Love refers to a variety of different feelings, states, and attitudes, ranging from pleasure. "Love" may refer specifically to the passionate desire and intimacy of romantic love, to the sexual love of Eros, to the emotional closeness of familiar love, or the platonic love that defines friendship to the profound ones s or devotion of religious love. This diversity of uses and meanings, combined with the complexity of the feelings involved, makes love unusually difficult to consistently define, even compared to other emotional states.
Love in its various forms acts as a major facilitator of interpersonal relationship and, owing to its central psychological importance, is one of the most common themes in the creative arts.
Love may be understood a part of the survival instinct, a function keep human beings together against menaces and to facilitate the continuation of the species.
A person can be said to love an object, principle, or goal if they value it greatly and are deeply committed to it. Similarly, compassionate outreach and volunteer workers' "love" of their cause may sometimes be borne not of interpersonal love, but impersonal love coupled with altruism and strong spiritual or political convictions. People can also "love" material objects, animals, or activities if they invest themselves in bonding or otherwise identifying with those things. If sexual passion is also involved, this condition is called paraphilia.
