Why do people love things? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Aaron Ahuvia, author of The Things We Love: How Our Passions Connect Us, on Quora:
I’ve been studying this exact question for over 30 years and have a book length answer but let me give the massively simplified version. Partly, loving something is a response to thinking it’s fantastic. But that’s not nearly enough. There are lots of things we think are great yet don’t love (for me, the Mona Lisa comes to mind). For a person to love something excellence isn’t enough, there needs to be “something more” that creates a deep emotional connection.
This “something more” usually comes from two places. First, the things we love are usually connected to the people we care about. For example, when you get a gift from someone the object gets connected in your mind with the person who gave it to you. So, if you think the gift is excellent and you love the person who gave it, you’ll love the gift. Gifts are just one example of the many ways that objects get connected in our minds to people.
The “something more” also comes from seeing the thing as part of our own identity. You can tell that something is part of your identity because if someone insults the object you feel personally offended or if someone compliments the object you feel proud. Just think of the way sports fan feel pride when their team wins even though they barely got up off the couch.
Most things we love have both of these “something mores,” we see the love object as connecting us with another person and we see it as part of our identity. But whenever we truly love something, we see it as part of our identity. That’s because as the poets said, in love, two become as one. Backing up this poetic notion, there is a lot of scientific evidence that when we fall in love with a person or a thing, the mental process of falling in love is the process of coming to see that person or thing as part of who you are.
If you’d like to learn more about the psychology of love when people love things, check out The Things We Love: How Our Passions Connect Us and Make Us Who We Are.
This question originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
"Love" - Google News
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Why People Love Things - Forbes
"Love" - Google News
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