What is love? This is a complicated question that millions ask. It is also one of the most searched questions on the internet. Love is one of the most misunderstood sets of emotions. You could say, many of us have a love-hate relationship with love.

Love can be quite complicated. There are many types and levels of love. Love is a composite of emotions and behaviors. These emotions can be characterized by intimacy, passion, attachment, endearment, devotion, adoration, and commitment. Love involves care, closeness, protectiveness, attraction, affection, and trust. Love can vary in intensity and changes (i.e., grows or declines) over time. It is associated with a range of positive emotions, including happiness, excitement, life satisfaction, and euphoria. However, as with all good things, love can also have a negative side. Love can also be associated with stress, jealousy, and romantic break-ups that can include sadness and shame. These can lead to decreased happiness, life satisfaction, and depression.

Not all forms of love are the same, and psychologists have identified several different types of love that people may experience. These types of love include:

• Friendship: This type of love involves liking someone and sharing a certain degree of closeness and intimacy.
• Infatuation: This is a form of love that often involves intense feelings of attraction without a sense of commitment. Infatuation is often at the early stages in a relationship and may deepen into lasting and committed love.
• Passionate love: This type of love is representative of intense feelings of longing and attraction. Passionate love often involves an idealization of the other person and a need to maintain constant physical closeness.
• Compassionate/companionate love: This form of love is marked by trust, affection, intimacy, and commitment.
• Unrequited love: This form of love happens when one person loves another who does not return those feelings.

When it comes to love, many argue it is one of the most important and deepest human emotions. Yet despite being one of the most studied emotions and behaviors, love is still elusive and widely misunderstood. For example, researchers still debate whether love is a biological or cultural phenomenon.

Is Love Biological, Cultural, or Both?

Love is influenced by both biology and culture. While hormones and biology are important, the way we express and experience love is also influenced by our conceptions of love.

Many confuse lust with love. However, when you think about it, the confusion makes sense to a certain extent. Hollywood and popular media institutions, more often than not, present lust as love perpetuating confusion between the two.

Media platforms like Netflix, Amazon Video, and HBO have moved to ‘almost porn’ production with Mature Audience ratings. Those who engage in such media and pornography typically confuse their lust for love. Pornography, in general, sensationalizes the sexual act over the individual. The ‘essence’ of the person is ignored while the focus of the ‘lust’ is on their body, sexual organs, sexual positions, sexual emotions, and satisfaction. They are objects in pornography and not people. Pornography emphasizes sexual acts and pleasure while denying the value and essence of the person. Pornography focuses on the act and disregards the importance and value of ‘love’ in sex and intimacy. Pornography objectifies the individual.

Distinguishing between lust and love can be difficult since both come with ‘intense feelings. The connection of love includes emotional closeness or intimacy–not just sex, but all kinds of intimacy. This intimacy may include having an open and vulnerable conversation with your partner about your innermost desires, future goals, ambitions, vulnerabilities, etc. Lust, on the other hand, doesn’t come with that level of commitment or attachment. The distinction is in how the person views what they want from the other person versus what they are willing to do, give, and sacrifice for that person.

Lust is a feeling that’s primarily driven by physical desire. Lust can feel very passionate and consuming. However, outside of attraction, a relationship fueled by lust has little substance or value. People in lust-centered relationships are often looking to satisfy their own needs regardless of the impact on their lust partner or themselves.

You’re not thinking about the future when you’re in a lust-centered mindset. So aside from sex, you’re not engaging in things partners in a loving relationship might, like deep conversations or meeting each other’s loved ones. The center of the relationship is lust and self-satisfaction.

Lust is powered by the desire for sexual gratification, typically in the form of a powerful urge. When you are lusting, you don’t think, you just feel. Lust can feel all-consuming — on the physical appearance rather than on who the person is.

In love, however, you desire the other person, but you don’t need to be with them all the time. When you are in love, you want to be bonded with your partner and spend time with them, but you are also able to accept not being with them.

From a scientific perspective, lust prompts our bodies to produce more testosterone, so when we’re around the person, we feel energized, highly aroused, and physically excited. Lust is defined by intensity and fades over time and with age, whereas love ideally grows stronger over time and through selflessness and commitment. We lust after people and that doesn’t turn into love, infatuation, or attachment. This reality of lust is rooted in science. Some research suggests lust lasts between three months to two years.

Affairs and Adultery Are Lust, Not Love

Affairs and adultery are lust-based, not love-based relationships. When people engage in affairs and adulterous behavior they do not have the best interest in mind or heart of their affair and adultery partner, spouse, children, family, or friends. They are in it for what they can get out of it. They risk everything for their affair by gambling away not only their own but also their cheating partner’s reputation, family, friends, children, physical health, and mental well-being. They do not value the partner they are cheating with because they do not love them — they merely lust after them. Affairs and adultery are lust-based and done in secret through lies, deception, and betrayal.

In the book, Private Lies: Infidelity and the Betrayal of Intimacy, Dr. Frank Pittman outlines nine defects that flaw a second marriage that begins as an affair. Second marriages that begin with infidelity, statistically speaking. will most likely end in divorce within two years.

The very elements that create an exciting and intoxicating affair are the fuel that consumes the relationship when it becomes a marriage. This is because the affair is fueled by lust and not love. Such marriages begin on extremely weak foundations that collapse under the strain of everyday life. When the affair is at its peak, the ‘adultery’ partners are blinded to the inevitability that the ‘romance consumes itself’ because it is based on lust. Those caught up in the lust of an affair nearly always imagine that they are the exceptions to an established pattern of human affairs. They are almost always wrong.

The probability of an affair ending in marriage is very, very low — between three and five percent, and many join the 75 percent of second marriages that fail, a rate half again as high as first marriages. While fewer than 25 percent of adulterers (i.e. cheaters) leave a marriage for an affair partner, according to one source, most of those relationships are statistically unlikely to endure.

Love Promotes Fidelity. Lust Promotes Infidelity.

Too many remain confused by the ‘high’ that lust gives them to recognize the lack of love in their relationship. Unlike lust, love isn’t possessive. When you love someone, you’re also considerate of their interests and needs — lust is more about focusing on your wants and desires — like an affair. The difference is love reflects deep emotional attachment — a romantic connection that, while it is inclusive of sexual attraction, is not defined by it as lust is.

Infidelity is the action or state of being unfaithful to a spouse. Infidelity is based on dishonor, distrust, disloyalty, irresponsibility, lies, and deceit. Sustainable relationships, marriage or otherwise, are not built on the foundations of infidelity. Affairs are built on infidelity which is lust-centered.

Fidelity is, on the other hand, faithfulness to a person, cause, or belief, demonstrated by continuing loyalty and support. Fidelity is based on honor, trust, loyalty, responsibility, truth, and honesty. Sustainable relationships, marriage or otherwise, are built on the foundations of fidelity. Fidelity is based on love.

Lust doesn’t last and will not make one happy. Lust is the counterfeit of love and leaves one empty and alone. Affairs are built on lust and ruin lives, marriages, families, and children. Love involves care, closeness, protectiveness, attraction, affection, and trust. Love varies in intensity and changes (i.e., grows or declines) over time. Love is associated with a range of positive emotions, including happiness, excitement, life satisfaction, and euphoria as well as health benefits.

Recovering from Infidelity

If you have experienced infidelity-induced trauma caused by the emotional and sexual betrayal of your spouse, there is hope! If you are a child affected by parental infidelity, there is hope! If you are a spouse who has betrayed the trust, love, and fidelity of your marriage, there is hope! We recommend that you seek support through professional counseling and therapy as well as through groups dedicated to supporting you through this traumatic journey to recovery. You are not alone and recovery and healing are possible!

Share Your Story

The CHADIE Foundation shares personal stories of spouses and children impacted by infidelity and affairs. If you have a story you would like to share and have published, please use the contact information below to share your story with The CHADIE Foundation. Our mission is to help educate everyone about the damage infidelity, affairs, and adultery cause families and how to minimize the impact.

About the CHADIE Foundation

The CHADIE Foundation (Children are Harmed by Adultery, Divorce, Infidelity, and related Emotional trauma), helps spouses, partners, and children who adultery, affairs, and infidelity have negatively impacted. To learn more about CHADIE and how you can help, please email us at support@chadie.org or visit us at CHADIE.org.