Types of Love

Why attempt to describe love? Is it not just a feeling of care and desire, of promise and lust? What does “I love you” mean? Why are many people scared of saying it? Where does that fear come from?

For me, a lot of the fear came from not understanding what someone means when they say “I love you”. Do they want to have sex with me, caught up in the moment? Do they care about me strongly? Do they want to marry me and build a life together? What am I agreeing to by saying “I love you too”?

I want to introduce language that is shared between partners, friends, and just empathetic people to be able to describe love. Because I want to say “I love you.” It means a lot to me. I love people. I just don’t want us to get radically different ideas about what that means.

And, also, ruminating on love feels good itself. Love is wonderful!

I came up with 8 types, although other people will describe more, or rearrange the boundaries. None of these types of love have hard categories. These types of love are not mutually exclusive. If anything, they work off of each other. In most loving relationships, some combination of all or most of them are going on, but relationships will often have a dominant or missing one.

1. Puppy love, crushes, limerence — Comes on strong, makes you feel magical, high almost. Most of us had them during puberty. If they work out, speaking their name puts you on the scale of “butterflies inside” to “losing your breath”. If they don’t work out, they feel somewhere between “the world is just a bit gloomier” to “I’m fucking dying”. Universally last several months at most, but it is possible to re-crush on the same person. In fact, for most long term relationships that is a good idea. Can make one obsessive, dangerous, and do stupid shit.
2. Care love — caring for others. The foundational basis of a parents love. On the giving end, it’s the “I want to protect them, I want to watch them grow” meme. On the receiving end, it’s feeling protected, understood, and cared for. When done well, giving it roughs out the edges of the world for others, and receiving it makes you feel like you’re not alone, that someone cares and will help you. When done poorly, it can coddle and isolate people, not letting them grow as they are taken care of and obsessed over. Can show up in non-parent contexts, in fact, most relationships have an undercurrent of this that comes out if one of the lovers is hurt or down, but if it’s around all the time, relationships feel unequal (one direction) or codependent (both directions).
3. Lust — pretty self explanatory. Lust is closer to the sensory hardware than anything else. The look of their body, their smell, their voice, everything becomes intense and intoxicating when lust spikes. It does a piss poor substitute for the other kinds, but is often the easiest to get for people. Lust gets a bad rap, often because it is the socially accepted substitute for other kinds of love, and is allowed to be expressed where others aren’t. Done well, it is intense, intoxicating, inspiring, and incredibly sating, even over weeks and months.
4. Admiration — the feeling that your lover is awesome, capable, strong, dependable. The feeling of watching them perform with strength, grace, wisdom, or any other quality one admires. Watching them becomes entrancing. Most good relationships will have some part of it, in part due to the connection we place between peoples’ worth and their capabilities. If the first 3 kinds of love are aimed at each other by both people, admiration is one person watching the other interact with the world.
5. Partnership love — the feeling of wanting to build things together. To develop your relationships and the world around you. Partnership has an unlimited well of verbal and non-verbal coordination to draw from, and the focus of it is on that coordination. In this case, both partners aim their attention at the outside world, but together. Often serves as a component and precursor to other kinds of love, because once the outside part goes away, the gazes fall on each other.
6. Compersion — the feeling of someone you love loving someone else. This type of love gets a lot of flak in cishet / monogamous society. For some people this word is tied directly into infidelity kink. But compersion does not have to be that way. Whether it’s the feeling of your partner loving someone else; or your child falling in love with a romantic interest; or your ex-on-good-terms moving on and finding new love; these feelings can be positive and intense. Compersion suffers under jealousy, thrives under stability. It blooms when one detaches from possessiveness, and dives into empathetic feelings of love. Close to admiration, but in the case of compersion, your partner’s focus is another human being and their actions are an expression of love.
7. Human Love, just (capital L) Love, perhaps lovingkindness — the hardest one to define. The simplest way I can talk about is “the wish for them to have a good life”. At its purest, without other pieces, this type of love doesn’t even need the other person to be around you. Simply thinking of them, even years later, makes one feel its warmth. Long lasting, it is rarely ever lost. A bit like care love, but when one lets go. It is yours to keep and cherish, and warms your heart even when lonely. A successful transition from care love to Love is an important step in the parent — young adult children dynamic.
8. Romantic love, committed love — Not sure if this is a separate category, but the word “love” is most often used for this. Implies some degree of durability, stability, that lets both partners forecast it into the future and know that the other will be there. Like trust, takes a long time to build, quick to destroy. Relates to the image of the other person in your mind and how close they are to the real thing. Well maintained romantic love is a strong foundation for other kinds.