Can love be defined in one sentence?  The Century Dictionary’s definition, which is as good as any, is:  “Intimate personal affection between individuals of opposite sex capable of intermarriage; the emotional incentive to and normal basis of conjugal union.”  This is correct enough as far as it goes; but how little it tells us of the nature of love!  I have tried repeatedly to condense the essential traits of romantic love into one brief definition, but have not succeeded.  Perhaps the following will serve as an approximation.  Love is an intense longing for the reciprocal affection and jealously exclusive possession of a particular individual of the opposite sex; a chaste, proud, ecstatic adoration of one who appears a paragon of personal beauty and otherwise immeasurably superior to all other persons; an emotional state constantly hovering between doubt and hope, aggravated in the female heart by the fear of revealing her feelings too soon; a self-forgetful impulse to share the tastes and feelings of the beloved, and to go so far in affectionate and gallant devotion as to eagerly sacrifice, for the other’s good, all comfort and life itself if necessary.

These are the essential traits.  But romantic love is altogether too complex and variable to be defined in one sentence; and it is this complexity and variability that I wish to emphasize particularly.  Eckermann once suggested to Goethe that no two cases of love are quite alike, and the poet agreed with him.  They did not, however, explain their seeming paradox, so diametrically opposed to the current notion that love is everywhere and always the same, in individuals as in nations; nor could they have explained it unless they had analyzed love into its component elements as I have done in this volume.  With the aid of this analysis it is easy to show how and why love has changed and grown, like other sentiments; to explain how and why the love of a civilized white man must differ from that of an Australian or African savage, just as their faces differ.  Since no two races look alike, and no two individuals in the same race, why should their loves be alike?  Is not love the heart of the soul and the face merely its mirror?  Love is varied through a thousand climatic, racial, family, and cultural peculiarities.  It is varied through individual tastes and proclivities.  In one case of love admiration of personal beauty may be the strongest ingredient, in another jealous monopoly, in a third self-sacrificing affection, and so on.  The permutations and combinations are countless, and hence it is that love-stories are always fresh, since they can be endlessly varied.  A lover’s varied feelings in relation to the beloved become gradually blended into a sentiment which is a composite photograph of all the emotions she has ever aroused in him.  This has given rise to the delusion that love is a simple feeling.[117]

WHY CALLED ROMANTIC