scientists still – At a two-day Royal Society gathering in Edinburgh, researchers from psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology compared definitions of romantic love—from emotions and brain reward systems to multi-part theories—while admitting they still can’t agree on
In a hotel lobby. a couple leaned in for a kiss as I headed toward a softly lit conference room in Edinburgh.. Inside, the mood was distinctly first-date—bright, tentative, hopeful.. The reason was clear: the Royal Society had convened a meeting called Love. Actually and in Theory. and the question on the agenda was as old as it is personal—what is love?
Over the next two days, dozens of researchers took turns describing love as they see it, from evolutionary biologists and neuroscientists to psychologists. The meeting was pitched as unusual in its reach, and for many it was the first time major figures in love research were in the same room.
“This is a big deal for love science.. It makes me cry,” Adam Bode from the University of Melbourne told me midway through the conference.. Bode said love research has often struggled for funding, partly because it has been treated as “soft” science.. “There’s been an impression since the beginning that the science of love is not a serious science,” he said.. The Royal Society funding researchers “from all around the world to come and talk about love. ” he added. “gives it a degree of legitimacy that I think has been lacking until now.”
The conference quickly ran into the same obstacle that has stalled answers for centuries: defining the thing being studied. “We, as scholars, aren’t yet at the moment where we can agree on what love is,” Marta Kowal of the University of Wrocław in Poland said.
Some researchers start with the simplest framing: love as an emotion.. Because people experience it in a subjective way—changing from person to person—it doesn’t always behave rationally. much like joy or sadness.. Bode described a personal spark for his interest: “I got interested in love because I fell in love with someone I didn’t want to [and] I wanted to understand that.”
But most of the researchers I spoke with leaned toward a broader view of romantic love. arguing it is more than feeling.. One alternative they discussed is that romantic love operates as a motivational state—something that pushes people to stay close to partners and. in some cases. reproduce. extending the survival of the species.
That idea connects to brain-imaging work described during the meeting.. Lucy Brown of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York said studies found love activates reward pathways deep in the brainstem that govern basic drives.. “It’s part of our survival system, like hunger or thirst,” she said.
Still, other scientists preferred an established psychological framework by Robert Sternberg from Cornell University in New York state.. Sternberg’s model, presented during the conference, breaks love into three pillars: intimacy, passion, and commitment.. Intimacy is the desire to be emotionally close to another.. Passion involves finding someone physically attractive.. Commitment is the drive to maintain a relationship.
Sternberg told the room that his formulation was shaped by his own life. describing different relationships as exemplars of those components.. “With Mary. I had a really intimate relationship; with Julia… I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. I had passion. ” he said.. “Then there was Ellen, with whom I had commitment.”
Researchers also circled back to a shared feature of romantic love: it tends to move through stages.. There is a honeymoon phase marked by intense desire. generally lasting up to one or two years. followed by companionate love.. Kowal described companionate love as “more pragmatic than poetic – it’s less intense,” and stressed the boundary is not clean.. “But it’s not a clear distinction. it’s more of a continuum. and a person can go from one side to the other.”
Even obsession, which often accompanies passionate love, came up as something researchers might incorporate into definitions.. Bode said people newly in love spend roughly half of their waking hours thinking about their love interest. which can make them easily distracted.. “I don’t think people who have recently fallen in love should be allowed to drive – I’m working on a grant [to research this]. ” he said.
Across the talks, one pattern kept repeating: speakers offered different ways of pinning love down—emotions, motivational states, brain reward circuitry, or Sternberg’s three pillars—while acknowledging that none of them has yet captured the whole phenomenon in a way everyone can agree on.
In the final discussion. researchers made plans to lay out multiple definitions for love in a scientific paper over the coming months.. I went into the meeting hoping for a single answer, and I didn’t get one.. Even so. it felt like a meaningful next step—especially for the people who insist love science deserves the same seriousness as any other field of inquiry.
love science Royal Society Edinburgh romantic love psychology neuroscience evolutionary biology Adam Bode Marta Kowal Lucy Brown Robert Sternberg