Love

Le printemps (Spring, 1873), a painting by Pierre Auguste Cot.

Love is the feeling of liking somebody or something very much. People sometimes get married or go on a date when someone loves another.

Love usually has something to do with the chemical reactions in the brain.

Forms of love

There are many kinds of love. There can be self-love, love towards a friend, love in romance, towards family, toward God, or towards an object or idea.

Often love can be confused with other feelings. Being sexually or physically attracted is the feeling of lust. Lust and love may be thought of as different. Besides that, normal friendship can be distracted by love. Sometimes, love can be destroyed. When love is destroyed between a dating couple, they may break up with each other.

Love is based on respect, understanding, and being able to talk with each other.

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  A heart as a well-known symbol of love.

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  The First Kiss of Adam and Eve, Eden.

First love

People describe the person that they first loved romantically as their "first love." For example, in William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Romeo is Juliet's very first love. At that time, she was only 13. In Maria Edgeworth's book Belinda, Mr. Vincent says, "First loves are silly things."

Chemical basis

The Biological model of sex is different from love because it is more like hunger or thirst. Helen Fisher, an expert in the topic of love, divides love into three stages: lust, attraction, and attachment. Lust makes people like each other, romantic attraction encourages people to focus on mating, and attachment helps people tolerate the spouse (or the child).

Lust is the passionate sexual desire that promotes mating. This usually lasts only a few weeks or months. Attraction is more for one person specially. Recent studies in neuroscience say that as people fall in love, the brain releases chemicals, including dopamine. These chemicals make people less hungry and sleepy, and also adds an intense feeling of excitement. Research shows that this stage normally lasts from one and a half to three years.

Since these lust and attraction stages are both described as temporary, a third stage might describe long-term love. Attachment can be used to describe the bonding period that helps keep husband and wife together for many years. Attachment occurs in the longer term.

Love and health

Love has consequences for health and well-being. Joyful activities such as love activate areas in the brain responsible for emotion, attention, motivation and memory, and it may further lead to stress reduction.

Related pages

• Saint Valentine

Other websites

• A Social Psychological Perspective on Positive Illusions in Romantic Relationships
• The Anatomy of Love Explanation of Theories of Love