What is love? What are its five forms?

What is love? It is a strong and mostly a positive feeling experienced for various things in this world. It may be for a person, an animal, a creature, goal, or any other inanimate material. Its intensity varies from just a good virtue to that of a strong interpersonal affection to that of a simple pleasure. There are two components of love: a strong attraction and strong emotional attachment.

Love can be of two kinds: positive and negative. The positive is all about selflessness, compassion, kindness, and affection. It asks nothing in return. It is the desire to see the good of another person or thing. This is a virtue and makes a good society. Good love binds people and helps them fight against common menaces in the world around them.

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The other kind of love is the selfish type that is full of vanity and egos. It can destroy relations and is a vice and a moral flaw. It could take the form of lust and make people go into a manic phase. It is obsessiveness and not desired.

Forms of love

The ancient Greek philosophers have identified five forms of love that exist in the World. These are: familial love of family members, friendly or platonic love between friends, romantic love of sexual partners, guest love for people around us but not friends, and divine love for all beings of the world. There are also more types of loves such as self-love, empty love, courtly love, consummate love, companionate love etc.

There are different definitions of love and it also had spiritual connotations. The color wheel of theory puts the love styles into three primary, three secondary, and 9 tertiary types. The triangular theory of love states that love had three main and core components and these are intimacy, passion, and commitment. Love is a subjective and abstract thing and hence it is complex and difficult to define or set limits on.

Love (Source: Pinterest)

Physical and chemical changes and love

Though love is abstract, it creates a lot of things in a human being. They undergo physical changes and chemicals are also released by the body during these feelings. The brain starts forming and secreting a number of chemicals when a person falls in love and this includes hormones such as estrogen and testosterone, neurotransmitters such as serotonin, dopamine, adrenaline, and noradrenaline etc. These are all pleasure or happy hormones. Additionally, the heart rate rises, loss of appetite results, and sleep is also disturbed. The person gets an intense feeling of excitement. Nerve growth factor also rises and these chemicals remain high for a year to 3 years.

In long-term relationships and commitments, there is oxytocin and vasopressin release.

World cultures and love

Love has been variously described in the different cultures of the world such as Greek, Italian, Chinese and the like. Accordingly the societal and familial expectations and duties and responsibilities differ and range from the good to the bad to the ugly. Somewhere, religion mingled with these and the end result has not been beneficial for the people since a lot of unhappiness came in over the time with these enforcements by society. Somewhere pure or true love was lost and has been replaced by what cultures laid down and what was interpreted by people as time went by. The religious heads and politicians exploited these concepts for their own ulterior motives and vote banks and the result is not what is good for the community at large.

Considering the bondage of love in societies, people have gone in for free love. This implies love without the shackles of marriage. The marital bonds are rejected by the newer generation. The goal is to segregate state from all sexual and personal acts related to the life of an individual such as love, marriage, child, adultery. What was initially considered to be stability is now looked at as a social bondage. The gender roles of society are disliked and thrown into the bin. A new era has emerged where all people are considered equal in all walks of life. Only biological differences would exist and there would be no differences in the public domain related to the gender of the person. Philosophy has entered the domain of love and is questioning on a number of aspects of it. Thus love is evolving and breaking all restrictions for the good of humankind!