Is it love, lust, or addiction?

The topic of love has been mostly in the province of writers, poets, and philosophers than in the minds of scientists. Even though it has been said that "love makes the world go round," few sexologists have addressed this subject in any detail. Nevertheless, we have all felt love in one way or another.Many of us have dreamed it, struggled with it, or basked in it's pleasures. It is also safe to say than most of us have been confused by it.
Trying to define love is a difficult task. Besides loving a spouse, boyfriend, or girlfriend,people can love their children, parents, siblings, pets, country, chocolate sundaes, and a favorite sport team. Although the English language has only one word to apply to each of these situations, there are clearly different meanings involved. When we talk about person-to-person love, the simplest definition was expressed; "love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own. "  There's a certain love that Shakespeare described in Romeo and Juliet, that popular singers celebrate, and that led Edward VIII  to abdicate the throne of England to marry the woman in his life.
In any type of love, the element of caring about the loved person is essential. Unless genuine caring is present, what looks like love may be just one form of desire. For example, a teenage boy may tell his girlfriend  - "I love you" just to convince her to have sex with him. In other cases, the desire to gain wealth, status, or power may lead a person to pretend to love someone to reach these goals.
Because sexual desire and love may both be passionate and all-consuming, it may be difficult to distinguish between them in terms of intensity. The key feature is the substance behind the feeling. Generally, sexual desire is narrowly focused and easily discharged, and love is a more complex and constant emotion. In pure unadulterated sexual desire, the elements of caring and respect are minimal, perhaps present as an afterthought, but not a central part of the feeling. The desire to know the other person is defined in only a physical or sensual way, not in a spiritual one. The end is easily satisfied. While love may include a passionate yearning for sexual union, respect for the loved one is a primary concern. Without respect and caring, our attraction for another person can only be an imitation of love. Respect allows us to value a loved one's identity and integrity and thus prevents us from selfishly exploiting them. One theory suggests that people can achieve a meaningful type of love only if they have first reached a state of self-realization (feeling secure in one's own identity). This theory defines mature love as "union under the condition of preserving  one's individuality," and noted that the paradox of love is that "beings become one and yet remain two." In speaking about the respect inherent in all love, it is suggested that a lover must feel, "I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his/her own sake, and in his/her own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me."
The insistence that people must be self-realized before having a "meaningful" type of love overlooks the fact that love itself can be a way of attaining self-realization.  People have a great capacity to learn about themselves from a love relationship, although it is agreed that love cannot be a substitute for personal identity.
Another interesting view-point on what happens when respect and caring are missing from a love relationship, is that it can lead people to a form of addiction. The resulting "love" is really a dependency relationship.
When a person goes to another to fill a personal void, the relationship quickly becomes a center of his or her life. It offers a solace that contrasts sharply with what the individual finds everywhere else, so that the person returns to the relationship more and more until it is needed to get through each day from otherwise a stressful and unpleasant existence. When a constant exposure in necessary in order to make life bearable, an addiction has been brought about, however romantic the trappings. The ever-present danger of withdrawal creates an ever-present craving.
Several books dealing with problematic love relationships made it into the national best-seller list in the mid 1980's - for example, Women who Love Too Much (Norwood,1985) and Smart Women/Foolish Choices (Cowan and Kinder, 1985). As a result of this shift in emphasis, many people began to realize that not all love relationships are the idealized, perfect unions we'd like them to be. In reality, some are exploited, desperate, or simply unfulfilled. Some scientists believe that "the only real difference  between liking and loving is the depth of our feelings and the degree of our involvement with the other person." On the other hand, it has also been observed that "it seems quite clear that more and more liking for another does not, in the end, lead to romantic love; more and more liking just leads to a lot of liking."  After much thought on the subject it seems that liking and loving, while interrelated, are distinct phenomena.