Every popular song is about it, half our books and films obsess over it, and everybody wants it.
But when we come to ask what love is, we are overwhelmed by a myriad different ideas and experiences.
On the one hand, love can lift us up; on the other, it can destroy us.
The problem is further compounded because we generally also feel tremendous love for our mothers, our children, our friends even chocolate. Or maybe especially chocolate.
How can one little word cover so many different nuances of feeling? More importantly, if love means different things to different people, how can we ever effectively communicate it?
Scientists have been trying to define love according to their frame of reference for a very long time.
The pioneering sexologist Havelock Ellis provided a famous but entirely incorrect mathematical formula: love equals a physical relationship plus friendship.
Freud dismissed romantic love as the sex urge, blocked.
(The guy's obsessed with sex)
Social biologists have scanned our brains and identified three chemicals— dopamine, phenyl ethylamine and oxytocin — which they claim attract us exclusively to our mates for long enough, in their opinion, to conceive and give the offspring a secure start.
All of this is mildly diverting, but of no use when someone looks into your eyes and tells you that they love you.
Dictionaries are not much help either. They list almost two dozen definitions — including affection, fondness, caring, liking, concern, attraction, desire and infatuation.
We all instinctively agree there is a huge difference between liking and complete infatuation. What we need is a new lexicon, something to help us negotiate and understand all the different types of love.
Psychologist Dorothy Tennov has already taken the first step towards this goal. She interviewed 500 people from different backgrounds and age groups, both gay and straight, about falling in love, and found a startling similarity in how each respondent described their feelings.
The basic components were:
-intrusive thinking (you can’t stop daydreaming about them);
-an aching in the heart;
-an acute sensitivity to any act or thought which can be interpreted favorably;
-fear of rejection and
-unsettling shyness in their presence;
-intensification through adversity (at least up to a point) and
-a disregard for all other concerns.
Tennov also discovered ‘a remarkable ability to emphasize what is truly admirable and avoid dwelling on the negative’.
Love is, in other words, blind, deaf and completely oblivious to foolishness.
(They needed to do research for that??)
To distinguish between these overwhelming emotions and the more stable, domestic feelings experienced by long-term couples who are only too aware of their partner’s failings,
Tennov coined a new term: limerence.
The obsessive, intrusive nature of limerence would be immediately recognizable to Martin:
‘I met her at a salsa class, the attraction was instant and we ended up exchanging telephone numbers, even though I knew she was married.
‘It was impossible to get down to work until we’d had our morning talk. I’d ache if she didn’t call.’
Twelve months later, when the affair had ended, Martin realized that they had little in common.
He put the attraction down to ‘lust’, yet the affair had been mostly non-intimate.
Tennov confirms: ‘Sexual attraction is not enough. Selection standards for limerence are, according to my informants, not identical to those according to which mere sexual partners are evaluated, and intimacy is seldom the main focus for limerence.
However, the potential for mating is felt to be there, or the state described is not limerence.’
When someone is under the spell of limerence, not even being rejected dampens down the madness. If limerence is returned, the feelings intensify and the couple end up ignoring their friends.
Sadly, these intense feelings never last.
Tennov puts the duration somewhere between six months and two years. This is a very similar figure to that proposed by social biologist Cindy Hayman of Cornell University, who tracked the brain chemicals of 5,000 subjects in 37 different cultures, and found this phase lasted between 18 months and three years.
It is important to have a new word for these intense feelings, for two reasons.
First, it recognizes the normality of borderline crazy behavior in the first stages of love, which could easily be stigmatized as stalking, or pathologized as too much in self-help books such as Women Who Love Too Much, by Robin Norwood.
Secondly, when limerence wears off, some people fear they are falling out of love.
In reality, love has just moved on to a new phase, and many people use limerence as a springboard for a long-term relationship. Arguably, we need this temporary madness, to convince us to set up home and intertwine our destinies with relative strangers.
While scientists have not researched precisely what it is that makes us choose one person over another, they have looked at what makes a good long-term partnership. At this stage we pick people who are like us, or who complement us in some hidden way.
Often, we search for other people with whom we can act out the issues we were unable to resolve as children. Our partners have to speak the same language, or there is simply no connection.
I call this kind of deep, intertwined love ‘loving attachment’.
Unlike limerence it is based on rational ‘eyes open’ choices about compatibility. Unlike limerence, loving attachment dies if it is not reciprocated, especially physically.
Unlike limerence, loving attachment can last forever.
To truly understand loving attachment, it is necessary to clarify the difference between the love for our partner and that for our children and our parents. Popular romance feeds us the idea of unconditional love, and during the limerence something approaching this is often achieved.
However, once a couple has moved on to loving attachment, unconditional love becomes a distant memory.
Most couples end up in my office because one half feels that their love is not returned, and because of that, over time, they have detached themselves from the relationship.
In contrast, the love for our children or parents is seldom conditional. I call this bond loving affection, because affection exists largely independently of how the recipient responds.
The confusion between loving attachment and loving affection can cause just as much misery as the confusion over limerence.
Love is a source of tremendous joy and comfort.
However, it will also be the source of untold pain, until we begin to differentiate between the three strands contained in just one four-letter word.
Maybe this new lexicon can help us understand each other better.
