In other words, we know that love isn’t just a thought, feeling, or action, but it can be present in a thought, feeling, or action (Levine, 2005). Notice that the only shared characteristic of these situations is that you care about something or somebody (your team, your children, your partner, your creative vision) and want it to be well. For example, love can be why you forgive your partner for always being late, commit to finishing a creative project, dream about getting a promotion so you can afford to take your kids to Disneyland, or feel devastated when your favorite sports team loses. While psychologists generally agree that there are a limited number of types of love (more on this in just a bit) everyone has agreed that love manifests in many different ways – perhaps too many to count. In addition to realizing that love involves feeling good when somebody else is well (Bowlby, 1978), psychologists started to describe different types of love, such as romantic love and companionate love (Berscheid & Walter, 1978). This process, though often painful or saddening, is part of the natural cycle of relationships coming and going in our lives.īelieve it or not, psychologists only really started studying love as a specific idea in the last 75 years. You might remember a moment when you looked at someone you were once close to and you felt no drive to be near them or invest in them. Perhaps you have experienced this yourself. When a close relationship fades, one or both people in the relationship gradually come to care less about whether the other person is doing well and start putting less effort into promoting the other person’s wellbeing (Barry et al., 2008). The experience of “falling out of love” provides an effective example of this. Since love involves being invested in somebody else and wanting them to be well, the opposite of love is the absence of investment and wanting the other person to be well – indifference, in other words (Abbasi & Alghamdi, 2017). Therefore, it can’t be the opposite of love. Hatred also involves a powerful – but in this case, negative – feeling. It turns out, though, that “the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference.” This phrase, most often attributed to Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel, emphasizes a central aspect of love: namely, that it involves a powerful feeling. You might be saying to yourself, “isn’t hate the opposite of love?” I wondered about this, too.
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