What is Love?

a. Individual love

The individual love is the one that we have for ourselves. It may be considered as the self esteem of each person and it changes in the circumstances in which each individual has developed his or her own life and their interaction with their surroundings. And it is determined by the personality of each one.

b. Maternal love

The maternal love is the most important of all. Our mother means to us the warmness, nutrition, security and most important above all protection. This love is a bond we create since the moment we are born and it is essential in every child because it develops the personality and the capacity to confront life during the rest of our lives.

c. Fraternal love

The Fraternal love involves the responsibility, care, concern, and respect for other human beings. It is based in the idea that all of us live together in society and therefore we must get along to live in peace and harmony.

d. Partner love

Partner love starts in a relationship.  When you love someone and want to establish a relationship with him or her, you start caring about them. His or her life becomes part of your life, and together the couple solves difficulties and goes together in happy, sad, anger and fear moments.

e. Religious love

Religious love is the love we feel for a supreme self. In many cases: God. In every religion each person is devoted to a God or a supreme self and they cherish and pray for him because they have a strong belief in their existence and they believe that this self will always help, protect and care for them.

III. LOVE RESEARCH

Love is a new word in the scientific field. Since the very first investigations scientists assumed love as an improper topic for experimental research. But, now a days love has become a matter of study in all facets of human and animal behaviour.

The little that is known about love does not transcend simple observation, and the little that is written about it has been written better by poets and novelists. But until recently, scientists wanted nothing to do with love. It is life’s most intense feeling. Anger and fear are emotions that have been researched in labs and can be quantified through measurements, but love cannot be charted or measured. Up until the past decade, scientists assumed that love was all in our heads. Now, research has become more intense. This may be because of the necessity to know why does love involve a series of  biochemical and physical reactions in our body. But, whatever the reason, science has come to know that romance is real.

A. Psychological Research

Psychoanalysis and especially its father Freud discovered projection. Maybe only with the idea of projection we can understand how love develops and why probably only human beings are able to experience this emotion. Projection means to transfer on to other people our own feelings, thoughts, fears, and aspects of our own personality and identity. Love is therefore primarily a projection of our unconscious elements on to the partner. We need the other person, sometimes in such a radical way, that we believe we can no longer live without them. Between our partner and ourselves develops a relationship where we are blinded by love and passion, and sometimes we are not able to see the real identity of our partner. Maybe it’s terrible, but in the end, we love certain aspects of our unconscious which are projected on the other person, that are very important for our stability’s and security’s need. But this projection doesn’t last forever, after a definite period of time, we move back to reality and this is the moment we must be sure if we should end the relationship or start the process of love.

IV. PHYSICAL CONTACT

But to start this process of love, we first need to know what does the physical contact means. Physical contact is very important for love. It is part of our daily life. Everyday we touched and we are touched. However, each way of touching has its own meaning. According to an English anthropologist, Desmond Morris, there are 14 basic contacts. These are: shaking hands, guide attitude, small stroke in the back, holding the arm, arm around the back, complete hug, tied hands, arm around the waist, kiss, hand over head, heads together, stroke, sitting on someone else’s knees, and clap in the shoulder. Each of these has its own meaning and its own rules. For example, shaking hands may mean that you agree with the other person; a small stroke in the back may mean a sign of support; a complete hug may mean that you love the person; the tied hands may mean compromise and a kiss may mean affection. But to these contacts there are social limits and they change in each culture depending on the traditions and customs of each one.

V. PHYSICAL ATTRACTION

Let’s move to the physical attraction stage. The first time we see someone we pay special attention to his physical appearance, then as we meet him we start feeling attracted by his emotional part. But, why do we always fall in love, of a special type of person? What determines our attraction to them? Since first investigations, scientists concluded that sexual hormones were linked to the physical attraction. Early researches have found that people tend to discard those models that don’t match with our parents’ model. By this, men choose their partner by looking for their mother’s aspects in the women they like. And women look for their father’s aspects in the men they like. Many psychological studies show that most of the people choose a partner with a similar background and life. Being those who are totally the opposite to our lifestyle, the first ones that are discarded. We also look for someone who lives in the same city or country, someone of the same social status, and the same culture and sometimes religion.

But more than physical attraction, there is the emotional attraction. Once we know the person we start loosing interest in their physical attraction and care more about his emotional part. It is known that important characteristics like kindness and intelligence are extremely important in the process of falling in love. Intelligence is important in all aspects of life, especially in love. But kindness is the strongest indicator for a successful long-term relationship. So when we start a relationship what really matters is the emotional sharing in conversations, acts or feelings, and that is when we start the so called process of falling in love.

VI. THE PROCESS OF FALLING IN LOVE

A. Humans

Everyday we see thousands of different people, when we see these people our mental philter doesn’t perceive them, it may seem as they don’t exist. But suddenly our pupils see someone that catches our attention; he or she seems interesting or attractive to us. After remaining half a second in our eye memory, we send that image to our brain, there our short term memory makes a quick test in order to discard the person or not. Then it passes to the long term memory and all the process starts to take place.

Flirtering follows some definite steps. The first acts are the movements that are recognized as corporal language. Then follows the speaking part, here the voice plays an important role because if it is not pleasant for the listener it is difficult that he or she gets really interested in the other. When all these facets have been reached then comes the touching; hand with hand, arm in shoulder, kisses, etc. And at this moment, passion appears and all the inner feelings and thoughts suffer a series of changes within us. Then our body starts shaking, our heartbeats and our blood pressure increases, our pupils expand, and there’s a great production of red cells to produce oxygen in the blood.

But without any doubt, this process of falling in love has its own chemistry. In the moment of the process, our brain is covered with stimulant substances like dopamine, adrenalin and noradrenalin that cause the excitation and euphoria. But what exactly is what unchains these substances? The answer is another chemical messenger, a sexual scent on the skin, the pheromones, which are volatile compounds picked up by the vomeronasal organ which is a neuronal epithelium located in the nose that is capable of altering behaviour. In women there are other substances called “couplinas” that are produced during ovulation by the external genital organs and are composed mainly of fatty acids that attract male sex.

But there is one substance that acts exclusively when we fall in love, and that is the pheniletilamin. It is located in the brain in the normal functioning pleasure center. At first, it acts by making us feel as we were living in a pink, full of love world and all of our attention roles around the beloved one. But after three months this substance decreases its production, and all the euphoria disappears. At this moment, we start noticing all the possible defects in our partner. At this facet, our love goes true, and we decide if this is true love or we must continue in the quest for real love.  

B. Animals

Now that we have gone through the process of love, some of you may have a question: Does animals experience the same emotions and changes when they choose their partner? The answer is NO. Animals in any circumstances do not experience the process of falling in love. The main difference with animals is that we have seeked love as a form of pleasure, and animals seek love (if we can call it that way) only with the purpose of reproduction, and the perpetuation of their species. Some of them, inclusively, have more than one couple in their reproductive period, and the monogamy is not so common among them.

But although they don’t experience love, animals have certain sexual aspects. For example, males are more beautiful than females and the reason is because when they are near a female they must be the most attractive male so the female accepts him. Also, there are the pheromones, as well as humans do. Pheromones can be smelled or detected in long distances, and this makes the reproduction more easily, and therefore it warns all the males in the field that a female is ready to reproduce.

VII. PSYCHOLOGICAL DISORDERS

1. Disorders

But now that we know all of this about love we must know that love is not only enjoyment and happiness as we have seen. There are several psychological disorders related to love. These may be caused by different factors, and they can affect many people seriously. Several psychologists have studied and classified these disorders in:

1. Jealousy: it is a very complex behaviour. It activates several emotions related with the idea to be the only one who can be with the other person. Violence, sadness, shame and fear are some emotions related to this disorder.
2. Hate/love: it is the ambivalent love. In psychology, ambivalent emotions usually go together. In each love, there are certain doses of hate, and sometimes, hate can win.
3. Maniac love: when there is an excess of feelings, people begin not enjoying the situation. The loved one begins to feel a lot of pressure over him and they loose balance in the relationship.
4. Narcissism: these persons cannot satisfy their own passions with someone else, so they end loving only themselves.
5. Wendy’s syndrome: this is an exclusive women’s illness. The woman sees her husband as a baby; she overprotects him and looks out for him.  
6. Bovarism: it is an alteration of the reality sense. A partner gives the other all the ideal characteristics that they want them to have. But when the real image of the loved person reappears, the ill person may have different reactions.
7. Impossible love: we fall in love with someone that cannot love us back. For example, a priest, a nun, a professor or a familiar’s partner. The social and moral rules become a barrier for that love.
8. Cyrano’s syndrome: the person replaces his or her personal dissatisfaction, by finding others’ satisfaction.
9. Phobias: these include sex phobia (when you love the person but you can’t have sex with him or her), and phobic love (when the person that loves someone, cannot establish visual contact, because of fear and insecurity).
10. Dissociated love: someone believes that he or she is in love with several persons. This syndrome is more common in men. But, the truth is that he doesn’t really love anybody. He just likes certain aspects of each woman.
11. Slave love: the lover enjoys serving the other, even by extremely sacrificing him or herself, and losing dignity.
12. Perverse love: it is also known as paraphilical love. Love goes against the social and moral rules. For example, love that can only be satisfied with elderly people.
13. Delirious love: it is the tendency to believe that all men or women, in most of the cases famous people, are in love with me.
14. Love with fusion: it is an uncontrollable love that produces a dissolution of the frontiers of one’s ego and the partner’s. Lovers end believing that they are both a single person. They live, suffer, enjoy, relate with others, as if they were just one person.

These disorders are presented during relationships, but there are also other disorders proposed by Freud, that can be caused during childhood and adolescence. The most important are:

15. Edipo’s Complex: It is when the boy falls in love with her mother, and therefore, he sees his father as a competition and he has to fight to have all his mother’s love and attention. This feeling should disappear in a natural way and the boy must realize that his relationship with his mother is different from his father’s. But if this problem is not solved, then the boy discards his father’s model and sees in his mother a new model. Due to this, the boy becomes homosexual in the future.
16. Elektra’s Complex: It is similar to the one before, but in this case, the girl falls in love with her father and sees her mother as a competition. This feeling should also disappear during time, but in the case it doesn’t disappear the girl discards her mother’s model and follows her father’s model and she becomes a lesbian.

All these disorders have a psychological cause and they can be diagnosed and sometimes healed by therapies with psychologists and psychiatrists.