refers to the highest form of love, a transcending, unconditional love, particularly the love between humans and God. This rich Greek vocabulary suggests that much of the confusion over the meaning of love arises from the fact that in English we have only one word to describe a wide range of emotional states and concepts.
The emergence of Islam in the seventh century CE gave rise to the concept of ishq, or divine love. In the Sufi-tradition of Islam, love is essential to lead humans back to our destiny of grace.
The Middle Ages in Europe engendered the tradition of courtly love that prized chivalry and nobility over erotic desires. This form of love, too, was believed to elevate the lover and the beloved to a higher level of being. While the concept of courtly love was influenced by religion, it was a secular concept, contrasting with the views of thinkers of that period such as Thomas Aquinas, who based his reasoning about love solely on Christian dogma. Given that courtly love centered on chivalry and male valor, it also neglected the role of women in mutually loving relationships.
In the seventeenth century, Baruch Spinoza proposed a concept of love that is linked more to nature than to the conventional concept of God.4 Spinoza saw God not as a person but as an all-encompassing entity, one that includes nature. To him, love was one of the natural phenomena, “passions,” which humans pursued because of their associated rewards, in this case joy. Spinoza’s views are among the earliest recognitions of love as a physiological drive. At a time when discussions on love and God were dominated by biblical views, Spinoza’s rational analyses of love and God earned him much criticism from the major established religions.
The nineteenth century saw a definite turn to biology and science for explaining love. Arthur Schopenhauer was the first prominent thinker to emphasize the biological aspect of love and its significance for human existence.5 Before Charles Darwin formulated his theories of evolution, Schopenhauer was already asserting that love is a powerful biological force essential to the success and survival of the human species. With his “will to live” paradigm, Schopenhauer identified love as a basic instinct with the purpose of facilitating reproduction. These concepts introduced biology as an important underlying mechanism for humans’ feelings and expression of love.
Charles Darwin is best known for formulating the scientific theory of evolution. In this context, his paradigm of the “survival of the fittest” has often been interpreted to mean the “survival of the strongest and most powerful.” In recent years, scientists have taken a closer look at Darwin’s later work, which deals specifically with human evolution. In his book The Descent of Man, Darwin argued that morality and conscience are the most important factors in human evolution.6 He concluded that empathy and other social instincts are rooted in biology, generating the basis of morality. Love and morality provide a survival advantage for our species by fostering and strengthening bonds between humans, leading to better protection of their offspring. Darwin acknowledged that he overstated the effect of the egotistic human drive in his earlier work, whereas in fact both selfish and altruistic instincts are in play in the process of evolution.
The twentieth century witnessed the fusion of evolutionary concepts of love with an emphasis on psychology, early childhood development, and sexuality, particularly among Sigmund Freud and his followers.7 Freud saw love predominantly as an expression of the sexual drive, a view that was consistent with the paradigm of reproduction as the underlying force in love. Psychology dominated the thinking on love for decades to come, exploring the motivations for love and romantic relationships.
In the 1950s, Erich Fromm drew a categorical distinction between falling in love and actual love (see chapter 1). He viewed love as a deliberate construct of the mind, one that requires effort and focus: that is, an art. He theorized that love is a response to humans’ innermost fear, that of loneliness. By facilitating union between people, love provides the remedy to our anxiety about human separation and awareness of our mortality. Fromm’s theory of love is based on both psychological theory and religion.
In his 1973 book Colours of Love, John A. Lee expands on categories of love formulated by the ancient Greeks: eros (passionate love), ludus (game-playing love), storge (friendship), pragma (practical love), mania (possessive, dependent love), and agape (altruistic love).8 The psychologist Robert Sternberg proposed a “triangle theory of love,” consisting of intimacy, passion, and commitment.9 Lee and Sternberg, however, describe patterns and components of relationships but not love itself. Love may be an important element in relationships, but other factors influence the dynamics of interpersonal bonds.
All these discussions of love through the centuries agree on some basic points. We refer to love in a number of ways: as an intense longing for another person that is associated with a highly euphoric state and a strong drive for connection and intimacy; as a passionate desire for physical closeness and sexual activity; and as a selfless concern for the contentment of others that may vary in intensity, ranging from benevolence toward neighbors and friends to, in its highest form, a feeling of mystical or spiritual union, that is, love of God or the divine. Over time, we have come to give more weight to the biological and psychological explanations of love than to religious theories.
Today, we can also bring the tools of neuroscience and endocrinology to bear on questions about how we perceive and experience love. Given the extreme complexity of the human brain and nervous system, we are only now starting to understand how our emotions, thoughts, and perceptions are directly related to the integrity, performance, and coordination of our nervous system. With modern brain imaging techniques, many thought processes can be located in specific areas in the brain. Functional magnetic resonance imaging techniques can now identify areas of the brain that are associated with different emotional states.10 For example, we know which brain areas control fear, anxiety, and sadness, and we can modulate these responses using pharmaceuticals.
In recent decades, biomedical scientists have begun studying emotions that we commonly associate with romantic relationships, such as attraction, passion, and attachment. We know that an array of hormones influence mating and partnership behavior.11 Studies demonstrate that different brain areas are active during early phases in a romantic partnership, such as the falling-in-love phase, than in long-term relationships.12 Furthermore, these studies have found that distinct areas of the brain are active when people experience feelings of lust and attachment, indicating that these are different phenomena.13
It is now generally accepted that human behavior is largely motivated by basic instincts or drives. When we feel hungry, we are motivated to find food. When we are tired, we want to sleep. These brain imaging and hormone studies support the idea that sexual arousal, attachment, and love are distinct human drives.
Human drives evolved through natural selection over millions of years and serve the same purpose for all life: fostering the survival of the individual and the species. The evolutionary advantage of the human sex drive is easy to understand: it directly supports reproduction by allowing the combination of two people’s DNA to create progeny. The intense, obsessive focus on somebody with whom we fall in love promotes mating, as well as partnership for the most vulnerable period of the offspring’s life. Our egotistic impulses also make sense from an evolutionary perspective, as they promote our own well-being in order to allow procreation and to protect our children. By the same token, pronounced egotism, manifested in a strong drive for status and power, is still prevalent today because in the past it extended an advantage to individuals of high standing in a community, who could provide more resources and protection to their offspring. Consistent with Darwin’s theories, recent research on evolutionary history has revealed that the association of social status and reproductive success weakened with human development and socialization.14 At the same time, empathy and love have become more powerful forces for human expansion.15
Is love as I define it here — the urge and continuous effort for another person’s happiness and well-being — also an evolutionary drive? A strong argument can be made that it is. Human brain imaging studies suggest that love is associated with numerous brain activities and tightly woven into our neural reward system.16 Loving somebody