Love

Love is an emotion of strong affection and personal attachment.1 Love is also a virtue representing all of human kindness, compassion, and affection; and "the unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another".2 Love is central to many religions, as in the Christian phrase, "God is love" or Agape in the Canonical gospels.3 Love may also be described as actions towards others (or oneself) based on compassion, or as actions towards others based on affection.4 In English, love refers to a variety of different feelings, states, and attitudes, ranging from pleasure ("I loved that meal") to interpersonal attraction ("I love my partner"). "Love" may refer specifically to the passionate desire and intimacy of romantic love, to the sexual love of eros, to the emotional closeness of familial love, or the platonic love that defines friendship,5 to the profound oneness or devotion of religious love.6 This diversity of uses and meanings, combined with the complexity of the feelings involved, makes love unusually difficult to consistently define, even compared to other emotional states. Love in its various forms acts as a major facilitator of interpersonal relationships and, owing to its central psychological importance, is one of the most common themes in the creative arts.7 Love may be understood as part of the survival instinct, a function to keep human beings together against menaces and to facilitate the continuation of the species.8