Is romantic love a linking emotion?

Abstract

This article aims to provide a contribution to the debate about concepts that describe the empirically rich phenomenon 'romantic love'. The great variety of different facets of romantic love that exist and that we encountered in over 100 qualitative interviews and 4 focus group discussions carried out in Spain (Barcelona) and Germany (Leipzig) have inspired us to rethink existing definitions of romantic love. Rather than emotion or bond, the concept 'linking emotion' might help to capture usually rather unconsidered dimensions of romantic love. In order to discuss the value of defining love as linking emotion, this article will point at the 4 most important dimensions of love that we encountered in the analysis of our interviews. Results of our analysis will be compared with existing definitions of love, the usefulness of different concepts in order to define love will be questioned. Our empirically driven bottom-up approach will allow to discuss the usefulness of defining love as linking emotion.