# Are most people deeply confused about "love", or am I missing a human universal?

(In the following I am talking about "love" towards human beings only, not love of other things (such as music or food or God).)

A pet topic of mine is that the term *love* is so ambiguous as to be nigh-useless in rational discourse. But whenever I bring up the topic, people tend to dismiss and ignore it. Let us see if Less Wrong will do likewise.

Modern western culture (and maybe also other cultures) is ***obsessed*** with the ideal of *love*. *Love* is pretty much by definition the best thing in life which everyone should strive for.

The problem is that people don't agree on what *love* means. 

Everyone will acknowledge that *love* can mean different things. But my claim is that *most people do not **truly** understand this, even though they think they do*. When this is brought up, people will say "oh yes, love can mean different things", but they will go on to act and talk as though *love* refers to something well-defined.

I would argue that many people treat *love* as a [semantic stop sign](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FWMfQKG3RpZx6irjm/semantic-stopsigns). *Love* is by definition good and beautiful and virtuous and thus needs no further analysis. I have even heard people say that *love* is too "big" and too ineffable to analyze or define. In my opinion this is a problem, because people *do* use the term in "rational" discourse.

One might try to resolve the problem by arguing that there are different "kinds" of love:

*   Altruism.
*   Platonic love (eg towards friends or children).
*   Romantic and/or sexual love.
*   Romantic and/or sexual infatuation.

This helps a bit, but it still does not resolve the problem. Altruism is relatively well-defined, but the other two are still nebulous concepts. 

I think a different approach is better. As I see it, the concept of love is garbled mishmash of at least 3 different things:

*   *Love as giving*: The drive to protect someone and do stuff for them. (Altruism is a variant of this.)
*   *Love as craving*: The desire to be with or "have" someone (sexually or not).
*   *Love as euphoria*: The pleasant feeling/emotion that you may sometimes experience when interacting with someone you "love".

These 3 things can co-occur and correlate, but they are clearly distinct things, and it is a mistake to shoehorn them into being 3 "aspects" of the same thing. 

*Love* is usually treated as a binary thing: Either you "love" someone or you don't. This is another misconception that gives rise to bad reasoning. The above 3 things are obviously *gradual*, not binary, and the same goes for pretty much all attributes that people commonly associate with *love*. 

People will often try to distinguish between *"true love"* and *"not true love"*, or between *"love"*, *"lust"* and *"crushes"*. But there is no clear consensus. Most notably, people don't agree on whether *"true love"* has a craving component or not. 

(One could of course argue that the various "kinds" of *love* exist on a continuum. Sure. But all sorts of things can be arranged into continua; this does not mean that it is useful to view them as variants of the same thing.)

This appears all over the place in popular culture, old and new. For a slightly older example, look at Richard Wagner's opera *Tristan and Isolde*. It is generally agreed that the story of the opera revolves around *love*, but the *love* shown in the opera is obviously a destructive obsession and not at all a good thing. Yet people who describe *Tristan and Isolde* as being about *love* will - in the same breath - insist that *love* is something beautiful and virtuous. (I suspect that Wagner himself was a prime example of what I am complaining about. His work has a clear overarching theme of *love*, but it remains highly muddled and ambiguous.)

It is also worth noting that *love* can be used as virtue signalling. People will say things like "I love my wife, *but*... \[complaint\]". In such a context, it is not clear whether the profession of *love* is supposed to convey any rational meaning.

People use the term *love* in discussions of relationship and family matters all the time, and that causes misunderstandings and problems. As a consequence, I avoid the term in rational discourse. When I say "I love you" to my wife, I don't intend this as a statement of fact with any well-defined meaning, but as an *emotional signal* like a kiss or hug. If anyone asks me "do you love your wife?" I will ask them what exactly they mean by that.

**Or am I wrong?**

I have argued that *love* refers to a range of things, some of which are *completely unrelated*. They exist at opposite ends of a contrived and unnatural continuum.

Or am I wrong? Do all these things which people call *love* genuinely share something important in common? Is there some "feeling of love" that underlies them all?

From my own inner life I do not recognize a singular "feeling of love". I recognize several different feelings: Of appreciation, of protectiveness, of longing, of infatuation, of empathy-with-suffering. But not a "feeling of love".

I have reason to believe that I am a bit of a psychological outlier. I have some degree of chronic anhedonia, and I might have a mild autism spectrum disorder.

Am I the odd one out? Does there exist a clear "feeling of love" that most people recognize? 

Alternatively, are people more rational than I give them credit for? Is this confusion all in my head? When people talk about *love*, is it actually clear to everyone what they are talking about?

Or am I right and most people are confused?