Harvard University
Celebrating Love
While love is often associated with romance, it also applies to our passion for friendship, creativity, and connection. Members of the Harvard community are researching the science of love, exploring love in all aspects of our lives, and offering help, advice, and support on how to build a love-filled life.
Love is all around
In the classroom
In his book “Love and Compassion: Exploring Their Role in Education,” Graduate School of Education alum John Miller writes that love is a powerful, motivating force for many teachers and students.
“One can teach basic skills without love, but to truly make a difference in a student’s life, there needs to be love,” he says. “Love brings patience and understanding, which are so important in teaching.”
In religious communities
As an ethnographer and an expert on kinship studies, Divinity School Professor Todne Thomas says many have found “unparalleled kinship” through their place of worship.
In the workplace
Friends in the workplace can be lifelines who provide crucial social connection, collaboration, and support for each other during times of change.
In unlikely places
Sixty years after they first met in Wendy’s mother’s kitchen, former domestic worker Mary Norman and HDS graduate Wendy Sanford wrote “These Walls Between Us: A Memoir of Friendship Across Race and Class.”
“The greatest science in the world … is love”
– Mother Teresa
When it comes to thinking about love, poets and philosophers may have a head start on science, but researchers and scientists are catching up.
Researchers are investigating how online dating matches are best made and learning more about the love lives of fruit flies.
By studying how the scent of a romantic partner can lower psychological and physiological stress levels, and exploring how our brains function when in love, scientists are learning why humans need love in our lives.
Words of wisdom
From establishing positive skills early in life to learning how to heal fractured ties, forming and maintaining healthy relationships is lifelong work.
All relationships—yes, even the healthy and fulfilling ones—take work and maintenance.”Danielle Farrell
Program Officer for Title IX and Professional Conduct
Title IX Resource Coordinator for Staff, Faculty, and Researchers
Forming a chosen family
Seeking out people who help make you feel safe, loved, and included is a good way to find support in a new situation.
Developing healthy relationships
Talking about the markers of healthy and unhealthy relationships helps prepare young people for caring, lasting romantic relationships.
Healing rifts
One way to find common ground with others is to show warmheartedness and love, says Arthur Brooks.
Bringing together ethics and desire
Two doctoral students bring together conversations about consent with research on ethics and love.
“All art is love”
– Aidan Chambers
From cards and portraits to romance novels and courtship manuals, love and art have always been deeply intertwined.
Love makes the world go ’round
Across countries and cultures, love and relationships are a universal human experience.
Finding love
As early as the late middle ages, and more so after the industrial revolution, people began pursuing “love marriages,” partnerships in which attraction and love were the reason for the union. The advent of digital technologies and particularly smartphones have changed dating once again, says Harvard Business School’s Debora Spar.
Matchmaking
Harvard’s Datamatch, a student-run online matchmaking service, began with paper surveys in 1994. Today it makes love connections with an algorithm that looks at personal profiles and answers to multiple-choice questions.
Love around the world
Love and romance differ around the globe, and the way people demonstrate their affection varies as well.
Race and romance
Research by Marya Mtshali, lecturer on studies of women, gender, and sexuality, uses an intersectional lens to examine the ways interracial couples navigate social norms and issues.
“Where there is love there is life”