The 7 Love Types: Navigating love in a fractured world

By Dr Christian Heim

We live in a fractured world: pandemics, economic upheavals, mental illness, screen addiction, loneliness, alienation & separation. We look for love, get confused, get hurt and lose love. More than ever, we need better relationships with family, friends, love-partners and even strangers. Do we even understand love? Or the different love types? Science and Ancient Ideas can help us know love more, show love more and secure it in our lives.

Get the love equation right for more love in your life.

Know Love + Show Love = Better Life + Better World.

They do not love who do not show their love (Shakespeare).

Combining reason and passion, science and songs, this book explores love: Seven Love Types, science, and showing it to family, friends, colleagues, strangers, and love-partners to give love a fair go.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781922565129

Book preview

References

Introduction

People before Productivity

Our world has become meaningless to many: less travel, dreams, freedom, career and productivity. Crises can remind us of what is important in life: family, friends, security, purpose, meaning and, as cliché as the word sounds, love. Love may have become a misused and abused platitude, but it’s what we all crave. That’s what the people I treat share with me. Even if we don’t understand love fully, science shows it helps heal us, it can protect us from mental illness, and, when you feel it, it can make life worthwhile. But what is love? What does the science say? How can I get more of it? Why is something so basic to life so misunderstood and complex?

Love is much more complex than we realize. There are many different types of love and we get them confused. We hurt others and ourselves. The science of love is becoming clearer and we are becoming more aware of how to share it with others.

The coronavirus may have taken away much of the good life, but even the good life is meaningless without the love of people. Many of us struggle to get on with people. Yet wealth, travel, kudos, fame, all we produce and the rest of it, would mean very little if it weren’t for people and love. So let’s not lose the people. Nothing else can fill the emptiness when there is less love. No wonder we are seeing a rise in depression, anxiety and suicide in our society. Let’s help turn this around; prevent it in you by making love more of a reality.

Imagine it’s pre-Covid. You’ve made it, rich and famous and are on a luxury holiday: exclusive hotels, first class transport. You feast at the finest restaurants, dine with the finest wines, and enjoy the best art and entertainment. People gaze at you and request your autograph. You visit castles, wineries, gorgeous mountains, countryside and see the world’s top sporting events, concerts and theatre. You travel to exotic landscapes and visit the finest our world’s cultures have to offer. No expense spared. Sweet.

Now imagine it all without other people: without a special someone to share it with, without family or friends who give a damn. No human contact whatsoever; the ultimate social distancing. You eat alone, watch shows alone and walk through beautiful cobble-stoned streets alone. What sort of holiday is that? What sort of good life is that? Not sharing with anybody, not saying hello to anybody, not feeling part of the human race.

It gets worse.

Imagine if everyone outright hated you. Your love-partner leaves you. Your kids, family or parents don’t talk to you. Friends are non-existent. Passers-by scowl at you. You ask a waiter for coffee and they bellow get your own damn coffee! Room services tells you to make your own damn bed! Everyone you meet is full of anger: Shut up! What the hell are you looking at? Get outta my way, ass-hole! Beat it. Any good life, however you want to conceive it, would be hell on earth without others sharing some love and kindness. If you take away the luxuries and live in lockdowns, love only becomes more important, not less.

As a psychiatrist, I get to see how little love some people experience in their everyday lives. The lives of the people I treat would be wonderful with more love: a loving partner, more understanding family members and friends, and feeling safe, secure and accepted in a sea of strangers. A good life means good connection with other people on all levels.

For the last few prosperous decades, we have collectively taken the people around us for granted. We’ve grown increasingly sour and disconnected; socially distanced as well as physically distanced. We’ve put productivity before people:

Sure I care about others, but I’m too busy to show it.

Talk to someone who cares.

I’m taking care of number one: me.

Remember the bottom line in this company: profit.

I hear real-life stories about people who don’t stop to help a stranger knocked down by a car; people scurrying away after an injury; wealthy people who keep business deadlines but whose father died without a word having been spoken between them for years. That’s not the good life; it has no love.

With kind interactions, all work becomes heaven:

I work with a great team.

I love my work because of the people.

We’re a little family.

I can be myself and do my best with people who care.

With love, a personal relationship is heaven:

We’re best friends, lovers and our own private support team.

We grow closer every day.

She’s my rock.

I’d be lost without him.

With love and kindness, a lockdown becomes easier to bear:

At least we neighbors talk across the balconies.

At least I get to spend more time with my spouse.

At least I can catch up with childhood friends over Zoom.

At least my mother and I have sorted out our relationship.

In a nutshell, here’s why I, a doctor and clinical psychiatrist, wrote this book.

In spite of decades of economic prosperity, the world is going through a mental illness epidemic¹ and with coronavirus it’s getting worse.

Social isolation, loneliness, separation and alienation are a large part of the problem² and they’re getting worse.

Love, social cohesion, and good relationships are scientifically known to protect mental health³ and we need more of these now.

Increased focus on productivity and screen technology means less time spent on relationships and sharing love. To share love, we need to know love, the science of love, the different love types, and how to apply the understanding to all of our people interactions.

Knowing love and showing love to our love-partner, family, friends and colleagues, and to strangers is what this book is about. Doing this will help protect you from mental illness. Love can no longer be taken for granted. They do not love who do not show their love says Shakespeare.⁴ If you can’t show a person that you love them, do you really love them? If people around you don’t show love, then do they love you? There is a deep longing inside each of us for love, but many of us don’t know how to nurture it and nourish it.

Love encompasses so much more than sex and romance. Some people play games with romantic love: keeping cards close to their chest, not letting feelings show, taking sex without caring. Others show their love openly: they make love, share laughs and tears, and know how to be kind. In the reality of day-to-day life, love is not a game, it is a deep intrinsic need. Scientifically, we innately attach to each other to connect, to love, and not to be socially distanced. We attach to survive individually. We are social creatures. Love is for our collective biological survival.

Part One of this book considers how to Know Love; the theory. Chapter One, The Love ideal is Powerful, is a glorification of idealized and archetypical love. I’ll reference popular songs for fun and to illustrate points emotionally as well as intellectually. Love moves us all and we need more of it, right now. Chapter Two looks at The Seven Love Types to shed light on love’s complexities. I’ll introduce a range of Ancient Greek words to help explore and understand this Crazy little thing called love. Chapter Three explores The Science of Love and what is happening inside your brain in love. Chapter Four considers The Wisdom of Three Psychology Love-Experts who dedicated their lives to fostering the expression of more love in a society seemingly conspiring against it.

Part Two asks you to Show Love; it applies the theory. Chapter Five considers Problems of Loving Other People and the obstacles to showing love: differing values, personality clashes, cultural and group differences and screen technology. Chapter Six looks at Being Kind to Strangers; the people we think we don’t care about. Chapter Seven looks at Sharing with Family, Friends, and Colleagues. Chapter Eight discusses Loving your Love-partner more completely; it’s a love manual. Each chapter focusses on The Seven Love Types and how not to mix these types for successful loving. An epilogue considers Loving Yourself.

As a psychiatrist, I see the devastating effects of mental illness on people’s lives. As articulated by the World Health Organization, there is a mental illness crisis in our world. Psychiatric illness is the leading cause of non-fatal illness in the world.⁵ Almost a half of the Western world’s population will receive a mental health diagnosis in their lives⁶ and, suicide is increasing alarmingly. In the USA, for example, over 47,000 people took their own lives in 2017, a 4% increase on 2016 and a 33% increase on 1999.⁷ In 2018 it was 48,344⁸ another large increase. Fifteen times as many people suffer from schizophrenia as are on dialysis,⁹ and twenty times as many people suffer from bipolar disorder as people suffer a stroke per year.¹⁰ Depression has outstripped heart disease in causing the most disability worldwide. In under eighteen-year-olds it increased by 63% and in under thirty-five-year-olds by 47% from 2013 to 2016.¹¹ Anxiety in children increased by 20% over ten years.¹² These figures suggest an epidemic and the virus has only made things worse.

Why these steep rate rises in mental illness? Better detection, maybe, but it isn’t our genetics, they haven’t changed appreciably for more than 60,000 years. It’s something in our society, the way we are living. I believe it’s a society putting productivity before people; a lack of love; we don’t value each other as much as we could; too many distractions, too much focus away from people.

Over the years in my practice I’ve asked people how they spent the last festive season; their answers give me an idea of the extent of loneliness and disconnect. Many more spend it alone. Some reminisce about a lost family. Others wish they’d had a family. For yet others, a family get-together is torturous. The concept of a community meeting place is entirely foreign. Now, thanks to lockdowns and viral fear, it’s virtually non-existent. Yet people matter. People are your primary source of love and togetherness. I have had the privilege of hearing thousands of life stories. Too often I hear

There’s not enough love in society,

I just don’t fit in,

I feel so lonely in the crowd,

Nobody really knows who I am, and

I don’t want to live when I feel so unloved.

These comments made me realize that this world lacks love. Yet this same world was cracking GDP records across the globe. Does one pull against the other? Yes. I believe that a lack of love is a direct result of putting productivity, product and profit before people in a faster, technology and entertainment-driven society. We need to put people before productivity, so we can enjoy both.

Despite his affluent life, Nathan was depressed. I’ve decided to kill myself when I reach sixty-five. It won’t be worth living unless my brother and I are at least talking, and my best friend hasn’t died of cancer. Without people, what is there? How does it get to the stage where, in a thriving city, someone feels there are only two people that matter? We’re all suffering from this trend; we’re all too busy to share our lives with each other meaningfully. During the first months of the coronavirus crisis, Nathan did kill himself, he was too alone.

Wars in the Middle East, American politics, share prices and poverty in Africa rarely get a mention in my office, but personal relationships and the need for more love always do. I have treated teenagers who live on the streets, divorcees who can’t find love, men who don’t show their love for children for fear of being branded a pedophile, refugees caught between hostile worlds, children abandoned by mothers, people bullied at work, and men ending their lives in lonely despair. All these situations are driven by a lack of love.

There is, however, hope. Love has been proven to combat the ill effects of trauma.¹³ It is protective against mental illness and speeds up recovery from mental illness. Loving, supportive relationships are your greatest assets.

Love is intangible, abstract and unmeasurable. Perhaps that’s why so many of us put productivity before people: we can measure money or the number of likes, but we can’t measure love. Science says too little outside of its biological usefulness. Extolling the virtues of love is left to artists, writers, musicians and poets. I’ll extoll love in this book, but I’ll be as scientific as I can. I’ll reference movies, songs and stories, but don’t dismiss these. As unscientific as they may sound, movies, songs and stories contain our collective hopes, ideals, and enduring archetypes. They contain wisdom. What’s on your playlist at the moment? It says something about you and your ideals.

This book draws heavily on my clinical work. If I share a story from my office, however, be assured that it has been changed beyond recognition. Each story is usually an amalgam of five or six separate people’s broadly similar experiences. The confidentiality and trust of the wonderful people I have treated is of paramount importance to me.

Care and take care.

Christian Heim

Part One:

The Theory

Know Your Love

Chapter One

The Love Ideal is Powerful

Love: wonderful, powerful, infectious. We need more of it in our society, yet we reserve it for just a few and we can’t always get that right. We speak about our love-life as we do our work-life, home-life, family-life, leisure-life and sex-life; as though it’s a compartmentalized fragment in the fractured world. It’s not. We each have an unfulfilled yearning for more love and we each carry an ideal of love in our unconscious, if only we could make it a reality. To compensate, we romanticize love. Romanticize literally means to make stories and we do this in fiction, movies and songs to immortalize love and keep it untarnished by the world’s harsh realities.

How did I get into this mess? I just want a husband and kids, love from my mom, and some self-respect says twenty-eight-year-old depressed, addicted sex-worker Katrina.

You know what I really want? I want someone to love, for them to love me, and to be a dad watching my kid play football said twenty-four-year-old Jake who is battling an amphetamine addiction.

All I want is to find real love said thirty-year-old Jason, a plumber with a great business but no lasting love. He has a string of casual relationships but is lonely and depressed.

I just want to find genuine love and grow old with someone said forty-four-year-old mother of two, Sarah, reeling from her second messy divorce.

I wish my mother would really love me said twenty-two-year-old Madison who is resentful because her mother’s third partner sexually abused her.

I wished my dad just loved me instead of leaving us, now I just hate him said nineteen-year-old Tom who’s out on parole.

These are realities spoken in my office. Heartbreaking. These stories stand in stark contrast to the depiction of love in movies, songs and stories; our ideals. Yet each of these people still hope for the ideal of love. Love’s ideal is embedded deep within our psyche. It’s an archetype that informs our personal search for love. Love is important to our identity and in our lives. The archetype preserves hope for us and a direction, a goal, to make at least some love a reality in our lives.

Carl Gustav Jung, psychiatrist, introduced the idea of archetypes: primordial images and motifs that lie in our psyche, our collective unconsciousness. Love, falling in love, motherly love and the idea that love frees us from evil spells are among the ideas Jung discussed. He articulated¹⁴ how we instinctually recognize and accept concepts and images as representing the power of love; images such as

the moon being romantic (think of songs: Moon River or Blue Moon),

marriage as sexual consummation and commitment-sacrifice for love,

a woman having the power to turn a beast into a handsome prince,

a queen blindly falling in love with an ass (A Midsummer Night’s Dream),

a sailor lost on dark seas until real love finds him (The Flying Dutchmen),

medieval knights worshipping virginity as sexual and sacred

a movie star idolized as a great lover, with the idolatry overlooking his life’s realities (Valentino).

In our movies and songs we keep love and its archetypical ideal alive. They are an infectious hope, a dream that someday, somehow, somewhere over the rainbow, we may experience some of love’s ideal in our lives. These pages aim, with the help of ancient wisdom and modern science, to make this more of a reality for you.

Our scientific understanding of love is vastly incomplete. There’s much profit to be made in keeping archetypical romance alive, but if we don’t understand love scientifically, we won’t know how to express it in our lives. We’ll keep getting it wrong and sink to inadequate explanations of complex events: I don’t love you anymore, I’ve fallen in love with someone else, I’m out of love, our love has died. The science shows that love is not that fickle, but perhaps our understanding is. We yearn for real personal love and social cohesion because, as the science shows in Chapter Three, love is essential to our individual and collective survival. The archetypal ideals may be preserved in stories, movies and songs but we need it expressed in our lives; let’s not have our songs contain more love than we collectively experience.

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Before we delve deep into the neurochemistry of love (Chapter Three) and into the Seven Love Types (Chapter Two), let’s leave our world’s fractured realities to look at the love ideal. During times of isolation we turn online to fulfill our depleted love-tanks: television series, movies, music and more. Our brains love being taken into an imaginary world to escape. So, in this chapter, I’ll use that world to consider a few definitions of love, some stories delineating love and sex, some archetypical legends and one legend that was real life. This will prepare us for the ancient wisdom and science to help make love more of a reality in life. We’ll touch upon a fundamental reality:

love is vital and central to existence.

This excursion will arouse in you a desire to express more love in your life; to share the archetypical ideal through an infectious brain chemical, oxytocin. Music, movies and stories carry the ideal, they more or less bypass your frontal lobe to reach into your limbic system to touch what you crave: love. Love, in all its types, is a powerful motivator. It’s a power worth understanding and harnessing.

We crave the power of loving and being loved.

So what is love?

Archetypically, but not scientifically, love is of the heart, not the head. We begin our exploration with an ancient understanding of love, a complex definition rich in meaning, which connects love with the beating of a heart.

In Ancient Hebrew, love is called ahab. Say it slowly a few times:

ahab … , ahab … , ahab … ,

ahab … , ahab … , ahab … ,

ahab … , ahab … , ahab.

Said at the right pace, you’ll soon hear and experience that it sounds like a heartbeat. This is intimacy, like lying on your lover’s chest after making love or a baby safe within its mother’s womb. The feeling of secure love is embodied in hearing and feeling a beating heart close to you; alive. The Hebrew picture-gram for this word is a strong person looking at a tent with awe. This evokes the depth of feeling associated with providing for a family amidst the harsh landscape of a desert. The people you love huddle as securely as possible in the shelter you provide for them. Love, the Ancient Hebrew picture-gram tells us, is a strong-heart-secure-family-in-a-harsh-world thing. Now think about our harsh, fractured world. We too crave a strong-heart-secure-family-in-a-harsh-world thing as a shelter from its realities. We crave love.

This ancient word for love is closely related to an Arabic word for love, habb, also sounding like a heartbeat. In traditional Chinese, love is again associated with the heart. Other ancient languages highlight other aspects of love. English is a blend of Latin and Germanic languages. Latin words for love include l’amour and aimer (French) and amore and amare (Italian); from these am words we get words like amateur, polyamory and monogamy. Our word love is from the Germanic lufu and lubo, interestingly connected to the Sanskrit lubhyati, meaning to long, desire, enchant, perplex, and make crazy.

Love is a force connected to the heart and family security that is a desire, an enchantment that can make a person perplexed and crazy. Broad but accurate. In English, love is both a verb and a noun. The verb to love is an emotional action expressed towards a broad range of objects:

I love you; she loves her work; he loves his country; she loves chocolate; I love it when you do that; she loves movies; do you love him?

These love actions articulate something different as well as similar. If I say I love my mother and I love my love-partner and I love music, I mean something vastly different for each, yet, in English, we use the one word love. This can become a source of confusion for our thoughts, as our words articulate our thoughts. Limited words mean limited understanding. No matter what the object of our affection, when we love someone or something, it is clear that there is a common feeling of great affection, desire or liking.

As a noun, love embraces many meanings:

It is an emotion, like anger and joy (I feel love)

It is being the object of affection or kindness (she is my one true love)

It’s the warm attachment of close kin (my family shares love)

It articulates sexual passion (we made love)

It elevates an inanimate activity or thing (football’s my one true love).

The noun love can also refer to

a sought-after quality: he is full of love; she has a lot of love to give

an abstract state: I’m in love

an inner drive which is considered and directed or blind and foolhardy

a virtue or an ideal to strive for.

All these meanings, and more, are encapsulated by our one little word, love. Without love, life becomes meaningless and empty. All the gold of Midas, the wisdom of Solomon and the kingdoms of Genghis Khan are relatively cold without it. As children, we are exquisitely sensitive to early ideas of love. One elderly woman I worked with remembers being berated by her father for saying she loved food. You can’t love food, you silly child! This comment, repeated over and over, impeded her ability to love anything, including people. With time, however, we worked on this so that, even late in life, she could find personal love.

We know what love is not. It is not lust, attraction or idealized romance, yet these are part of the romantic love experience. These aspects of love are easily exploited for commercial gain: sex sells, puppy love sells, idealized love sells, love-as-sex and even love-as-broken-dreams sells. Romantic love ideally matures and produces relational fruit beyond lust, attraction and sex. Lust and sex play no role in the love for children, plutonic friendships, family love and stranger kindnesses. Yet it’s all known as love, and we easily make mistakes by mixing up different types of love. Many of us settle for