Loves Me or Loves Me Not? Passing through the Forest of Love Symbols and Unveiling Its Social Nature

This article unveils how love, as a signified, can be constituted by the artificially constructed symbolic signs (“signifiers”) represented in our everyday life. Only when we regard love as a symbolic system and try to decipher its meanings can we understand how love is transmitted through sociomental patterns. This article attempts to provide examples from language, symbolic materials, the imprinted body, the code of temporality, and the spatial aspect to interpret the general elements that commonly form the forest of love symbols. Moreover, this article introduces cognitive sociology as a significant analytic approach to examining love. On the one hand, taking the “semantic square” proposed by Zerubavel, I articulate that when we want to understand the meanings of symbols, we usually have to embed them into their symbolic context. On the other hand, based on the distinction between marked and unmarked social categories proposed by Brekhus, I explain that more often than not, we can shed light on the marked love types even when we focus on love issues. Last, this article reminds us that the symbols of love are not fixed and constant but change according to the transformations of context.