The dictionary of the RAE defines love as «intense feeling of the human being who, starting from his own insufficiency, needs and seeks the encounter and union with another being. Feeling towards another person that naturally attracts us and that, seeking reciprocity in the desire for union, completes us, makes us happy and gives us energy to live together, communicate and create. Feeling of affection, inclination and giving to someone or something». In short, in these first three entries of the 14 that have the word love, they all refer to “an other” and in no case to oneself, although self-love has its own place.
Types of love
According to psychology, there are six types of love: Eros, Ludus, Storge, Mania, Pragma and Agape.
– Field: romantic and passionate love and has to do with the intensity of physical attraction.
– Play: playful love that seeks adventure and fun and in which physical attraction also plays an important role.
— Storge: friendly and loyal love, mature and committed to lasting relationships. Sexual relations take a backseat.
– Mania: Manic love that arises from the obsessive and the passionate. It usually occurs in people with low self-esteem.
– Pragma: pragmatic, realistic and practical love that seeks common interests, the same tastes or the same social class.
— Agape: selfless love that is based on the welfare of the other. There is no jealousy and reciprocity is not sought. It is a combination of romantic love with the friendly and the loyal.
Typically, love relationships experience different types of love in their evolution and that people can experience one or more types of love throughout their lives in one relationship or in several.
In love there are many brain regions that are activated, especially those related to reward and motivation. Being in front of the loved one or thinking about him activates the hippocampus, the hypothalamus and the cortex of the anterior cingulate in a way that reduces anxiety and behavior while increasing trust in the partner. On the other hand, there are also areas that are deactivated and are those responsible for negative emotions or judgments towards the other: the amygdala and the frontal cortex.
At present there is a deep debate regarding romantic love and how it has been transmitted through art, maintaining the masculine and feminine roles of protection and submission respectively and abounding in gender stereotypes. Some myths of that romantic love are:
False myths of romantic love
- Who does love you, will make you cry
- The orange stockings
- Everything is forgiven for love
- Be a single person
- Happiness only as a couple
- Opposites attract
- Love can do it all
Faced with the eternal, platonic, broken, desperate, pure or unconditional love of songs and poems, there are who is much more skeptical keeping the heart as an organ that pumps blood and love as a cocktail of hormones destined to the maintenance of the species. The reality is that the concentration of oxytocin and vasopressin, the hormones most linked to love, increase during the intense phases of romantic love and act on numerous brain systems stimulating the release of dopamine by the hypothalamus and secreting happiness.