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Love

In Focus

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


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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.”

Learn about the role love and compassion play in education

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

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Listen much, criticize little

Experts in negotiation and mediation say keeping curiosity alive is key to long-lasting, healthy relationships.

Listen much, criticize little

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.

Forming a chosen family

Developing healthy relationships

Talking about the markers of healthy and unhealthy relationships helps prepare young people for caring, lasting romantic relationships.

Developing healthy relationships

Healing rifts

One way to find common ground with others is to show warmheartedness and love, says Arthur Brooks.

Healing rifts

Bringing together ethics and desire

Two doctoral students bring together conversations about consent with research on ethics and love.

Bringing together ethics and desire

Love makes the world go ’round

Across countries and cultures, love and relationships are a universal human experience.


Moving love online
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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.