“Being in love is associated with intense feelings of passion, infatuation, obsession and lust,” says Sarah. So there’s a lot of sacrifice and a lot of responsibility.' How can you tell you’re in love? It is an emotion however it comes after there’s trust, after there’s loyalty and after there’s commitment. According to Anya*, age 20, who is engaged in a long-distance relationship, 'Love is a reciprocal interaction that needs to be displayed on both sides. Loving someone means even loving the mundanity of your day-to-day life together, and building a real commitment to the other person, Sarah explains.ĭifferent people have different definitions and experiences of love, and everyone's different experiences of love is of course going to shape what love means to them. 'Loving someone is about accepting them for who they are,' explains psychosexual & relationship therapist and psychotherapist Sarah Calvert, even the things that you might not necessarily like about them, such as how messy they are. Having someone's best interest and wellbeing as a priority in your life. What is the definition of love?Īccording to the dictionary, love is 'an intense feeling of deep affection.' Meanwhile, Urban Dictionary defines love as, 'The act of caring and giving to someone else.

Meanwhile, a lot of people simply prefer to identify as queer. Some people are polyamorous, meaning they love multiple romantic partners at once, while others are aromantic and don't feel romantically attracted to other people at all. Lesbians are women that love other women, while gay men love other men, and bisexual people love people of more than one gender, while pansexual people love people of all genders. The LGBTQ+ community shows that there are plenty of different forms of love. But, most often, when people talk about love they mean romantic love with a partner. There’s non-romantic platonic love between friends, love between family members, plus intense unconditional love. Love is an incredibly subjective thing, and within love itself there are a whole bunch of different kinds of love. What is love? We all talk about love a lot, but what actually is the definition of love? What does love really feel like? And how is love different from lust? Here are all the different ways that love can be defined, plus an expert explains exactly what love is.

What does it mean to love someone