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Some influential scientists have issued an urgent call for a renaissance of love. In an address, anthropologist Ashley Montagu announced, "As a result of our misunderstanding of what we are on this earth for, we have brought ourselves very near to the edge of doom. I regard most people as dead, simply as creatures wandering around having no realization of why they are on this earth. They have no idea that the reason for being on this earth is to live to love." And human potentialist Herbert Otto wrote, "We are at a point in our development where a massive nourishing and flourishing of love has become a necessity if we are to survive as a species." There seems to be no doubt that love is of the utmost importance. But what the heck is it?

What is love?

Few words in the English language have been used in so many ways or given so many meanings as the word "love." To poet Samuel Daniel, "Love is a sickness full of woes/all remedies refusing." But to many other poets as well as to Montagu and Otto, love is the cure for whatever it is that ails us.

Psychologists seem far from agreement on what love is.¹ Hardly in a lyrical mood, the great behaviorist B. F. Skinner wrote that "love might be analyzed as the mutual tendency of two individuals to reinforce each other."² But widely read counseling psychologist Wayne Dyer defined love as almost the opposite: "[the] ability and willingness to allow those you care for to be what they choose for themselves, without any insistence that they satisfy you."³ What might be considered to be the final word on love was uttered by Henry Finck: "Love is such a tissue of paradoxes, and exists in such an endless variety of forms and shades, that you can say anything about it that you please, and it is likely to be correct."

What love is or isn't is of more than academic interest. A common problem in loving relationships is that the parties have different ideas about how love should manifest itself. The preamble to many a complaint is "If you really loved me, you would . . . " I was told about a brief estrangement caused by a husband's failure to share household chores; in an effort at reconciliation, he went up to his wife who was standing at the kitchen sink, put his arms around her, and said, "I love you." "Does that mean," she replied, "that you are going to help me with the dishes?"

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