Western Notions of Love

In a sense Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) had begun this investigation. He had challenged the Christian-philosophical ideal of transcendental, universal love. For him, the urge to love came from the self, born out of base instinct. Freud's id was, in many ways, a revival of the Greek idea of love as an unreasoning furor. While his ideas were soon challenged, Freud was important for placing love more or less on the dissecting table, a subject for research and discussion. Others such as Havelock Ellis had joined the efforts to reexamine love and sex. Psychologists entered the field in the 1960s through efforts to distinguish different types of love. Elaine Hatfield, one of the pioneers, argued that people themselves distinguished several types of love and might do so at different times in their life cycle. Passion, she said, is pleasurable but the strong emotion involved creates the potential for relationship instability. Lovers want stability and often desire friendship as well as passion. Romantic love in effect remained complicated by reality.

Another psychologist, R. J. Sternberg, put forth a triangular theory of love involving intimacy, passion, and commitment, but also recognized that this did not describe all cases and that a sudden burst of passion and commitment could appear at a first meeting. Others, such as John Bowlby, developed an elaborate theory of human infant attachment as the precursor of and foundation for human love.

Not surprisingly, some researchers have found that men and women differ somewhat in their descriptions of love. They note a tendency for men to describe themselves as more involved in game-playing while women describe themselves as more friendship-oriented, practical, yet dependent. Men idealize an altruistic love more than women do, while women are more realistic. Both, however, emphasize the importance of passionate love. This phenomenon is no longer, if it ever was, confined to the Western world. According to W. R. Jankowiak and others, romantic love is everywhere.

The actual physiology of love has also been investigated. Intense love physiologically has been found to be distinct from sexual arousal, something that was often assumed in the past but is now demonstrated. Love, it now seems, evolved in tandem with two other primary neural systems: the sex drive and adult male-female attachment. The sex drive, according to this theory, evolved to motivate individuals to seek sexual union with appropriate mating partners, while the romantic attraction evolved to enable individuals to prefer and pursue a specific partner, whether male or female, since the same reaction is noted in homosexual and heterosexual individuals. In fact, as the literature of the past is reprinted without the censorship of earlier generations, homosexual love has come to play a significant role in the romantic literature of love as well. Lillian Faderman's 1981 study Surpassing the Love of Men broadly traces the literary history of romantic friendship and love between women from the Renaissance to the present. As the debate over gay and lesbian marriages in the first decade of the twentieth century would indicate, homosexual and heterosexual love are driven by the same forces.

Though love in popular fiction and accounts seem to belong to the young, love spans all of human life. Most studies have shown that friendship and passionate love are positive predictors of marital satisfaction across the life span. Love, in fact, has come to be regarded by most researchers as fundamentally important to humanity. It has a strong biological basis that is undoubtedly influenced by cultural developments. Love, it seems, is in a sense what makes the world go round.