Love (emotion)

Love is a strong feeling of affection, care, or attachment toward another person, being, or thing. It can involve intimacy, commitment, desire, or concern for another’s well-being.

Attachment: A lasting emotional bond that supports closeness and security between individuals. Attachment helps explain the enduring bonds often included in love.
Infatuation: An intense, often short-lived attraction marked by idealization and preoccupation. Its intensity can resemble love while lacking love’s broader care or stability.
Attachment theory: A psychological framework describing how early bonds shape patterns of closeness and security. It explains how expectations about closeness can influence later loving relationships.
Romantic love: Love involving romantic attraction, emotional intimacy, or a desire for a partner relationship. This is a prominent form of love, often combining desire, intimacy, and commitment.
Plato’s Symposium: A Platonic dialogue in which speakers offer competing accounts of love and desire. Its speeches established influential ways of connecting love with beauty and knowledge.
Affection: A feeling of warmth, fondness, or tenderness toward someone or something. Affection is one of love’s most direct emotional expressions.
Limerence: An involuntary state of intense romantic longing and preoccupation with another person. Limerence highlights obsessive longing that can be mistaken for reciprocal love.
Oxytocin: A peptide hormone and neurotransmitter involved in childbirth, lactation, and aspects of social behavior. Research links oxytocin to some bonding processes, without making it a simple chemical cause of love.
Parental love: Affectionate, protective care that a parent feels toward a child. It shows love organized around caregiving rather than reciprocal partnership.
Courtly love: A medieval literary tradition portraying idealized devotion between a lover and an often unattainable beloved. It shows how cultural conventions can define love as longing and service.

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