What is love?

By Joe Bunce

“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and… thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.”

- Jesus, Mark 12:30-31

        “Omnia vincit amor”

- Virgil, Eclogues X

        “All you need is love/All you need is love/All you need is love, love/Love is all you need/Love, love, love/ Love, love, love/ Love, love, love.”

- The Beatles, ‘All You Need is Love’ from the album, Magical Mystery Tour

        From the day we are born, we are surrounded by the concept of love. Love as a connection, love as an emotion, love as a virtue: not only are we told that love is all around, but it is constantly reinforced that love is the most important thing in the world: verily, it is the meaning of existence.

        But, at the back of every man’s head, a question lingers: What is love? The question often gets responses which are poetic at best, and displays of sickening sentimentalism at worst. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the 19th century American poet, said, “Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness”, and even I, within the first paragraph of my essay, have written that love is both “the meaning of existence” and “the most important thing in the world”. All of these definitions, though perhaps serve a purpose as cute sentiments to write on St. Valentine’s cards, are entirely useless when it comes to an actual definition of love. If you asked me to describe to you what strawberries were like, and I responded by telling you they ‘tasted like the soft beating of an angel’s wings’, you would gain very little from my description. Thus, due to its tremendously emotive nature, the concept of love seems, more often than not, to sneakily avoid definition.

But, throughout history, many philosophers, psychologists, and theologians have indeed tried to identify some truth with regards to a definition for love – a path to find some kind of absolute defining this concept that, largely, rules much of our lives. The psychologist Robert Sternberg made an attempt to simplify love (within, at least, the context of interpersonal relationships) into what he called the ‘Triangle of Love’. In this theory, he identifies three components to love: intimacy (the idea of closeness and bonding), passion (which brings physical attraction and sexual consummation), and commitment (the decisions in relationships of remaining with one another). The ‘strength’ of love depends on the amounts of all the different constituents, whilst the ‘type’ of love is determined by which components are (proportionally) greatest, which Sternberg explained diagrammatically:

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One can imagine different situations that might bring the types of love that Sternberg describes: an arranged marriage could start off entirely as ‘Empty Love’. Sternberg believed that consummate love is the ‘complete’ form of love, which represents an ideal relationship towards which people should strive, but he does stress that the different forms of love can, with the passage of time, transform into other forms – a couple finding intimacy and passion within an arranged marriage, or a ‘Consummate Love’ relationship losing passion as the years go by.

        Although I can glean some         value from this triangular theory ...

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