Birds do it, bees do it, I make my living from it and a significant majority of the human race spend varying degrees of their time obsessing about it. Yes, that’s right, I’m talking about love! But what exactly is love? What does it mean? Why are we so obsessed with it and where does it get us in the long run?

According to Wikipedia, ‘Love is a condition or phenomenon of emotional primacy, or absolute value’. Whilst this is far from being untrue, it stops some way short of describing adequately the depth and variety of this universal (or almost universal) human quality. Naturally Wikipedia’s definition does not stop there, but goes on for several thousand words exploring the various meanings and interpretations of this ephemeral concept. Great tracts of work spanning the entire history of literature are dedicated to the description, exaltation and analysis of love. Unfortunately space is limited here, so we shall be looking briefly at just a few common approaches to the attempt to define and analyse love.

1 – The Biological Approach

The world of science often struggles to engage with concepts such as emotions, and for centuries quite deliberately avoided any attempt to define such things, preferring instead to leave that stuff to the philosophers or, more recently to explain them away with the catch-all, ‘don’t ask’ explanation of ‘neurological impulses’. Recent advancements in neuroscience, however, have given rise to much greater understanding of exactly what happens to us in a physical sense when we experience various emotional states. Recently, physiologists studying emotional states have begun to discuss a new theory called limbic resonance.

The limbic system is a portion of the brain exclusive to mammals which is principally concerned with emotion, motivation and emotion memory. Limbic resonance basically refers to the ability of mammals to share emotional states and react to the emotions of those around them without the need for explicit communication. This is particularly important in babies, whose limbic association with their mothers begins in the womb, and forms the basis of what we more abstractly term love.

2 – The Evolutionary Role

Humans are social animals. We draw a great deal of our strength as a species from our ability to collaborate and rely on one another for mutual support. Historically this has been interrelated with the development of our evolutionary path. The basis of our human society is a network of social bonds of varying strengths, the strongest of which we tend to characterise as love. According to Darwin’s theory, the process of evolution is a reciprocal one, namely in that characteristics that aid the survival of the individual affect the process of natural selection, which in turn leads to the strengthening and refinement of the characteristics in question. As a mammal with a relatively long gestation period, whose young are dependent on the mother for several years and whose requirements make it difficult for the mother to lead a fully independent existence, it made sense for early humans to form strong psychological bonds within a family unit (and to a lesser extent within a wider clan or tribal group) to facilitate rearing of the young and the continuation of the species. To put it more brutally, those individuals who failed to develop these bonds would have measurably less success in the survival rate of their children, and their bloodline would not have survived.

3 – Literary and Artistic Importance

Many people throughout history have resisted the impulse to analyse love in a scientific sense, preferring to characterise it as a more ethereal or spiritual aspect of human existence. The attempt to define or explore the concept of love has been the driving force behind some of the world’s greatest works of art, literature and music from Ancient Greece to last week’s top ten.

For all the scientific and psychological advances in this field, the arts may still be best equipped to explore and explain the concept of love as they reflect better the space that love occupies within our lives. People experiencing love are unlikely to be concerned with the whys and wherefores of the process, love is a dynamic process that affects us on a deep emotional and expressive level, it is less important to understand it scientifically than to reconcile our inner feelings with our outward behaviour. Love is, after all, an affair of the heart and not of the head.