For other uses, see In Love. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. This article is written like a personal reflection, happy valentine my love essay, or argumentative essay that states a Wikipedia editor’s personal feelings or presents an original argument about a topic.

This article possibly contains original research. Romance or romantic love is a feeling of love for, or a strong attraction towards another person, and the courtship behaviors undertaken by an individual to express those overall feelings and resultant emotions. The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Family Studies states that “Romantic love, based on the model of mutual attraction and on a connection between two people that bonds them as a couple, creates the conditions for overturning the model of family and marriage that it engenders. This indicates that romantic love can be the founding of attraction between two people. Alternatively, Collins Dictionary describes romantic love as “an intensity and idealization of a love relationship, in which the other is imbued with extraordinary virtue, beauty, etc. Although the emotions and sensations of romantic love are widely associated with sexual attraction, romantic feelings can exist without expectation of physical consummation and be subsequently expressed.

In certain cases, romance could even be interpreted as a normal friendship. Kushnick undertook a comprehensive review of romantic love from a biological perspective in 2021. They considered the psychology of romantic love, its mechanisms, development across the lifespan, functions, and evolutionary history. Romantic love is a motivational state typically associated with a desire for long-term mating with a particular individual.

It occurs across the lifespan and is associated with distinctive cognitive, emotional, behavioral, social, genetic, neural, and endocrine activity in both sexes. Throughout much of the life course, it serves mate choice, courtship, sex, and pair-bonding functions. Anthropologist Charles Lindholm defined love as “any intense attraction that involves the idealization of the other, within an erotic context, with expectation of enduring sometime into the future”. Romance is a feeling of love and attraction, that people currently like and want to continue in the future. This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources.

The word “romance” comes from the French vernacular where initially it indicated a verse narrative. The word was originally an adverb of Latin origin, “romanicus”, meaning “of the Roman style”. Anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss show that there were complex forms of courtship in ancient as well as contemporary primitive societies. There may not be evidence, however, that members of such societies formed loving relationships distinct from their established customs in a way that would parallel modern romance. In the majority of primitive societies studied by the anthropologists, the extramarital and premarital relations between men and women were completely free.