intimacy, in Sternberg’s framework, is the emotional cornerstone of love. It’s about closeness, trust, and sharing. Intimacy allows individuals to experience the warmth of being understood and valued.
Passion
Passion is the spark that ignites desire, physical attraction, and sexual fulfillment. It’s the driving force that draws people together and creates an intense longing for each other.
Commitment
Commitment, the decision to stay together through thick and thin, is what turns a fleeting connection into a lasting relationship.
Sternberg categorizes seven types of love, depending on how many of the above factors (0-3) are contained in the relationship.
Here’s the breakdown11 https://www.hofstra.edu/pdf/community/slzctr/stdcsl/stdcsl_triangular.pdf :
| Intimacy | Passion | Commitment | |
| Friendship | ❤️ | ||
| Infatuation | ❤️ | ||
| Empty love | ❤️ | ||
| Romantic love | ❤️ | ❤️ | |
| Companionate love | ❤️ | ❤️ | |
| Fatuous love | ❤️ | ❤️ | |
| Consummate love | ❤️ | ❤️ | ❤️ |
When intimacy, passion, and commitment are all present, Sternberg describes the relationship as “consummate love”—the most complete form of love, embodying depth, intensity, and devotion.
Zick Rubin’s theory of love
Zick Rubin made a distinction between liking and loving.
At the core of his theory, Rubin identifies three fundamental elements that constitute love: attachment, caring, and intimacy. These elements separate the deep, complex nature of love from the simpler, though pleasant, experience of liking someone.
Let’s go into each:
Attachment
Rubin’s first element, attachment, speaks to the gravitational pull we feel towards our loved ones. It’s a profound need for physical and emotional closeness that transcends mere companionship.
Caring
Caring, according to Rubin, is the altruistic side of love. It’s about valuing your partner’s happiness and well-being as much as your own, sometimes even more. This selfless concern is what differentiates love from a fleeting attraction.
Intimacy
Intimacy, the third pillar of Rubin’s theory, is about the courage to bear your true self and to share your deepest thoughts, fears, and desires. Intimacy is built on vulnerability and closeness.
Rubin would say that when you like someone (but don’t love them), you enjoy their company and share common interests. However, “liking” lacks the deeper emotional bonds and commitments seen in love. Only when you experience attachment, caring, and intimacy does it become love.
Tips to Express Love
If you’d like to get better at expressing love to partners, friends, and family, consider the following tips.
Use the five love languages
The five love languages are a framework that claims that there are five ways to express and receive love. And most people have a preference for how they like to receive love.
The five languages are receiving gifts, words of affirmation, physical touch, quality time, and acts of service.
Here are ideas on how to express each love language to people in your life:
Give a gift. If there’s someone you want to express love to, take a few minutes and brainstorm ideas for gifts that they might appreciate. Then go ahead and create or purchase one of them!
Words of affirmation. Write a note to your loved one and tell them several things you appreciate about them.
Physical touch. Ask your loved one what type of touch would feel most nourishing to receive.
Quality time. Block off some time to spend with a person you love. And make sure to keep your phone in your pocket!
Acts of service. Do a major chore for a loved one in your life, whether it’s cooking for them or cleaning their kitchen.
It’s also good to know that it’s best not to guess what type of love someone likes. Go ahead and ask them! Then, you can make sure your loving efforts are aligned with what they’d like to receive.
If you’d like to learn more, check out this article about the five love languages.
Write a letter
Another great way to express love to someone in your life is to write a hand-written letter.
Let them know what you appreciate about them and some of your favorite memories together. A letter can be a meaningful and sentimental way to show someone that you care about them.
Use the “L” word
Do you often tell people in your life you love them?
I grew up in a family that didn’t say the word “love” very often. And as a result, it can feel scary, vulnerable, and even weird for me to tell friends that I love them. But when I do, it tends to create a feeling of connection and open-heartedness.
Try telling someone in your life that you love them!
Plan a thoughtful trip together
You might love someone deeply, but if you never spend time together, your relationship will never grow.
Consider showing your love to someone by investing in your relationship with each other.
Maybe you can spearhead a weekend trip where the two of you carve out some serious quality time to deepen your connection and forge new memories.
Tips to Become a More Loving Person
If you’d like to increase your capacity to feel and express love to others, consider these tips.
Engage in acts of kindness
Small, thoughtful gestures can make a big difference and can help you orient toward kindness and care.
Look for opportunities to perform acts of kindness without expecting anything in return. This could be as simple as offering a genuine compliment, helping a neighbor, or volunteering.
Action Step: Block off thirty minutes this weekend to walk around your town with the intention of sharing small acts of kindness. Either to people you know or to total strangers.
Try loving-kindness meditation
Loving-kindness meditation (also called metta12 https://tricycle.org/magazine/metta-practice/ ) is a Buddhist practice that helps you cultivate compassion towards yourself and others. It involves silently repeating phrases that express wishes for well-being and happiness, first for yourself and then extending to others.
Action Step: Try this guided meditation!
Practice forgiveness
Forgiveness is the act of letting go of resentment, anger, or bitterness towards someone who has wronged you. It’s not about condoning the action but freeing yourself from the negative emotional bind.
When we practice forgiveness, it softens and opens the heart.
Action Step: Think of someone who you feel upset or resentful toward. Someone who you haven’t yet forgiven. Then, write a letter to that person detailing the hurt they caused but also expressing your intention to let go and forgive them.
You don’t have to send the letter; the act of writing it can be a powerful step toward releasing the emotional weight you’ve been carrying.
Practice empathy
Empathy is like a muscle you can build with practice. It allows you to connect more deeply with others and feel what they are feeling. The more you can empathize with others, the easier it is to extend love to them.
Action Step: Next time someone shares a problem with you, resist the urge to offer a solution right away. Instead, ask them how they feel about the situation and listen intently. Reflect back on what you hear to show that you understand their feelings. This could be as simple as saying, “It sounds like you’re feeling really overwhelmed by this,” which can validate their feelings and deepen your connection.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) About Love
The definition of love in a relationship is the deep emotional connection and commitment shared between partners that encompasses trust, respect, and mutual support. It’s about continuously choosing each other and working together through life’s challenges.
The definition of love language is the preferred way an individual expresses and receives love, which can include words of affirmation, acts of service, receiving gifts, quality time, and physical touch. Understanding and speaking your partner’s love language can significantly enhance the connection and satisfaction in a relationship.
The definition of being in love is a state of deep emotional attachment and infatuation with someone, often characterized by intense feelings of passion and desire. Being in love typically refers to the exhilarating initial phases of a romantic relationship.
The definition of “I love you” is an expression used to convey deep affection and commitment to another person. It is a powerful statement that signifies emotional investment and a desire to maintain a close and enduring relationship.
Takeaways on What Is Love
Love is a complex thing!
If you’d like to get better at expressing love, consider the following:
- Give a thoughtful gift
- Tell someone what you appreciate about them
- Share cuddles and touch with a loved one
- Spend uninterrupted and mindful time with someone
- Help someone with chores to save them time and energy
And if you’d like to get better at becoming more loving, here are a few ideas:
- Spend a few minutes seeking out ways to offer random acts of kindness to strangers
- Sit down and practice loving kindness meditation for a few minutes
- Write a letter to someone you haven’t forgiven (but don’t send it)
- In your next conversation, pay extra attention to the other person’s emotions
Check out this article if you’re curious about the three stages of love.
Article sources
- https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Percentage-of-top-40-songs-referring-to-19-content-categories-by-decade_tbl1_322664390
- https://www.amazon.com/Warrior-Ethos-Steven-Pressfield/dp/193689100X
- http://www.psychology.sunysb.edu/attachment/online/inge_origins%20DP1992.pdf
- https://dictionary.apa.org/love
- https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1218&context=srhonorsprog
- https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=72678
- https://healthcare.utah.edu/healthfeed/2023/02/seven-reasons-why-loving-relationships-are-good-you
- https://news.asu.edu/content/study-expressing-love-can-improve-your-health
- https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0013309
- https://www.hofstra.edu/pdf/community/slzctr/stdcsl/stdcsl_triangular.pdf
- https://www.hofstra.edu/pdf/community/slzctr/stdcsl/stdcsl_triangular.pdf
- https://tricycle.org/magazine/metta-practice/
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