Week 1
Questions this week
What is love? If there is a language of love, is there also a grammar?
Research discoveries
One of the most significant things I have discovered through my research is that love may not be a single, universal, or fixed emotion, but rather a complex state made up of different emotional and relational components. At first, I thought about love languages mainly in terms of how people express and receive love differently. However, my research has led me to a more fundamental question: people may differ not only in how they express love, but also in how they understand and construct the meaning of love itself. I was particularly interested in research on long-term romantic love, which suggests that love does not simply become weaker over time. Elements such as passion and reward can remain, while attachment, intimacy, friendship, and bonding become increasingly important, changing the overall structure of love. Research on unconditional love also showed me that different forms of love may share some underlying neural systems. These findings led me to think of love not as a single form or emotion, but as something composed of different proportions of passion, attachment, desire, friendship, intimacy, compassion, and care. What surprised me most was the possibility that although we all use the same phrase, “I love you,” what we actually mean by love may be very different from person to person. Because of this, my research is shifting beyond the question of “How do people express love?” toward questions such as **“What is each person’s love made of?"and "When two people use the same word ‘love,’ are they actually talking about the same thing?”
Other work
Love may not be a fixed “love language” that each individual already possesses, but rather a unique language and grammar that two people develop together through their relationship. Research on Personal Idioms shows that couples create expressions and signals that carry meanings specific to their relationship, while Relational Culture explains how these shared expressions and experiences accumulate to form a unique system of meaning within each relationship. Similarly, Shared Reality theory suggests that these meanings are not determined by one person alone, but are co-constructed through repeated interaction and mutual recognition. This led me to wonder: If every loving relationship develops its own grammar that is created and mutually recognized by two people, can the relationship remain the same when one person unilaterally changes that shared grammar?
Other questions or notes
If I have more, I'll bring them to class!