Does expressing love make us feel more love?

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Love really is all around us. From the love of romantic partners and family to small acts of kindness borne of love for neighbors or even strangers, all of love falls into one of two dimensions: feeling or experiencing love from someone else and extending or expressing love towards another person. Now, researchers are beginning to understand the nature of how giving love reinforces feeling love.

Zita Oravecz, associate professor of human development and family studies and faculty co-hire in the Penn State Institute for Computational and Data Sciences, studies how people feel and express love in our daily lives, as well as how it connects to our mental health and well-being.

Oravecz started studying the quantitative dynamics of emotional experiences in daily life in 2005, beginning her focus on everyday experiences of love around 2013. She has published nearly 10 papers based on her love research, much of which is supported by the John Templeton Foundation.

Expressing and feeling love are behaviors that can be learned and practiced, according to Oravecz. In the Q&A below, she explained how love experiences show up every day and how to cultivate more love in the world.

Q: How do you define love?

Oravecz: The concept of love is much broader than what people might immediately think. The first thing we tend to think of is romantic love, but there are so many other expressions of love. There are many small gestures and behaviors that generate the same feelings of warmth and kindness — the kind of love you experience through friendship, from your family or even love that you might receive from strangers.

In my research, my collaborators and I define love as doing something nice for someone else and showing care for their well-being without expecting something in return. That can certainly happen in romantic love, but there are just as many scenarios in which that can play out in non-romantic contexts. That is really what we want to capture — all experiences of love in everyday life. In the long run, we want to examine connections between daily experiences of love, well-being and flourishing, and mental health.

Q: What are the primary indicators of love, and how do we express and experience them?

Oravecz: There are many daily expressions and experiences of love. In prior research, my collaborators and I studied what makes people feel loved. We identified several scenarios that people in the United States agreed made them feel loved. These scenarios include receiving compassion in difficult times, cuddling a child, receiving a compliment from a stranger, and spending quality time with someone. These results suggest that people generally embrace the broader definition of love that we use.

In our most recent project, we explored the connection between our expressions and feelings of love. We asked people between 19 and 65 years old if they had been expressing love and how loved they felt at random times each day. Early results suggest that the more we express love, the more we will feel loved.

I think this speaks to our human willingness and eagerness to feel love. When people are open and ready to express love, they might also be more open and ready to receive it. This preliminary finding could also mean that people who express more love are generally more aware of the signs and expressions of love in everyday life, so they are more attuned to when they are experiencing love.

We developed mathematical models to capture love dynamics and found that those who more freely express love experienced feelings of being loved for longer before returning back to a normal emotional baseline — we call this love inertia. Higher love inertia means that the level of loving feelings was maintained longer and changed more slowly, while people who had lower love inertia returned to a normal emotional baseline more quickly. People who experienced higher inertia in their feelings of being loved had better mental health and well-being indicators. This lines up with established research that found social support and caring — as compared to loneliness and isolation — are very beneficial for our psychological well-being.

Q: How do expressions and feelings of love connect to our mental health and well-being?

Oravecz: In several of our studies, we have found links between daily life experiences of love and psychological well-being. For example, in a series of studies from 2019, people reported their feelings of love several times a day and we found that higher levels of feeling loved were associated with greater psychological well-being. We have also found that participants who agreed with a consensus on the daily love scenarios expressed in their culture had higher levels of psychological well-being.

Q: What has surprised you most about studying love?

Oravecz: It has really surprised me how many different ways we can experience and feel love. We often think in terms of partners and family, but the more I have dug into the research, the more I’ve realized that even small moments in daily life — when a neighbor does something kind like bringing in your garbage can or a colleague invites you for lunch and asks how you are doing — these moments are just as important, and they can create the same warm, caring, loving feelings that romantic and familial love can.

What surprised me the most was how overwhelmingly people agreed that they feel loved when their pets are happy to see them. I have never had pets, and I didn’t realize that they are such an enormous source of love and support for people. It is so wonderful and so pure that we have the love of pets in our daily lives.

Q: As someone who studies love, what does it mean to you to have a holiday — Valentine's Day — dedicated to expressing and experiencing love?

Oravecz: I support any kind of activity to raise awareness of love and the power of love. Valentine’s Day has helped expand our understanding of love beyond the romantic context, which is wonderful. I see people wishing their friends “Happy Galentine’s Day” — the friendship-focused answer to Valentine’s Day popularized by Leslie Knope on the television show “Parks and Recreation” — and showing love to strangers through random acts of kindness.

Valentine’s Day might also be an opportunity for people who struggle to express love to show it more easily on a nationwide day that encourages expressions of love. It makes expressing love, which for some may be awkward or uncomfortable, more okay. Valentine’s Day really gives us an opportunity to create a continuous circle of loving behavior.

Q: What can people do to better express and experience love?

Oravecz: I think people can be made more aware of the small, daily gestures and expressions of love in their life. There are huge differences between individuals in terms of how well people understand daily experiences of love and express love. The good news is that expressing and feeling love are skills we can learn.

We have also started to explore cultural differences in everyday experiences of love in a project that spans six countries around the world, which will hopefully further contribute to raising awareness of global experiences of love.

If we practice consciously looking for expressions of love, we’ll see them everywhere. Hopefully as we become more aware of daily gestures of love, it will motivate us to open up and express our own love even more. It’s a habit, just like anything else: the more you do it, the more you will get better at it.