For me, “romantic love” should include “lust.”

Outside of that, my experience of “general love” actually follows Dr. Plutchik’s.

Robert Plutchik (b. 1927) was professor emeritus at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and adjunct professor at the University of South Florida. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and he was also a psychologist.

Dr. Plutchik curated a “wheel of emotions” seen here.

I’ve leveraged and quantified his model quite often in my own professional research and studies.

Plutchik’s three-dimensional circumplex model describes the relations among emotion concepts, in a similar way to the colours on a colour wheel. The cone’s vertical dimension represents intensity – emotions intensify as they move from the outside to the centre of the wheel.

“Love” isn’t one of the emotional concepts he modeled on the petals. However it’s implied that the complex experience of “love” exists between and is a combination of the two emotional petals in the upper-right of the wheel.

“Love” exists between the following two petals:

  • serenity ➡️ joy ➡️ ecstasy
  • acceptance ➡️ trust ➡️ admiration

For each individual person, their experience of love may weight the above emotions varyingly, but a respective combination of the above six emotions is the general gist of the “love” experience.

“Submission” also isn’t an emotion on the petals he created, but it’s a complex experience that exists between the following two petals:

• ⁠acceptance ➡️ trust ➡️ admiration • ⁠apprehension ➡️ fear ➡️ terror

One could posit that “respect” exists between the above two petals as well.

I found these three petals most interesting as it relates to concepts commonly discussed on PPD and hetero dating dynamics.

Is this a useful heuristic?

Does it resonate with your experience of “love” or of “submission” or “respect”?

How do you define or describe those three experiences?

Thoughts ?