Love which focuses on an emotional relationship involving some sense of commitment and either an ongoing sexual relationship or the potential for such a relationship is viewed and defined in a variety of ways. Despite the fact that the major portion of a treatise on love devotes itself to a consideration of tendance in love (i.e. aquisitive, benevolent, acquisitive-benevolent), this categorization of the primary beneficiary is of little value in understanding love. Love is best understood as a decision, rather than a feeling or behavior. Empirical research on the dimensions of love points to a large general factor of love dependent on a cognitive evaluation that one is understood, and a feeling of competency and involvement in understanding the other. Feeling seems dependent on cognition rather than vice versa, and behavior, apart from verbalized behavior of acceptance, also plays a secondary role. A taxonomy shows in what way one definition of love differs from another. It becomes possible, therefore, to communicate these differences and to study their behavioral correlates. (Author/LEB)