What is love anyway?
By Aren Cohen. This is an edited version of an article first published on Positive Psychology News Daily. 
So what is this love that we bandy about all the time? Love comes in many different shapes and sizes.
Most frequently we think of love in terms of romantic love- that heady experience that is so often glorified in romantic comedies, the first blush of meeting a lover and falling “head over heels” for him or her.
In his book The Happiness Hypothesis, Jon Haidt (2006) explains that in romantic love there are in fact two stages. The first, the one that Hollywood usually celebrates and lionizes is called Passionate Love. This is the love where we nuzzle, we gaze into each others’ eyes, and we “fall” into love.
By comparison, there is a second stage of romantic love that called Companionate Love. After you have known someone for a while, once you know his or her quirks, once you have decided to join your lives together, well, then you are companions, and your love is companionate in nature.
But, with all this talk of romantic love, we forget that there are many other kinds of love out there. Our love for our parents, children and friends are also all profound kinds of love.
Stephen Post, in his book Unlimited Love, (2003) gives us different classifications of love. He says that the types of love include: celebration, compassion, forgiveness, care, companionship and correction.
The different textures of these kinds of love make us more aware of the fine tuning of the emotions we feel when we say we love someone. This is useful because this kind of granulation allows us to appreciate the fine gradations of our feelings when we talk about this grand thing called love.
Perhaps one of the biggest challenges is that love, like all positive emotions, borders on the spiritual. An emotion that makes us feel that good is both mysterious and mystical, and maybe to a certain degree it should stay that way.
The biology of love is all well and good, but more important to me is the way my mother’s hug feels, how that look from him makes my heart beat quicken. Yes we can give it words, we can give it science, but at the end of the day, what we feel borders on the magical, because it happens uniquely to us, in only that rarified situation.
When we feel it deep in our hearts and our brains, our need to translate it into words and science recedes into the background. Maybe that’s why we have love songs. They allow us to feel it, to confirm that love does exists, and that people definitely love each other, no matter what questions the musicians might ask.
By Aren Cohen. This is an edited version of an article first published on Positive Psychology News Daily.
