Love is the most cherished emotion and feeling and is considered the most superior also. It comes in various types like love of mother and offspring, love of brothers and sisters, love of lovers and marriage, and the Mother Teresa kind of love- loving the humanity. Out of these the first two comes most naturally, the next is what we make an effort for and the last type is for the rare few blessed soul.
We often link love to the feeling of the heart because we think we feel it from the heart and the heart break also. No one says I am brain broken because we broke up. It is indeed a very strong emotion and we can do almost anything for it. There can be eight different types of love.
Philia - the affectionate love. It is love without romantic inclination as found between friends and family members.
Pragma- the enduring love. It is an unique love between couples who are putting equal amount of faith dedication and commitment into the relationship.
Storge- familiar love. It is the kind of deep rooted love found between parents and children and some friends having deeper emotional connection.
Eros- the romantic love. It is the passionate primal love which is intrinsic to all and is a desire for another person’s physical body.
Ludus- the playful love. It is the childlike flirtatious love found in between new lovers and newly married. It is a type of playful excited interaction with lot of fun, teasing and laughter.
Mania- the obsessive love. As the name suggests it is a love bordering on jealousy and possessiveness due to mistrust and imbalance in love towards each other.
Philautia- the self love. It is a healthy form of self love where you value your self worth and personal needs of physical mental and emotional needs.
Agape- the selfless love. It is the highest form of love where you decide to spread love to all irrespective of anything in expectation and kindness for all.
Our life is not limited to any one form of love but a bouquet of it. In different stages of life some types may be stronger than the other types, but it won’t be devoid of any one of them. Except the Agape all other types of love are limited to our close ones. But agape has the ability to be used as a destructive love also. Hitler’s love for the pure Aryan race led to the genocide of Jews, Americas hatred for communism sucked them into the Korean and the Vietnam War.
Though the heart is said to be the epicenter of love but it is actually the brain which controls over emotion of love. It is a play of chemical in our brain which creates the emotions related to love.
Love also has three phases and these chemicals play an important role in it. Lust is often considered derogatory term in love but none the less it is a part of the love chemistry between a man and a woman. It is controlled by testosterone in males and estrogen in woman and is common to all mammals. So whether we accept it or not but it is an important emotion which leads to creation of offspring’s. Then is the attraction and euphoria stage which is controlled by the dopamine, adrenaline and nor epinephrine and has the same effect of addiction to drugs and it is the reason why our palms get sweaty, the heart racy and cheeks seems flushed. Next is the attachment stage which is again the effect of combination of a above mentioned chemicals along with oxytocin which is also called the cuddle hormone. It creates a feeling of close bond and gives us thoughts of a long term relationship. So a lot goes on in the brain and nothing in the heart.
What triggers someone to fall for another in a romantic relation varies from individual to individual but some common things influence it like the appearance, the personality traits and the body type. We find people in romantic relations who have been born and brought up in completely different environment as between a Chinese and an American. Or we find a slim girl falling for a fat man or vice versa, or a introvert falling for an extrovert, and a white falling for a black. Even money may induce love. It is indeed not fully understood yet what makes one love another person. Also we know how loved developed in the first place among the early humans. Was it purely based on lust which created the feeling of love or was it ingrained in the evolution process?
But whatever love is, it has the ability to transform our lives in a better way with all the joy and happiness and it also has the antidote for all the problems we have created for us on this earth.
The ability to love is pure peace and to feel loved is priceless...