**I think yes, there is such a thing as love. It doesn't exist as an extractable or essential thing, though. It's a word we have assigned to the human experience of a particular feeling.** - As a term, the meaning of 'love' can be dulled slightly by over-use. It's become so central to our cultural lexicon that it can easily seem hollow and lacking in meaning. - But I believe that feelings come first, and then we name them. We feel things, then [look to language] (https://nobaproject.com/modules/language-and-language-use) to recognise those feelings. There are certain [recognisable things] (https://www.mindbodygreen.com/articles/what-does-love-feel-like) that indicate when we are experiencing love - like empathy, wanting to take another person's pain for your own, feeling at peace around them, that cliché thing of it 'just feeling right', not wanting to live without them, etc. - Saying 'there's no such thing' as love also avoids the fact that [love is a verb] (https://medium.com/personal-growth/love-is-a-verb-not-a-noun-f18163088e8f). It's something you do, something you engage in the act of sustaining. It's not an extractable thing that you can possess. - To wrap it up: the mere fact that many, many people will claim to have experienced love means that there is such a thing. It's just not a 'thing' that we can take stock of in any simple sense.

**Love can seem limitless, which is really amazing and leads to it being a very spiritual feeling that we do see all across human religious/spiritual history and present-day practices. Physically, many attribute love to a simultaneous release of specific chemicals in the brain: Oxytocin, endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin.** Love is one of the only emotions that seems sometimes to have no limit, which almost makes it realer than realer, to me. (It can also be, arguably, something that elides context-specificity, which is rare for an experience, I think...Meaning, it doesn't necessarily have to be compared to anything else as a feeling - since it doesn't, perhaps, derive its properties from comparative intensities of sentiment, but instead is something around which we often feel able to say "I know it when I feel it.") Regardless, I do think that love is something we can't totally understand _but_ that sort of does exist as a nebulous form of "ideal abstraction" that, against physicalism, doesn't hold up. As Eleanor points out, with so many people having experienced it, it would be hard to really stand behind the sentiment that "love doesn't exist". Whatever the experience is that we call "love" does almost certainly exist as _something_, considering that we, well, call it something. Interestingly, love is often described as feeling limitless, at least a really "true" kind of it; and [plenty](https://www.crossway.org/articles/the-kind-of-love-that-marks-a-christian/) [of](https://islamweb.net/en/article/156581/the-concept-of-true-love-in-islam) [spiritual](https://kadampa.org/podcast/what-is-pure-love) [engagements](https://chopra.com/articles/pure-love-is-the-essence-of-life#:~:text=Meditation%20is%20the%20most%20powerful%20tool%20we%20have,back%20into%20our%20lives%2C%20and%20the%20transformation%20begins.) have ["infinite love"](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-forgotten-art-love/201912/love-and-religion) as (at least one of) their end goals/points/states. To me, this is intriguing evidence for a certain kind of non-context-sensitive sort of experience. That is, if love is something that can outlast time and context, it makes sense that we are drawn to looking to it as something spiritual in quality. Those who subscribe to hardcore physicalism/materialism would probably say that [love is perhaps exclusively the chemical reactions](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-neurochemical-self/201802/the-neurochemistry-love#:~:text=Love%20is%20a%20cocktail%20of%20brain%20chemicals%3A%20dopamine%2C,stimulates%20all%20of%20your%20happy%20chemicals%20at%20once.) in the brain, such as a rush of oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, and even sometimes sex hormones like testosterone and estrogen. The fact that they all flood the brain at once can explain some of the transcendent, category- and context- defying nature of experiences of love. Here, though, one can still wonder whether love across larger periods of time, such as in long-term relationships, requires different chemicals or even thought patterns of the higher-order level such as [narrative](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4445577/) [storytelling](https://www.samwoolfe.com/2019/09/the-human-need-for-storytelling.html), which might be somewhat unique to the human brain. Both the more spiritual love and physical love could be true at once, and many do believe that to be so.