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Although love is intangible, the work of Zick Rubin made it possible to measure attraction between people. Rubin opens his report of the Measurement of Romantic Love with, “Love is generally regarded to be the deepest and most meaningful of sentiments.”,  He continues to explain that love, over time, has served as a bases for literature and art and explains the association between love and marriage in Western culture. Rubin gives credit to Heider (1958) to explain that “loving is merely intense liking,”, which is why experiments about romantic attraction always has a dependent variable on how much a person likes another. The first step Rubin took was developing a love scale, and from there he noticed that there are three major components of loving, which later lead to his relation of his upcoming concept of love to theories of different psychologists such as Sigmund Freud and Harry Harlow. Rubin then took his study to the laboratory, in which he observed the gazes between his subjects. In the end, he got the result he predicted: couples identified as a strong together couples (couples declared that they are in an intimate relationship) had multiple and lingering gazes, where as weak together couples resulted in the opposite. Rubin ends his study report with explaining that behavior in each person could play a part as to why they would look at the other person more or less. He concluded that his questionnaire results helped to draw a line between liking and loving. Rubin suggests that for further studies about romantic love relationships, one should consider the“nature of the interpersonal rewards exchanged between partners”, such as security or those of stimulation. He also suggests to take notice of a person’s patterns of sexual behavior, helping, and self-disclosure.

In the past, the social norm of love was always between a heterosexual couple. In recent years, acknowledgement and acceptance of homosexual couples have slowly integrated itself into the social norm as well. Lisa M. Diamond’s research started with a focus on love and the “implications regarding gender and sexual orientation”, . Diamond writes that psychologists have agreed that “regarding human sexuality is that women tend to place greater emphasis on relationships as a context for sexual feelings and behaviors than do men (Peplau, 2003).” . She then goes into detail of the neurochemical, oxytocin, that women release during sexual activity. As a result, she finds that women’s correlation of love and desire may be influenced by the release of the neurochemical. Diamond comes to the conclusion that women “sometimes develop same-sex desires as a result of falling in love with female friends (a phenomenon rarely documented among men) might be interpreted to indicate that oxytocin-mediated links between love and desire”, can make women disregard their sexual orientation and become homosexual. In total, the point she is getting across is: sexual orientation does not cap the ability to to love and desire others.

On the topic of love, Barry F. Moss and Andrew I. Schwebel explore varying views of the importance of intimacy within a relationship. First off, Moss and Schwebel define 4 levels of intimacy: mutual, positive cognitive closeness; mutual, positive affective closeness; mutual, positive physical closeness; and commitment. Positive cognitive closeness describes the process of revealing values to one another. The second stage, positive affective closeness, strong feelings start to develop based on the qualities learned from one another. The next stage is positive physical closeness where “individuals in romantic relationships are comfortable in close physical proximity [..] exhibit extended periods of mutual gaze […] and engage in deeper stages of tactile involvement (e.g., Rosenfeld, Kartus, & Ray, 1976)”, . Finally, the last step in an intimate relationship is commitment. Moss and Schwebel state, “The more commitment a person feels toward another, the more likely he or she is to focus affective and cognitive attention toward that other individual.”