Love Is a Vector

We communicate romantic feelings largely through language. The vocabulary follows a rough progression: "I care about you" becomes "I like you," then "I'm falling for you," then "I love you," then "I'm in love with you." Each phrase signals where we believe we are in the arc of a relationship.

But among all these words, one carries more weight than any other: love.

The trouble is that "love" is not merely descriptive. It is interpretive. It compresses a complex internal state into a shared signal and, in doing so, quietly assumes alignment between speaker and listener. That assumption is often wrong.

Romantic love, viewed scientifically, is not a single emotion but a constellation of interacting neurochemical systems. Dopamine narrows attention toward a partner and reinforces pursuit. Oxytocin supports bonding and emotional safety. Vasopressin sustains long-term attachment. Cortisol often spikes early in relationships, introducing anxious vigilance that fades as security takes hold. Research from Harvard Medical School shows that this neurochemical cascade produces patterns similar to those seen in obsessive states.

These systems vary independently. Intensity can be high while security is low. Attachment can be strong while novelty fades. Calm can increase as excitement declines. There is no switch that flips from "not love" to "love."

Put differently, love is a vector, not a point. It has magnitude across multiple dimensions. What we call "love" is a region in that space, not a coordinate. And the word "love" attempts to collapse that entire region into a single bit.

The problem begins when we name that region. People decide whether their current state qualifies as "love" based on thresholds shaped by past experience, emotional literacy, and expectation. Some associate love with intensity and obsession. Others with stability. Some with certainty. Others with the simple passage of time. This is why two people can say "I like you" at wildly different levels of attachment, or say "I love you" while meaning different things. The phrases form a ladder, but everyone spaces the rungs differently.

This divergence is amplified by the relativity of emotional judgment. A person whose past relationships were volatile may associate love with intensity and dysregulation, so that a calm, secure attachment feels muted by comparison, even if it is deeper and more durable. Conversely, someone encountering emotional safety for the first time may experience moderate attachment as overwhelming and defining. In both cases, the internal state is filtered through a reference frame built from personal history. The same vector can feel extraordinary to one person and insufficient to another. This does not imply asymmetry of care. It implies different calibration.

Most relationships function because partners are comfortably inside each other's thresholds. Imprecision matters most at the boundary. One person applies the word "love" as soon as attachment and exclusivity appear. The other waits for long-term certainty. Both feel similarly invested. One speaks; the other hesitates. The silence is interpreted as absence. The asymmetry of language is mistaken for asymmetry of feeling. A delayed "I love you" becomes evidence of doubt. An early one becomes evidence of recklessness. What began as a classification problem in language starts to feel like a gap in how much someone cares.

These failures are often moralized. Someone is said to have led the other on, moved too fast, or withheld truth. In many cases, none of that is accurate. The word is being treated as a synchronized milestone when it is really a personal classification, and when the classifications don't match, it feels like betrayal. It is usually neither deception nor rejection. It is overconfidence in the precision of a word.

Love exceeds language. As Robert Waldinger, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, has noted, love is too rich, complex, and varied to yield all its secrets to empirical investigation. The word is not wrong; it is merely lossy. Problems arise when we treat that imprecision as precision, and difference in expression as difference in feeling. Many people are closer than they think. They are simply projecting a high-dimensional experience onto a one-dimensional channel.