Insight On The Love At First Sight And Its Progression

What is love and how do we know when you are in love? What hormones are produced when you are in love? What happens when you are attracted to someone? What is romance? How do you know when you want to have sex and are there any steps? What hormones are produced when you are having sex? These are all questions that we have about the psychology of love, attraction, romance, and sex. Hopefully, this research paper will help you understand more about love and will help you gain more insight.

What exactly is love? One thing we do know is that it is an emotion. Love is a hard thing to define because it means so many different things to so many different people. This statement is in line with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1953) idea that most notions cannot be properly explained because there is not one characteristic in every example of the notion that resembles another characteristic. According to Kevin E. Hegi and Raymond M. Bergner (2010), because of that, “they lack the universal necessary and sufficient condition(s) required for a formal definition” (p.621). From two studies that Hegi and Bergner (2010) performed they observed that people have an essentialistic view, puts things together through predictions, rather than a prototypical view, every presumed feature is there, of four significant types of love. Those four types of love include romantic, parental, friendship and altruistic love.

Parental love is love between a parent, guardian, or parental figure and their child. An example of parental love would be Miley Stewart and Robby Stewart from the Disney Channel show, Hannah Montana. Friendship love is love between a person and their friend. An example of that would be Miley Stewart and Lily Prescott from Hannah Montana. Altruistic love is when a person cares for someone else that is in need (.

Romantic love is the type of love that comes out of being and loving someone in a relationship. As Jonathan Gottschall (2008) states, romantic love is when you “experience a strong desire for union with someone who is deemed entirely unique” (p.157). Berit Brogaard (2015) explains that “since the 1970s there has been a tendency to treat romantic love as a transitory and intermittent state of mine that has little to do with true love” (p.10). Information has been found that the growth of intimacy in the child’s romantic relationships is thought to be affected by how the child was raised by his or her parents (e.g., Collins & Read, 1990; Hazan & Shaver, 1987; Mikulincer, 2004). Examples of romantic love would be Rose and Jack from Titanic and Allie and Noah from The Notebook.

Victor Karandashev (2015) views “romantic love as a universal emotion across various historical periods of humankind and among contemporary cultures across the globe” (p.3). Romantic love involves a combination between sexual and emotional desire (Karandashev, 2015, pg.4). Another way that Karandashev (2015) defines romantic love is that it is “passionate, but the passion itself is not the only feature of this type of love. Romance is the fanciful, expressive and pleasurable feeling from an emotional attraction towards another person. There is often more emphasis on the emotions than on physical pleasure” (pg. 4). There is information that culture has a huge impact on people’s interpretations of romantic love and how they think, feel, and act in romantic situations (Hatfield, Rapson, & Martel, 2007). In western culture, romantic love is believed to be the “idealization of love” (Karandashev, 2015, pg. 8). Some people have noticed that romance is not really found in some cultures, including Japan and China (Karandashev, 2015, pg. 8).

There are multiple ways to fall in love at first sight. One way is known as ”harmonism” in which the couple has similar facial proportions, including “the relative distances between the forehead and bridge of nose, base of nose and mouth, and mouth and chin” (Malin, 2004, pg.10). An example of this, that Suzi Malin (2004) gives us is Princess Diana and Charles. Another way of loving at first sight is “echoism” which is when the couple has an echoed structure of the upper part of the eyelid line, the upper part of the lip line, and the wave of the eyebrow.