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EVER since Adam first saw Eve in the Garden of Eden, people have loved each other. Over thousands of years society has grown and changed and advanced, yet there are few people today who would deem themselves better equipped to define love than that very first couple.
Of course that hasn't stopped every generation from trying. Poets, playwrights and philosophers have been searching for an adequate description for years. They have argued that it is a many splendoured thing, that it makes the world go round, that it is blind and even that it is all you need.
The Greeks have three distinct words for love in the same way that the eskimos have many words to describe ice - "eros" describing the sexual side of things, "philea" dealing with affection and friendship, and the biblical "agape" covering the love God has for man.
The Oxford Dictionary of Current English describes love as a "deep affection or fondness" or "sexual passion". But others will argue that it includes elements of intimacy, friendship, attraction and a chemical compatibility.
Kim Casali's popular '70s cartoon Love Is..., in which a couple is portrayed in a variety of scenarios depicting the meaning of love, included a whole host of options, from "remembering to replace the toothpaste cap" to "letting him feel he made all the major decisions" to "sharing things money can't buy".
In spite of all her experience on the subject, life and love coach Lynda Field, author of numerous self help books including Weekend Love Coach: How to Get the Love You Want in 48 Hours, says love is almost impossible to define.
"I don't think that we can be objective about love. It's like 'what is a good time?' - it's different for different people," she says.
"Love is a feeling inside ourselves. Love is not outside ourselves, its an inner feeling which is important to remember because when we think about love we tend to project to an outside interest.
"In some way when you look to love relationships we are looking at reflections of ourselves in another person, qualities we admire, qualities we want to have.
"Anybody who is looking for love should start with themselves because the people that have a good love relationship are the people who love themselves. If we are looking for love, if we don't love ourselves and we're looking for that in somebody else they're always going to fail us."
But as well as a feeling, there is a practical element to love which makes it complete, says Lynda.
"Love is active, it is an idea until it's put into practice. That's how love works and is demonstrated in the relationship. Bunches of flowers are lovely but they're not enough," she says.
"Love is being ready to listen even when you don't want to. Love is putting the rubbish out on a Monday night. Love is giving each other a break. Love is sharing your feelings. Love is being forgiven.
"People can be attracted to love and the idea of love but the realists are the ones who develop real relationships and stick it out and discover more love. It's a developing thing, a nurturing thing - the more love you give to something the more it gives love back to you."
Anyone who has been lucky enough to experience love will identify with at least some of this. But the question still remains, what is love? What makes us like one person, get on fabulously with another, but only fall head over heels in love with the third?
In the 21st Century even science has had its two pennies worth on the subject. We are, after all, biological creatures - animals - and so, according to scientists, our motivations and reactions can be explained rationally through a lab coated mix of psychology, sociology and biochemistry.
According to science, love has three stages - lust, attraction and attachment. Lust is driven by testosterone and oestrogen, the so-called sex hormones.
In the more traditionally "loved up" attraction phase, more hormones come into play - dopamine (also activated by cocaine), norepinephrine (aka adrenalin) and serotonin (the happy hormone).
Finally we settle into attachment, brought on by yet another set of hormones - oxytocin, which helps mothers and children bond and which is also released during sex, and vasopressin.
But there are other key factors at play at each stage, including the way we look, the way we act and interact and even the way we smell.
Yes, one theory of attraction is that it's all down to the way we smell. Not what aftershave or perfume we wear, but the smell that is unique to each of us and based on chemicals called pheromones. It is thought that pheromones subconsciously help us to choose a mate with a greatly varying immune system to our own, to give our intended offspring the greatest chance of survival.
Smell expert Professor Tim Jacob of Cardiff University's biosciences department, studies human pheromones and their possible role in human behaviour.
He says, "The basic idea is that we all have a unique immunotype - that is the genetics of our immune system - and that influences our odour type, our individual smell. So in the same way that we have unique immunotypes we have unique smells.
"Evolution ensures that people with similar immunotypes tend not to pair up because they don't like each other's smell. If you have a dissimilar immunotype to someone, your offspring are going to benefit from an increased disease resistance. Over time those with wider disease resistance will survive better.
"Smell is part of that because smell equates to immunotype and we tend to find the smell of people who have a similar immunotype to us unpleasant and we're attracted to people who have a dissimilar immunotype."
It all sounds a bit complicated and even the scientists aren't entirely sure how it works.
"It's not quite understood how immunotype influences smell but it definitely does," says Prof Jacob.
"You can't disguise pheromones, it's something that no amount of perfume or washing is going to get rid of. One is sensitive to very small amounts of these smells.
"It would be extremely difficult to spend your life with somebody whose smell you really dislike."
However, even Prof Jacob admits that just having compatible pheromones doesn't equal love, a phenomenon which one group of Italian scientists likened to a mental illness.
"We may be attracted to a great many smells so that doesn't mean to say that this mechanism is a way of finding a mate," Prof Jacob says.
"If the only criteria is a different smell, well, there are a lot of people out there who have a different immune system to you. It's just one criteria among many.
"Plus you won't get close enough to smell it in the first place until you're interested in that person anyway."
Before we're drawn to someone's smell - and the accompanying promise that our children will have a better chance of survival - there are a number of other factors at play which interact to spark the flame that is love.
One set of theories focuses on how we look. Numerous studies in humans have shown that men go for women with symmetrical faces, for example, and it has also been found that they prefer women with a waist to hip ratio of 0.7 based on the formula "ratio equals waist measurement divided by hip measurement".
So it is true that, in many ways, science can explain some of the more basic, animal mechanisms which cause us to be drawn to each other for the sake of physical desire and the natural drive to procreate which is present in all living creatures.
But if it is only attractive people, people who are the "ideal" shape or "perfect" size, what about all those lopsided, imperfect, normal men and women who fall in and out of love just like the so-called ideals?
Sioned Morys, owner and founder of Welsh online dating agency Pishyn.org and English language site Pishynwales.com, is married with two children.
In her experience looks have little to do with real love, and Pishyn has led to five marriages and a baby so far.
"The nice thing about websites like Pishyn is that it's not about looks. People get to know each other through letters basically, through e-mails," she says.
"Only about 30% of people on Pishyn put their picture up and I don't think most people exchange pictures until a couple of weeks, so when the picture does come it matters but it doesn't matter as much as when you meet someone in a club because you have got to know someone, you have got to know their character.
"Psychologists say it takes a whole six seconds to fall in love. I suppose Pishyn does take that out of it. It's a bit more serious as well, because if you're on Pishyn you're looking for love, whereas if you're in a pub you're not necessarily looking for love. It's a very different game to going out on a Friday night.
"My mother always said to me that if I found a man that was kind to me I couldn't do much better. I think love is being kind to each other. Those big flashing lights and bliss - ask any married couple who have been living with each other for more than two or three years and they'll tell you that goes. So it has to be more than the big flashing lights."
Of course there's probably no one better equipped to answer the question "what is love?" than someone who is head over heels in that very situation.
Cardiff-based couple Peter and Anna Bell were married in October last year, two and a half years after they met during a university year abroad in Spain.
Neither one was looking for love but, when a mutual friend introduced them, it was only a matter of time.
"I spent most of my time trying to convince myself that I didn't love him because I was going out with someone else," says Anna, 24.
"It was something that started in Spain and grew, but I don't think I admitted it until Christmas of the following year."
Peter, 25, was way ahead of her. He says, "For me I think it was getting on the plane and leaving Spain."
Despite identifying his feelings for Anna early on, Peter still can't put his finger on a decent definition.
"Love is indefinable or at least indefinable to me. I don't think you can pin it down to one particular thing.
"People have been trying to nail it down for millennia and I don't think anyone's done it," he says.
"You can describe various aspects of it but I don't think you can ever truly say what it is. I've heard it described as an emotion but I don't think it is. It provokes emotions but I don't think it is an emotion."
One thing he's sure of is that it's more than a way for nature to trick us into continuing the species.
"You can do that without love coming into it at all," he says.
"I think approaching it from a purely scientific view and trying to boil it down to chemical relations and so on is really taking it back to front. All that is what happens as a result of love, it's not the cause of love."
Anna agrees.
"Science tries to work out the how whereas when you talk about love it's about why.
"Like why you love someone. You can break it down - they're funny, they're good looking, they like the same films as you - but it's more than the sum of all that. Someone can have all that and you still don't love them."
"And you can love people who are totally inappropriate," Peter chips in.
For both Peter and Anna, getting married was an important way of committing - and defining - their love for each other.
"Anyone can promise love when the feelings are there. Real love is getting to the point where you don't necessarily have the same feelings but the promise that you have is such that you want to go on for the sake of what you have together," explains Anna.
"It sounds very unromantic, but I would say the best thing that we did before we got married was to sit down and talk about our expectations.
"It's got to the point now when everyone has a different idea of what love and marriage are and what they represent, and if you go into a relationship expecting someone to be with you until their dying breath, when their idea of love is that it's fleeting and not worth continuing once the romance fades - that revelation, when it finally happens, will be painful.
"It's one of the reasons why we were both so keen to get married - with the wedding vows, as long as you mean them and are committed to them, it's all laid out. You know exactly what to expect from each other.
"Otherwise you'll turn to your partner one day and say, 'hey, you never supported me in my career' or 'why did we not travel/have children?' or even, 'you can't just walk out of this relationship'.
"And they'll turn round and say, 'but I never promised you that, and I didn't want it'."
So even people who are in love, who have first hand experience, still need to talk through what it actually means and how it will be lived out in the reality of their daily lives.
For some, their love will be cemented in marriage, others agree to live together without the need for formalisation, still others may, as Anna says, see love as just a fleeting thing to be tossed aside when the flavour is chewed out of it.
But if hearts are to remain unbroken then it is important that both halves of a couple have the same definition of love, and so we are right back where we started.
If love is not the initial attraction or a feeling of physical desire, if it is controlled less by the body or mind than by the soul, if it grows and changes and strengthens over time, then the question remains - what is it?
Perhaps writer Louis De Bernieres came closest to the true meaning of love in his novel Captain Corelli's Mandolin, as the heroine's father tells his broken-hearted daughter what he has learned about such matters.
"When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision," he says.
"You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is.
"Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the desire to mate every second of the day.
"It is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every part of your body. No... don't blush. I am telling you some truths.
"For that is just being in love; which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over, when being in love has burned away.
"Doesn't sound very exciting, does it?
"Trust me, it is."
How do you know when it's love? Lisa Jeynes, former Big Brother contestant
I'VE only been in love twice in my life - once when I was 24 and the other time was with James Hewitt. With James I would go to bed thinking about him and I would wake up thinking about him. You get butterflies in your stomach. But I think people say 'I love you' too easily. I think love is when you would die for someone and, no matter what, you want to be with them. No matter what happens to that person, if they are maimed in an accident or have to be in a wheelchair, it shouldn't make any difference to your love.
Does love conquer all? Sian Lloyd, weather presenter
I WOULD add friendship - love and friendship conquer all. Love does change as you're in it more and friendship has to be as strong as love. I think love does conquer all but not in a sentimental way - you've got to work at it and you need tolerance and perseverance. Love conquers all when you are selfless in love. It's compromise, compromise, compromise. But that compromise has to come from both sides. When there is friction between men and women it is often about selfishness.
Do you believe in love at first sight? Sian Rivers, actress
I THINK what I believe in is a connection at first sight. A lot of people believe in lust at first sight, and I believe you can fancy the pants off someone at first sight. Sometimes it works that way but initially the attraction is not love. All the qualities I would fall in love with you can't tap into in the first 10 minutes or so. You can fall in love with someone who brings you a cup of tea in the morning but you don't get to see that straight away. I think it's difficult at first sight for someone to get to your soul. Having said that, I fell in love with David Cassidy at first sight!
IS there a 'one' or can you love anybody? Lowri Turner, journalist and TV presenter
I USED to think there was The One and then I got divorced! Now I think there's a range of people and to expect one person to meet all your needs is unrealistic. You can change throughout your life so the person who is The One when you're 18 may not be The One when you're 40. If you look back to when you were a teenager and someone you were determined would be The One forever and you were devastated when it all broke up but now you think 'why did I ever like them in the first place?' But when one relationship breaks up there's always hope for another one.
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