ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a definition of love by communicating with different authors. By reflecting on the empirical basis of love, and on the experience of love in everyday life, it explains different dimensions of love: love as feeling, emotion, and bond, as something experienced and durability providing, as part of objective and subjective culture, and as utopia. Sternberg's Triangular Theory of Love has allowed us to consider love as a form to various love forms that can find in the world of lived experiences. Luhmann's theorization of love as a system of interpersonal interpenetration allowed to understand love's capacity to unite and to engage two people in a shared, stable social field. Whilst Beck and Beck-Gernsheim's work emphasized more strongly the religious-like character and meaning of love in later modernity, it was Eva Illouz who incorporated all the dimensions of love. However, she left them underdeveloped, focusing only, or at least foremost, on the process of partner search.
