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The Love Equation

Friday, February 13th, 2009

‘What is Love?”

One of the per­va­sive myths about life in a col­lege res­i­dence is the idea that fas­ci­nat­ing, late night con­ver­sa­tions just spring forth out of nowhere every night. They say that you learn the most impor­tant life lessons when you’re up until the early morn­ing hours chat­ting it away with your room­mate and neighbors–a com­mon occur­rence. Mid­way through my fresh­man year I real­ized that this sort of thing just doesn’t hap­pen. Frus­trated, I decided that I would take on the job of facil­i­tat­ing some of these con­ver­sa­tions and finally tap into the secret knowl­edge I was sup­posed to dis­cover at school. I started by sim­ply walk­ing into my neighbor’s room and ask­ing the ques­tion: “what is love?”

What resulted was an over four hour con­ver­sa­tion on the myr­iad ways to describe the feel­ing of love itself, and more impor­tantly, the many ways we use the word itself in ref­er­ence to another per­son. The con­ver­sa­tion took place with a core group of 4 peo­ple, but at least 5 dif­fer­ent peo­ple walked in and out of the room and con­tributed to the con­ver­sa­tion, the dom­i­nant ideas chang­ing with every opin­ion. At one point near 2:30AM I decided that the eas­i­est way to explain what we had come up with was to put it in the form of an equa­tion on the white­board in our hall. Of course, every­one agreed that the com­po­nents we spoke of weren’t quan­tifi­able, but that it was def­i­nitely an easy way to con­vey 4+ hours of talk­ing about love and relationships.

The Poster

I always thought the equa­tion would make  a great poster, so when one of my class assign­ments was a lay­out project (Stu­dio Art 160 – Design II: The Bridge), I got right to work. 5 ver­sions and a cou­ple of weeks later, it was finally ready to get handed in. Prints will be avail­able from my online store (com­ing soon), but until then you can down­load a dig­i­tal copy here (screen ver­sion) or here (print ver­sion) or use the con­tact me page to ask me for a print. The poster actu­ally isn’t in its final ver­sion, but will be by the time the store is up.

The Equa­tion

The full descrip­tion of what we came up with is in the poster, but if you want more info, “The Love Equa­tion” actu­ally is sup­posed to describe all human rela­tion­ships. Specif­i­cally it describes on person’s feel­ings for another per­son in terms of the four basic com­po­nents and their rel­a­tive impor­tance. The com­po­nents are sex­ual attrac­tion, trust, fond­ness, and emo­tional attach­ment. Sex­ual attrac­tion is the obvi­ous one, it’s the person’s desire to mate with the other. Trust is how you you feel you can depend on the other per­son to act a cer­tain way. This encom­passes things like whether the per­son expects the other to tell the truth, keep a secret, or even respond in a pre­dictable man­ner to an event. Fond­ness is the com­fort of famil­iar­ity with the other per­son, it is the com­po­nent that is most directly related to the time the two peo­ple have spent together. The last com­po­nent, emo­tional attach­ment, is what some peo­ple might call the “X Fac­tor,” or that “spe­cial some­thing.” We defined it as how much your feel­ing of well being depends on the other per­son. Being con­stantly wor­ried about the other per­son, or find­ing joy in their hap­pi­ness and being par­tic­u­larly affected by their despair–these are the things that are included in this component.

The coef­fi­cients in front of the four com­po­nents are sup­posed to rep­re­sent how many peo­ple think dif­fer­ent com­po­nents have dif­fer­ent lev­els of impor­tance. I know every­one has prob­a­bly met that some­one who only cares about the sex­ual attrac­tion cat­e­gory. To look at it like an actual math­e­mat­i­cal for­mula, when the sum of all the com­po­nents times the coef­fi­cients reaches some high amount, we have what we call love. This works out well because the equa­tion takes into account the fact you might love your par­ents and your spouse but its clearly not the same love.