International Journal of

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

Love is not a simple phenomenon. Throughout human history it has been understood and defined in multiple ways. What do people believe that love is? What are its attributes and characteristics? What types or examples of love best represent you? Despite its evident importance and omnipresence in our life, the term love is often used indiscriminately by people, leading to varied and different conceptions of what it is. Therefore, researching about the love theme impels us to reposition ourselves in the face of this phenomenon known since our youngest age, with which we grow up and sometimes experience it daily, but we do not reflect sufficiently on its real meaning. It must be shown that researching, talking or talking about love is an arduous feat. There is a risk of falling into banality, ambiguity, spiritualism or even sentimentality. And how could there be a vehement statement of universal validity
about love, considering the plurality of idiosyncrasies (many of them probably contaminated by ethnocentrism), which try to establish a primacy in defining what love really is. It is also a fact that conceptions of love have certainly evolved and continue to evolve over time due to the historical context in which it is inserted. In this sense, we believe that the findings of this study can help to obtain a better understanding of love as a psychological phenomenon, insofar as more objective empirical data could be collected in this area where subjectivism reigns.
As can be seen in this study, love is a plural and multidimensional phenomenon that includes the most varied expressions and that changes over time due to factors such as sex, age and level of education, considered in this study. Consequently, love can mean different things to different people in different cultures and historical moments. Although other studies in the past have proposed to define love and describe it according to their own criteria, this work, in an original way, tried not to start from a priori definitions, considering all possible and non- hegemonic expression of love over the others , as proposed by Lee (1988) among others. A study like this, with a sample of 600 subjects, identified 14 categories, analyzed seven groups and more than three thousand responses, is unique in both quantitative and qualitative terms.
However, even though this study has provided a lot of data and findings on the subject, it must be shown that its results, although obtained from a significant sample of subjects, cannot be automatically generalized to other groups and samples, since it refers to only two Brazilian cities and it was not possible, for practical reasons, mainly of an economic nature, to constitute a representative sample of our country.
Thus, it is suggested and expected that further research in the area, like the present study, will be carried out, expanding and diversifying the samples and / or investigating aspects or variables not considered in this work. For example, future researchers could consider other national and international, western and eastern samples in order to compare the results obtained, taking into account the design of the method used for this study, in such a way as to corroborate their results and / or suggest alternative theoretical interpretations and analyzes.