Researchers across disciplines have spent decades trying to define, categorize, and measure one of humanity’s most elusive experiences.
For thousands of years, philosophers, spiritual leaders, and poets have wrestled with love’s mysteries—what it is, how to describe it, and how to nurture it. Scientists? Well, they’re relatively new to the game.
Only in recent decades have researchers felt comfortable explicitly studying love. Before that, psychologists diplomatically called it “interpersonal attraction” or viewed it through the lens of attachment theory. Today’s scholars have expanded far beyond romantic love to include friendship, altruistic love, and even boundless compassion for all humanity.
The Challenge of Defining Love
At bedofeelgood, we think of love as a deep, selfless commitment to another person’s well-being—sometimes even putting their needs before our own. But we’re certainly not the final authority on this complex topic.
Researchers across psychology, sociology, neuroscience, religious studies, and philosophy can’t agree on how to break love down into components. Is love an emotion? A state of being? A practice? Maybe all three? They study it through observation, surveys, brain imaging, and countless other methods, each revealing different pieces of the puzzle.
A Brief History of Love Research
In the early 1900s, psychology was obsessed with the individual. Freud and Jung explored personality and how childhood shapes us, while love research hid within studies of childhood bonding and marriage. Jean Piaget examined cognitive development, John Bowlby explored attachment, and marriage researchers focused on family dynamics and marital satisfaction.
“For a long time, psychologists wouldn’t talk about love,” explains Charles Hill, professor of psychology at Whittier College. “They called it interpersonal attraction.”
Everything changed in the 1970s when social psychologists Ellen Berscheid and Elaine Hatfield boldly defined two types of love: passionate love (that intense, all-consuming feeling) and companionate love—”the affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply entwined.”
Their groundbreaking work sparked an entire field dedicated to studying relationships and their impact on happiness, health, and well-being. They even created a “passionate love” scale with 30 questions about feelings toward a beloved, later validated through brain imaging studies showing activation in reward centers when people think about or look at photos of their loved ones.
Around the same time, social psychologist Zick Rubin distinguished between liking and loving. He viewed love not as a fleeting feeling, but as an attitude with three components:
- Cognitive: what we believe about our beloved
- Emotional: how we feel about them
- Behavioral: how we treat them
Later, psychologist Robert J. Sternberg proposed his famous triangular theory of love, comprising intimacy (feelings of closeness and connection), passion, and commitment. In new relationships, commitment means deciding you love someone. In long-term partnerships, it’s the promise to maintain that love.
Modern Love Research: Expanding the Definition
Today’s researchers approach love from multiple angles, broadening the definition to include love of strangers, places, civic institutions, and even the natural world.
Hill collaborated with 30 researchers worldwide on a massive study of intimate relationships across cultures, conducted online in 20 languages across 72 countries. Their analysis identified four consistent measures people cited across eight relationship types: “Love is caring about another, feeling attached to that person, feeling passion towards the person and being willing to share feelings with that person.”
Arthur Aron, who studies romantic love, sees it as a drive toward intimacy that creates emotions when achieved—or frustrated. “We argue that love is a motivation, but not itself an emotion,” says Aron, a professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. “I would define it as a strong desire to connect, to include the other in the self.”
The Addictive Nature of Love
This desire to connect can become genuinely addictive. Neuroscience studies show that passionate love activates the same dopamine-rich reward centers in our brains as addictive substances and foods we crave. Research into cognition and memory reveals that being in love focuses our attention and memory around our beloved—while also creating potential distraction.
“You have better attention for your beloved, and information that has to do with your beloved,” explains Sandra Langeslag, a cognitive and biological psychologist at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. “Love distracts people from doing other things.”
Langeslag works with a model proposed by the late Helen Fisher, which divides love into three types: sexual desire, passionate love (or infatuation), and companionate love (or attachment). While animals experience both sexual desire and bonding, infatuation appears uniquely human. “I’m most intrigued by that infatuation stage,” she says.
The Great Love Debate: State or Trait?
One major disagreement among researchers is whether love is a temporary experience—a state we move through—or a fixed, enduring attitude or disposition.
Barbara Fredrickson describes love as a momentary emotion that expands our awareness, sense of self, and ability to truly see another person. In her book Love 2.0, she writes about experiencing “positivity resonance” comprising “shared positive emotions, biobehavioral synchrony, and mutual care.”
Research confirms these connection moments dramatically increase well-being. Studies directing people to have meaningful interactions with baristas, greet and thank strangers, and chat with people they don’t know found these interactions boosted happiness and positivity. “Those small moments really do make a difference to our well-being,” notes Beverley Fehr, a psychology professor at the University of Winnipeg. “The science is very clear on that.”
Sara Algoe, a psychology professor at UNC–Chapel Hill and director of the Love Consortium, describes two aspects: the momentary experience (“a surge, where we feel a deep sense of commitment and care and adoration for another person”) and enacted love (“behavior that is motivated by the experience of love”).
Love as Commitment
Others view love as commitment rather than momentary experience. Jacqueline S. Mattis, a psychologist and dean at Rutgers University Newark, defines love as “a cognitive and emotional experience of affection for another or for something that leads one to then engage in acts of care or acts of inconvenient virtue”—meaning acts requiring commitment, compassion, sacrifice, and grace.
Rabbi Shai Held, author of Judaism is About Love, sees love as “a profoundly demanding moral discipline” and “an existential posture—a way of holding myself in relationship to other people and the world.” Genuine love means seeing people for who they are and making space for them to be themselves.
The Spiritual Dimension: Finding Love in the Divine
While scientists analyze love through brain scans and behavioral studies, many people find their deepest understanding of love through their relationship with God. This spiritual perspective offers a different lens—one that sees love not just as a human experience, but as a reflection of the divine nature itself.
For many believers, God is the source of all love. This understanding transforms how they experience both giving and receiving love. When love flows from the divine, it becomes less about personal need or attraction and more about participating in something sacred and eternal. It’s love as a spiritual practice, a way of honoring the divine spark in every person.
This divine foundation can make human love feel both more grounded and more expansive. Grounded because it’s rooted in something unchanging and eternal. Expansive because it connects us not just to our beloved, but to all of creation. It’s the difference between love as a feeling that comes and goes, and love as a fundamental way of being in the world.
Many spiritual traditions teach that experiencing God’s love transforms our capacity to love others. When we feel deeply loved by the divine, we overflow with love for those around us. It becomes less about what we can get from relationships and more about what we can give—a natural expression of the love we’ve received.
This perspective adds another layer to the scientific understanding of love’s mystery. While researchers can measure brain activity and behavioral patterns, the spiritual dimension of love touches something beyond the physical—the soul’s longing for connection with both the divine and the human.
The Beautiful Mystery Remains
All this research and definitional disagreement—whether scientific or spiritual—provides more evidence of love’s fundamental mystery. Love is an experience that ultimately transcends complete analysis, whether through laboratory studies or theological reflection.
“The starting point is this mystery. We have questions, and we want dialogue so that we can better understand the mystery,” says Matthew T. Lee, a Baylor University sociology professor. “Once you start analyzing it and labeling it, you move back into the world of things.”
Lee’s bottom line? “Have a little humility. And don’t forget the poets and the great novels, and all the works of art.”
Perhaps that’s the most important insight from decades of love research: while science can illuminate many aspects of love, it remains beautifully, mysteriously human. At bedofeelgood, we believe that’s exactly as it should be.
