She interviewed 500 people from different backgrounds and age groups, both gay and straight, about falling in love, and found a startling similarity in how each respondent described their feelings. Psychologist Dorothy Tennov has already taken the first step towards this goal. What we need is a new lexicon, something to help us negotiate and understand all the different types of love. We all instinctively agree there is a huge difference between liking and complete infatuation. They list almost two dozen definitions - including affection, fondness, caring, liking, concern, attraction, desire and infatuation. Social biologists have scanned our brains and identified three chemicals - dopamine, phenyl ethylamine and oxytocin - which they claim attract us exclusively to our mates for long enough, in their opinion, to conceive and give the offspring a secure start.Īll of this is mildly diverting, but of no use when someone looks into your eyes and tells you that they love you. Freud dismissed romantic love as the sex urge, blocked. The pioneering sexologist Havelock Ellis provided a famous but entirely incorrect mathematical formula: love = sex + friendship. Scientists have been trying to define love according to their frame of reference for a very long time. How can one little word cover so many different nuances of feeling? More importantly, if love means different things to different people, how can we ever effectively communicate it? The problem is further compounded because we generally also feel tremendous love for our mothers, our children, our friends - even chocolate. On the one hand, love can lift us up on the other, it can destroy us. But when we come to ask what love is, we are overwhelmed by a myriad different ideas and experiences. Every popular song is about it, half our books and films obsess over it, everybody wants it.