Love is a condition or phenomenon of emotional primacy, or absolute value. Love generally includes an emotion of intense attraction to either another person, a place, or thing; and may also include the aspect of caring for or finding identification with those objects, including self love. Love can describe an intense feeling of affection, an emotion or an emotional state. In ordinary use, it usually refers to interpersonal love, an experience usually felt by a person for another person. Love is commonly considered impossible to define.
The concept of love, however, is subject to debate. Some deny the existence of love, calling it a recently invented abstraction. Moreover, approximately 13 percent of cultures reportedly have no word for love.[1] Others maintain that love exists but is indefinable; being a quantity which is spiritual, metaphysical, or philosophical in nature. Love is one of the most common themes in art. An unfinished debate about the authenticity of love as other-regard began with Friedrich Nietzsche's charge that love is merely an ideology constructed by the weak to mask "resentment" about their lack of power. Critics of Nietzsche's view find gratuitous his assumptions that self-interest and the "will to power" overshadow all other concerns.
Types
Courtly love – a late medieval conventionalized code prescribing certain conduct and emotions for ladies and their lovers.
Erotic love – desire characterized by sexual desires.
Familial love – affection brokered through kinship connections, intertwined with concepts of attachment and bonding.
Free love – sexual relations according to choice and unrestricted by marriage.
Platonic love – a close relationship in which sexual desire is nonexistent or has been suppressed or sublimated.
Puppy love – romantic affection felt between or as though between adolescents.
Religious love – devotion to one’s deity or theology.
Romantic love – affection characterized by a mix of emotional and sexual desire.
Unrequited love – affection and desire not reciprocated or returned.
There are also 6 greek terms for differing types of love.
Eros-- erotic love; sometimes portrayed as romantic love. More characterized by passion to a singular person and sexual desire.
Platonic-- love between friends, or love where sexual desires are not present (sometimes is referred to under philos instead)
Storge-- a friendly, affectionate type of love. Sometimes has been portrayed as parental or familial love.
Philos-- a pluralistic type of "love"; also sometimes written as a friendship type of love.
Agape-- selfless, giving love, the love one has for all of humanity or for others simply because of their human nature.
Mania-- obsessive love. (a minor type of love)
Cultural views
Although there exist numerous cross-cultural unified similarities as to the nature and definition of love, as in there being a thread of commitment, tenderness, and passion common to all human existence, there are differences. For example, in India, with arranged marriages commonplace, it is believed that love is not a necessary ingredient in the initial stages of marriage – it is something that can be created during the marriage; whereas in the United States, by comparison, love is seen as a necessary prerequisite to marriage.
Like hatred, of the same value, but to its extreme, love is what we "cultivate," of the mind, of that sense of love which is commonly considered good or acceptable or even worthy of (our) purpose and being.