The experience of love in romantic relationships: an existential phenomenological exploration on the experience of love

Although love is widely used in everyday language it’s depth and importance is often overlooked, especially in the consideration of the wellbeing of individuals. Love resides in the experience of being human in many different relationships, familial, friendships, religious, romantic as well as a general feeling of love towards humanity. This research looked at love as an experience between couples in committed romantic relationships. Previous research has explored love from an ontological perspective, i.e., what it means to love, I try to get closer to the experience through this research to try and understand and share my findings on what is the actual experience of people in loving relationships.

Semi structured interviews were conducted with eight participants who were all in romantic relationships of at least five years. The data gathered from these interviews was analysed using an existential phenomenological method – I used Structural Existential Analysis (SEA) in order to look at the experience of love from the physical, social, personal, and spiritual dimensions of our existence. In addition, I explore the presence of time in the narratives of each participant.

My findings suggest that love is experienced in the physical, social psychological and spiritual realms of our lives, in addition time has a part to play in this experience. Each of these realms operate simultaneously within our day-to-day existence in and through time to create an experience which can bring immense comfort, security, and happiness and at other times shake the very foundations of our lives. Some of the key aspects of the experience of romantic love for my participants was that individuals chose to love romantically and were quite clear about the conditions which enabled this love to grow. In addition, love was expressed as an active and embodied aspect of my participants experiences, they showed and experienced love through their actions their words and through their bodies. Love was experienced as a way for them to feel connected to another person but also to become closer to their own sense of self and identity. Time played out in the way they experienced love through previous romantic relationships or parental love, it formulated their own perception of what they did or didn’t want in their present relationships.

Based on these findings, I propose that Counselling Psychologists/Psychotherapists and couples’ therapists could formulate the work around these four dimensions of existence, with a consideration on time as an important element to working with love in the therapeutic space.