Love as a phenomenon has accompanied us throughout the history of human civilization. In ancient Greece (for example, with Plato and later Aristotle), different types of love were distinguished: eros (romantic, passionate love), storge (familial love), agape (unconditional, selfless love), and philia (friendly love).

The need for classification even at that time indicated attempts to rationally encompass the mystique of this feeling. This rationalization reached its peak during the Enlightenment and later its offspring, modernity, when love began to be explained by biological or psychological factors. Thus, Kant spoke of practical love (ethically based love—morality and self-sacrifice towards others) and propensity, which is based on feelings and emotions. Kant acknowledged the value of emotional love but considered it insufficient for moral action because it can be changeable and unreliable. On the other hand, Schopenhauer linked love to the drive for preservation, i.e., the passion that directs us towards reproduction or the will to live. Thus, love began to be demystified with the advent of modernity, a time when there was a strong obsession with defining and controlling everything. However, these attempts to explain love focused, as we have already mentioned, on biological, psychological, or anthropological determinants.

Although each of these approaches defines a specific part of the truth (within the confines of its own paradigms), there is another explanation of love that integrates different approaches. Therefore, in this text, we will advocate for a different approach—the sociological one. The basic argument of this text is that love is a concept constructed for and because of society. In other words, love is a social construct, the result of communication processes (according to Luhmann's 1986 theory, which is unnecessarily complicated for the purposes of this text) based on accumulated, everyday knowledge. This means that the concept of love is something we acquire and adopt through our social engagement.

The idea of love is not something we are born with but something we become familiar with throughout our lives. Love for family, friendly love, and even romantic love are not primary feelings of the human species but of persons, and as Georg Herbert Mead once indicated, we are not born as persons but become persons. Therefore, to love, we must learn what it means in each context. We must learn how to properly love a mother, friends, and lovers. All of this is learned through forms of communication practices. Love is communicated; it can only be realized in this way. Thus, love exists only in a social form, in society.

In every other non-symbolic, non-communicative space, love does not exist. There is sex, primary narcissism, and parental (primarily maternal care), but not love. We have defined it as a super-category in comparison to nature. Therefore, love is also a symbolic space that elevates us above other living beings. Practices of seduction, a goodnight kiss, and gifts from Santa Claus are true expressions of love. Particularly interesting is the concept of Santa Claus, under whose symbol children are given gifts, thus blurring their gratitude towards their parents.

This is indeed one of the examples of parental love towards a child (except if the child, because of misbehaviour, receives nothing, which could also be defined as a form of love). So, love is solely social. Even when we talk about the most intimate forms of love, between romantic partners, in marriage, or between lovers, love is communicated through forms of knowledge that are taken for granted—we typify romance, expect something we have seen, hope for flowers, the fulfilment of fetishes we have encountered through life—we know society and therefore know the expectations we can have from love. But since we are talking about very deep feelings, and as we have defined it as social, we must necessarily discuss this phenomenon in the context of its interpenetration.

In other words, we are using knowledge about love in the interactional game of expectations with the alter-ego. In seduction, something is expected and what is expected is either given or not given. In a Goffmanian sense, we are managing impressions of another person, and the foundation of that game is collective knowledge, a structure of communication that makes the entire game relatively predictable.

Examples of this include practices like abstaining from sex before marriage, or more recently, abstaining from sex before the third date; gender-patriarchal aspects like paying for drinks or bringing flowers... In essence, the entire social game before it moves into the more intimate corners of individual lives. Yet even then, everything is directed by the communication of love—the desire to move in together, proposals, weddings, partnerships, and life outside of marriage. As soon as there are two people united in a certain form of social knowledge (love as knowledge), society is inevitably a part of their intimacy. Therefore, talking about love without considering the sociality of that love does not make much sense and leads to the psychologization or biologization of the phenomenon.

So, what can we say about love in our sociological sense? Essentially, what we can say about society – that it undergoes certain structural changes. The sets of relationships between social structures (e.g., education, economy, religion), individuals, groups of people, and real abstractions (such as power, money, and symbols) have been changing over the past few decades. Therefore, some authors characterize our era as liquid (Baumann), accelerated (Rosa), and risky (Beck, Giddens). Consequently, love is also like this. It is liquid (it has no stable form), accelerated (there is not enough time for development according to Fromm's "love as an art"), and risky (prenuptial agreements testify to this).

The symbolic structure of love changes through changes in social life and the structure of individual knowledge. The symbol, of course, remains: almost everyone wants to be loved, but in the spirit of individualism and particularism of values, we want this love for ourselves, but do not truly want to give it to others. The structure has limited (through the process of socialization) our possibilities of communicating love to a selfish kind of love. Romantic, affective love still exists, but only as an experience we strive for because of ourselves, not because of the other person. The other person is a tool for achieving our desires. In individualised society, all we can have structurally is individualised love – love towards ourselves in the first place, then everything else.

The reason for this text is simple. If we want to understand the concept of love, we must start with an analysis of society. Self-help manuals, individual endeavours like changing ourselves to find love, are just band-aids we apply to wounds when we should be addressing the unhealthy society in which we live. Consultations with experts, marital counselling in hopes of saving a marriage, various guides on how to find love, therefore, legitimize this same unhealthy society. This may sound harsh, but it finds justification in the explanation that these practices shift the focus of blame onto individual practices, which ultimately rely on the communication practices we adopt (some might use the term internalize), borrow from society, incorporate into our authenticity, and act upon.

If we understand love as a collectively founded, socially constructed practice, then we can see that the real problem is not just within us—in the relationship between two or more people—but in the structure of sociality that is given to us to communicate love in the first place. The ball of blame is shifted to the social sphere instead of the individual one, because it truly belongs there. A bad marriage may not be bad only due to the fault of the two or more involved individuals, but also because of social factors such as job stress, traditional ties of the extended family (when will those kids come), institutional violence, symbolic violence, etc., and the ways in which love is communicated while dealing with these problems.

In love, as in disappointment in love, we are not alone. It is society that makes love acceptable or not to us—something that imposes expectations on the love relationship (of any kind). This is also true, for example, with the issue of maternal love, which is expected to be unconditional (according to societal expectations) even during postpartum depression (which is more common than generally thought).

The solution to these problems, therefore, is not in individualization but in the collectivization of blame, while we must not absolve ourselves of responsibility. Likewise, the solution can be found through the acceptance of this social irony of love. It is and isn't ours. We have made it ours, but under the conditions of sociality. Understanding this offers us the possibility to (this time in a positive sense) alienate love from its sociality—to isolate this communication into the frameworks of intimacy that suit us. In doing so, we cannot escape the social genesis of the communication of love, but we accept it ironically and conditionally. We become aware of the social foundations, which we then place as secondary to the authenticity not of ourselves, but of the love situation in which we find ourselves with another person.

The person then is no longer the object over which communication is realized, but the meaning of the communication of love, and this same communication becomes merely an optional tool. Only then do the social elements of love become alienated from that same society, more intimate and special, more mystical—and in today's disenchanted society of superficiality, mysticism is something we desperately need.