ABSTRACT
In the expanding literature on human relationships, a high proportion of studies have been concerned with “romantic” or “dating” relationships or marriage. Romantic relationships are presumably to be identified by the fact that the participants experience, or hope to experience, “love”, but “love” means many different things to different people. The love felt by young adults in a romantic relationships bears some resemblances to, but in other respects is very different from, the love felt by a long-term married couple, and both differ according to the age and other characteristics of the participants, as well as between cultures. Love is also an important element in, for instance, parent–child and sibling relationships, and in friendship. Each of these has other properties associated with it—nurturance and security, mutual support, companionship, and so on, the relative importance of which differs between relationships of the different types. For instance, a comparison of the relevance of trust, need, and care indicated that care predominated in subjects’ conceptions of love, trust in those of friendship, and need in those of attraction (Steck et al., 1982). We must therefore ask whether love is the same sort of thing in different types of relationships.
