The Seven Forms Of Love

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One of the most commonly asked questions throughout the ages is: What is love? While there are endless variations of the answer to this question, the closest answer can be found through another question: What forms of love exist, and when do they apply? By understanding that there are different types of love, and depicting the meaning behind them, people are better equipped to access the answer to the aforementioned age-old question. Love is a universal language that is the core of a functioning society. Therefore, it is, and has been, a hot topic, for people are relational beings and crave an answer: “The elusiveness of love, like that of lovers, has not discouraged people altogether: several psychologists have proposed to capture the essence …show more content…

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Intimacy, on its own, equates to liking. This is an emotional component that causes a person to feel a sense of closeness to another. Key associations to a purely intimate love are comfortableness, freedom to talk about anything, a sense of support, and a feeling of mutual understanding: “Intimacy, the “warm” component, refers to ‘feelings of closeness, connectedness, and bondedness’” (Heinrich, Albrecht, & Bauer, 2012, p. 138). Next, there is passion, which is a motivational component. On its own, this is infatuation. Passion is what drives a “trigger” attraction, sexual desire, and sense of romance. People associate this love with a “butterflies in the stomach” type of feeling, high arousal, and sneaking gazes at one another. However, this love type is not necessarily always a positive form: “infatuation is prototypically associated with euphoria but is frequently also accompanied by negative feelings such as insecurity, nervousness, and anxiety” (Langeslag, Muris, & Franken, 2013, p. 740). The third component, to complete the points of the triangle, is commitment. Commitment is the cognitive component, which is a love that exists due to the decision to love and feeling of responsibility to another person. It may be referred to as the “cold” component, for it “represents the decision to love someone else in the short run and the commitment to

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