What Is Love Anyway?

This essay explores seven interlocking meanings of the term love. These meanings are the author's synthesis based on years of trying to understand what people mean by the word and why they are not more explicit in explaining themselves during psychotherapy. The meanings may help clinicians better grasp what seems to be the most basic context for understanding a person's sexual life. Love may be: a complex emotion—it is never a single feeling; an ambition; moral commitment; a private dynamic struggle; a deal; a stop sign to psychological inquiry. Many forces in culture and within individuals resist careful scrutiny of what we mean by love.