O Love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough To find out all that is in it For he would be thinking of love Till the stars had run away And the shadows eaten the moon.
William Butler Yeats, "Brown Penny"
Love has intrigued people throughout history. Its joys and sorrows have inspired artists and poets, novelists, filmmakers, and other students of human interaction. Indeed, love is one of the most pervasive themes in the art and literature of many cultures. Each of our own lives has been influenced in significant ways by love, beginning with the love we received as infants and children. Our best and worst moments in life can be tied to a love relationship. But what is love? How do we define it?
Love is a special kind of attitude, with strong emotional and behavioral components. It is also a phenomenon that eludes easy definition or explanation. As the following definitions suggest, love can mean different things to different people:
Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. (I Corinthians 13:4-7)
Love is a temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder. (Bierce, 1943, p. 202)
Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own. (Heinlein, 1961, p. 345)
As difficult as love is to define, can it be meaningfully measured? Some social scientists have attempted to do so, with varied results (Davis & Latty-Mann, 1987; Graham, 2011;
Hatfield & Sprecher, 1986). In the last 60 years, over 30 different measures of love have been developed (Hatfield et al., 2012). Perhaps the most ambitious attempt to measure love was undertaken years ago by psychologist Zick Rubin (1970, 1973), who developed a 13-item questionnaire (the Love Scale) designed to assess a person’s desire for intimacy with, and caring and attachment for, another. Some evidence supporting the validity of the Love Scale was obtained in an investigation of the popular belief that lovers spend a great deal of time looking into one another’s eyes (Rubin, 1970). Couples were observed through a one-way mirror while they waited to participate in a psychological experiment. The findings revealed that weak lovers (couples who scored below average on the Love Scale) made significantly less eye contact than did strong lovers (those with above-average scores).
Perhaps in the years ahead we will have access to a variety of new perspectives on the question of what love is, largely because of a marked increase in the number of scientists, especially social psychologists, who have begun to study love.