This chapter reviews some of the earlier approaches through psychology to understanding what love is. It considers some of the major approaches namely philosophical approaches, literary approaches and clinical approaches. The philosophical approaches include reinforcement theories and cognitive-consistency theories. For many people, love is the most important thing in their lives. Perhaps the earliest approach to understanding the nature of love was through philosophy. Literature helps us understand not only love but also the forces that can undermine and even destroy love: family quarrels, economic hardship, incompatible goals in life, jealousy, inability to control one's rage or other negative emotions, and so forth. One of the earliest approaches toward understanding the antecedents of love was based on reinforcement theories, which are theories aimed at explaining behavior through patterns of environmental rewards. Cognitive-consistency theories basically hold that people strive to keep their cognitions psychologically consistent.

Evolutionary psychologists argue that passionate love is innate to human nature and is based on biological processes that are universal, applying to people of all cultures. However, it is possible that people fall in love more or less often depending on their culture's social organization and ideology. Research has found that some of the antecedents of falling in love are reciprocal liking, appearance, personality traits, similarity, familiarity and isolation. Even if romantic love occurs in many or even all cultures of the world, it is still reasonable to assume that the experience of being in love is colored by one's cultural values and the society to which one belongs. The emic approach gives us quite a different picture of what people considers love to be from that obtained with the etic approach.