Cambridge Festival Speaker Spotlight

Today is Valentine’s Day. What better day to find out more about love from Professor Viren Swami, one of the world’s leading experts in the psychology of romantic attraction. On 22 March, Professor Swami is set to give a talk at the festival, Love, actually: The science of this thing called love.  

What do you think love is?  

Wouldn’t it be great if there were a simple answer to this question? Sadly, there are no neat answers when it comes to love. For example, if I said “I love you” – a collective you including all readers of this piece – would that love be different to the love I express towards my wife? And is it still the same love when I say I love my children or my dog? What about when I say I love pizza or the colour blue, or when I say I love the novels of Jesse Ball or that I love my hometown? 

And to complicate things even further, not everyone answers this question in the same way. A neuroscientist, for example, might tell you about what happens in the brain when we’re in love, whereas a cognitive scientist might tell you about the different ways of measuring love. A psychoanalyst might focus on your attachment styles, while an anthropologist might be more concerned with how distinct cultural groups understanding meanings of love. So, answering this question isn’t quite as easy as it seems.  

Can science ever fully explain love? 

One thing that most scientists – irrespective of their specific field of research – agree upon is that love is that we feel. We feel love, we fall in love, we become lovesick. Love in these scientific perspectives is basically an internal process that happens to us. And insofar as you agree with this perspective, then yes, science has come a long way in terms of helping us understand what that feeling is, when and why it occurs, and how we can measure it.  

But this isn’t all that love is. In fact, there is a vastly different approach to love, which takes issue with the idea that love is just an emotion or sentiment. In the 1950s, the psychologist Erich Fromm argued that love isn’t just something we feel, but something we must actively do – love, he said, is a verb not a noun. And although Fromm’s work has been highly influential on philosophical approaches to love, his views sadly remain largely absent from the science of love.  

Have our understandings of love changed over time?  

They certainly have. About 3,000 years ago, for example, the ancient Greeks came to think of love as an act of god – specifically the god of love and sex, Eros. He was usually winged and carried his signature bow and arrows, and it was his arrows that he used to make both mortals and immortals fall in love. For the ancient Greeks, anyone who was lucky – or unlucky – enough to be pierced by one of Eros’s arrows would instantly fall in love with anyone else who happened to be around. 

And while most people today would characterise love as something positive, in the European Middle Ages, love was often seen as a form of melancholia or illness. Love was something to be avoided and, if you were unlucky enough to be afflicted, you’d need to find a cure. Physicians like Galen, for instance, believed that eros or love could only be treated with purgatives, laxatives, or bloodletting to rebalance one’s constitution.

Do you think love means different things to diverse cultural communities? 

One way to find an answer to this question is to ask respondents from different communities to describe what they think are the prototypical characteristics of love. Studies have generally shown that most people, irrespective of their cultural background, have a clear prototype in mind: love is something in which intimacy and commitment to another is emphasised.  

At the same time, anthropological work conducted in the 1950s and 1960s – particularly by Margaret Mead, Ralph Linton, and Robert Lowie – showed how, unlike Western respondents, many communities around the world do not have elaborate beliefs about romance. In other words, their conceptions of love – while certainly involving compassion and liking – were absent what those in the West might call passion or romance.  

But in an increasingly globalised world, conceptions of love are becoming remarkably similar across cultural groups. This hasn’t always been an entirely benign process – throughout the twentieth century, for example, colonisers often imposed laws and regulations that sought to enforce a singular view of love as that between a man and a woman.   

Does the feeling of love vary among individuals? If so, can it be dramatically different from person to person? 

People certainly differ in what we call their ‘love styles’. The psychologist Robert Sternberg proposed a triangular theory of love, which suggests there are three main forms of love: passion, intimacy, and commitment. In this model, different forms of love are explained as different combinations of these three elements. For example, romantic love occurs when we are both passionate and intimate with them.  

Sternberg also believed it was possible to measure these forms of love using questionnaires. Studies have shown that this model of love is stable across individuals and cultural groups, but there is also wide variation in people’s preferred love styles. For example, some people may be more likely to love romantically, whereas others may be more likely to love compassionately (a combination of intimacy and romance).  

As it’s Valentine’s Day, do you have any tips on how we could all be better at love?  

I will borrow from Erich Fromm, who asked us to treat love as an art. And in the same way that we might practice music, painting, or writing, we must also practice the doing of love. But how do you practice love?  

According to Fromm, there are four activities that are essential to loving: we must actively care for the life and growth of that which we love, we must be able and ready to respond to the needs of another, we must respect those whom we love, and we must truly know and understand those whom we love.  

This might sound difficult, but a good place to start is in learning to apply these principles of love to yourself. Loving yourself isn’t the same as arrogance or narcissism. Instead, loving yourself means taking care of yourself, taking responsibility of yourself, respecting yourself, and truly knowing yourself. To be able to love others, we must first love ourselves in this way.