This story is from the summer 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL ISSUE. Get four issues each year, sent straight to your door, by subscribing here.
For all its enduring appeal, the concept of romantic love can feel maddeningly vague. Look in a dictionary, and you’ll just learn it’s a “complex emotion” characterized by intense affection. Consult the dating gurus or pop psych for some clarity on what that actually means in practice, and you’ll find tons of narrow definitions, few of which overlap. Or you’ll learn that love is entirely individualistic and subjective—that you have to somehow redefine it over and over again in every new relationship. Absolutely none of which helps the countless anxious individuals asking themselves, Is what I’m feeling love, or am I mistaken? Or the people who worry, when their partner says “I love you,” Do they mean the same thing I mean when I say it? Or the folks who casually wonder things like (to quote an actual 2011 research paper), “Does a passionate and energetic Latin lover love more intensely than a quiet and reserved Nordic?”
Well rejoice, vexed romantics, because last year a slew of scholars across the world came together, compiled tons of scattered research, and largely settled on a few key findings. Turns out there is a common, core experience of romantic love, one that transcends culture and time. But what we do with that feeling—what we expect from love … that’s where shit gets sticky.
While philosophers have tied themselves in knots for centuries trying to define love in a way that lines up with their contested schema of the world, evidence-obsessed scientific researchers shied away from the squishy subject until the mid-20th century. Even then, the research was slapdash, with many people convinced that the concept of romantic love was just a Western cultural construct—because courtship and relationships in other parts of the world didn’t look quite the same. It took decades of slow, plodding study to systematically winnow down common experiences, figure out how to measure them, then test those measures across the globe, or look for signs of these conceptions of love deep within the historical record.
However, Cyrille Feybesse—a Brazilian psych researcher who spearheaded one of the recent meta studies—believes we can now say with some certainty that romantic love is defined by:
- “A strong desire to be close to the beloved”
- “Intense, even intrusive thinking about the beloved”
- “Idealization about love, the beloved, and the relationship”
- “A powerful sense of empathy and concern with the beloved’s wellbeing”
And often, but not always:
- “Strong, exclusive sexual desire”
These big emotions, though, often find themselves being mediated through different behavioral codes, added Lucy Brown, a New York neuroscientist who co-developed one of the main scales we now use to identify and measure love. So the way we act on those feelings—the way we express that shared core experience—varies wildly across time and place. See, for example, the quiet Nordic lover who shows his feelings through subtle action, versus the Latin lover loudly professing eternal devotion in the street at 4AM.
Our research into love is hardly complete. As Adam Bode, the biological anthropologist behind study aggregator site LoveResearch.info, points out, we’re still learning what physically causes the experience of love and why some people feel its visceral and mental effects more intensely than others, for example. Brown added that we still don’t know much about “why we fall in love with one person and not another? Why him? Why her?”
However, even this small nut of knowledge can be valuable. It may help the anxious to feel confident in recognizing and naming their emotions. It might encourage couples to trust there is a common core in their connection. And it suggests that what we really ought to focus on is discussing what we and our (potential) partners want from love—and how we’d like to express it. Which may be a hard conversation to raise or resolve but is at least a step beyond a constant emotional freakout.
Thanks to love psychologist Robert J. Sternberg for his insights in this field.
This story is from the summer 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL ISSUE. Get four issues each year, sent straight to your door, by subscribing here.
The post Newsflash: Boffins Finally Nail Definition of Transcendental Romantic Love appeared first on VICE.
