Love has fascinated researchers for decades. We look at what experts have learned about the origins and psychology of love.
Love is a powerful, complex emotional experience that involves changes in your body chemistry, including your neurotransmitters (brain chemicals). It impacts your social relationships in varied ways, affecting how you relate to others around you.
There are many types — like the love you share with your partner, family, and friends — and each version you feel is unique. It can fill you with emotions ranging from joy to heartbreak.
Love is an emotion of strong affection, tenderness, or devotion toward a subject or object. When you love a person you experience pleasurable sensations in their presence and are sensitive about their reactions to you.
Research from 2016 points to neuropeptides and neurotransmitters as the source of love. Feelings of love help us form social bonds with others. As social creatures, these natural chemicals developed to help us survive by encouraging:
It seems like so much more, though. Calling love an interaction of brain chemicals doesn’t quite describe how it can warm your heart and captivate your soul.
Attachment is a component of love. Strong attachment bonds set mammals apart from many other types of animals, though other groups — including fish and birds — also form strong social connections to help them survive.
A 2017 review describes four types of mammalian attachment bonds as:
Most instances of human love fall into one of these categories. For example, the love you feel for a close friend could be classed as a peer bond.
A romantic relationship is a type of pair bond. It can start as mutual attraction and evolve into love over time.
When you like someone, you enjoy their companionship and care about their well-being. When you love them, those feelings are unconditional.
Love can do more than help you bond with another person. It can even impact your physical health.
Love may affect your immune system. A 2019 study found that falling in love resulted in immune system changes similar to protective viral infection responses.
It might also safeguard against cancer, according to a 2021 study that found tissue from pair-bonded mice was less likely to grow tumors than tissue from mice with disruptions to their pair bonds.
You might feel like you have no control over the love you feel, but research says otherwise. Love is like an emotion that you can regulate by generating new feelings or changing the intensity of the feelings you have.
So, if you’re disappointed because the love you feel isn’t reciprocated, you may be able to take your mind off it.
