This essay argues that love resists easy definition precisely because dominant cultural and philosophical frameworks rely on idealized, moralized, or overly narrow conceptions. Drawing on Mark Twain's reflections on perception and beauty, philosophical accounts from Descartes, and sociological observations about marriage and divorce trends, the paper builds toward a working definition of love grounded in emotional and physiological experience rather than traditional markers or institutional categories. The proposed definition deliberately sidesteps moral gatekeeping — including debates over marriage, sexual orientation, and even disturbing criminal cases — in favor of a framework that is consistently applicable across the full spectrum of human relationships.
Despite being the frequent subject of literature and film, actually defining the concept of love has remained a somewhat difficult task, especially because some would argue that the concept itself resists precise definition. There are, of course, individual interpretations and categorizations of love, but a definition that manages to include all the necessary information to describe love without limiting its scope remains elusive. However, by examining the treatment of love in literature and philosophy alongside evidence demonstrating the need for an adaptive definition, it is possible to arrive at a specific definition of love that nonetheless remains useful for describing a wide variety of phenomena in contemporary society.
Before seeing how definitions of love have evolved through literature, philosophy, and social customs, it will be useful to briefly examine a description of two competing kinds of beauty that will offer a frame for the larger work of defining love. In a portion of Reading the River, Mark Twain discusses how learning the language of the river — how each detail of a sunset means something specifically related to steamboating — actually leads one to lose "all the grace, the beauty, the poetry" that was once in the river (Twain 1). Twain likens this process to what he imagines physicians must feel when looking at a beautiful person, wondering "what does the lovely flush in a beauty's cheek mean to a doctor but a 'break' that ripples above some deadly disease?" (Twain 2).
Twain's statement is important because he seems to be suggesting that looking too closely at something ostensibly beautiful — like a sunset, a beautiful person, or the concept of love — strips away the very aspects which make it beautiful. Read this way, one might be forgiven for thinking that Twain is arguing in favor of ignorance, since when he asks "doesn't [a doctor] sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?" he appears to suggest that becoming a doctor, or learning how to safely navigate a river, are somehow beauty-less life choices (Twain 2). However, when examined more closely, Twain is actually hinting at the very reason why love requires a precise definition in order to bridge the gap between what is often professed about love and its actual reality.
While Twain is undoubtedly poking fun at one's ability to let work strip the beauty out of something, he is also implicitly pointing out the need for a specified definition of love. Just as the younger Twain finds beauty in the mystery of the river and the sunset, so too could the older Twain find beauty in the secret language of the river, marveling at how "the 'break' from a new snag [that] has located himself in the very best place he could have found to fish for steamboats" makes the river more like a living thing than a body of water (Twain 2). Looked at in this way, the initial beauty Twain describes is analogous to what many would call an idealized love — one more often than not characterized as immediate or near-immediate, eternal, and homogenized.
The experience of the sunset free from knowledge of the river, while traditionally beautiful in its description, is also fairly boring, because each of the details mentioned is provided with flowery language lacking any lasting meaning. It describes a perfect sunset, free from any of the details or intricacies that reveal real truth about the river — just like "the idealization of marriage in the contemporary media [in which] the focus of discussion is the wedding day itself, with hardly a mention of what comes next" (Schaefer 2). The focus is on the idealized moment, captured in time for eternity, and this mentality characterizes most common depictions of love, often with the qualifier "true" added to the beginning. A more useful definition of love is hinted at by the characterization of the river the second time through, when Twain reveals the greater meaning behind the various details mentioned in the flowery description of the sunset.
Whereas the first description of the river focuses only on the visual experience of a single moment in time, the second time around Twain describes the meaning of each detail, noting, among other things, that "this sun means that we are going to have wind to-morrow; that floating log means that the river is rising, small thanks to it; that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody's steamboat one of these nights, if it keeps on stretching out like that" (Twain 1). While at first glance one may read this as Twain lamenting all the negative things underlying the beauty, the important part lies in the realization that change occurs, and that one moment of a river is simply that. This kind of nuance is required in order to truly understand love, because just like the changing river, love is far from eternal or idealized. It is rather enacted in a variety of situations and through a variety of different means, leading to the aforementioned differences in categorizing and labeling love.
Although the divisions between categories of love ultimately serve to obscure the object, they may be helpful in constructing a useful definition. Most commonly, love is divided between romantic and non-romantic love. Romantic love is described as — "at least according to innumerable literary works, much received wisdom, and even a gradually coalescing academic consensus — to experience a strong desire for union with someone who is deemed entirely unique," "to idealize this person, to think constantly about him or her, and to discover that one's own life priorities have changed dramatically," and finally, "to care deeply for that person's well-being and to feel pain or emptiness when he or she is absent" (Gottschall & Nordland 450). Non-romantic love generally includes close bonds between friends and family members, encompassing the same kind of concern for one another expressed through different means of affection.
This categorization is generally unhelpful because human relationships, especially between close friends, exist more on a spectrum than in neat divisions — non-romantic love may evolve into romantic love and vice versa. Thus, a more useful definition of love would be broader, including mutual concern and affection without the unnecessary distinction based on the appropriate means of expressing that affection. When discussing love, one might say that it is the collection of emotions (including the underlying chemical and physiological changes) experienced in human relationships characterized by one party caring "deeply for [the other] person's well-being and to feel pain or emptiness when he or she is absent" (Gottschall & Nordland 450). As the following discussion shows, defining love in this way removes many of the problems plaguing other conceptions of love that rely on outdated assumptions regarding human relationships.
"Proposed definition grounded in emotion and physiology"
"Starter marriages and divorce as evidence of evolving love norms"
"Descartes, moral gatekeeping, and same-sex marriage debate"
Despite the fear that the essence of love is nigh indefinable and the prevalence of idealized notions of love that have no bearing on the realities of human experience, determining a specific, productive definition of love is possible. By recognizing that love is a collection of emotions and chemical changes characterized by certain behaviors and feelings toward other individuals, one can discuss love without falling into any of the same traps of categorization and distinction that previously hindered a useful consideration of the concept. Ignoring the outdated notions of love and the rules for determining its legitimacy in the eyes of moralizing institutions allows one to apply this proposed definition in order to explain not only recent trends in marriage and divorce rates but also how a clearer conception of love can improve society at large by taking better account of people's states of mind in an objective and productive way.
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