Key difference: ‘Love’ is a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person. It is a feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection, as for a parent, child, or friend. It can also be used to describe sexual passion or desire. Marriage is a legal contract between two people. The act of marriage usually creates legal obligations between the partners.

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Humans are fascinated with love. We need love, we crave love, and we’ll do anything for love. There are pages and pages devoted to love throughout history, stories, poems, sonnets, paintings, and so much more.

According to Dictionary.com, ‘love’ is a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person. It is a feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection, as for a parent, child, or friend. It can also be used to describe sexual passion or desire.

Love is a strong affection and an emotion of personal attachment. Love is defined as a virtue full of human kindness, compassion, and affection; "the unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another". While love more often than not is used to denote feelings toward the romantic partner, love, in fact, is more generic than that. See the difference between love marriage and arranged marriage.  

Loving someone is a feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection. It can be used to refer to anyone, any person, or anything. For example, I love you. I love my mom. I love my husband. He loves his girlfriend. I love my dog. They love pizza. She loves vanilla ice-cream. Mary loves the sea. John loves football.

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Love can be used to refer to a variety of different feelings, states, and attitudes, ranging from pleasure to interpersonal attraction. It may refer to passionate desire, the intimacy of romantic love, sexual love, familial love, platonic love, religious love, and to a concept of love that encompasses all of those feelings. However, when referring to love between two different people, there are in fact two distinct forms of love:

• Platonic love: A deep and non-romantic connection or friendship between two individuals. It is love in which the sexual element does not enter. Platonic love can refer to friends, best friend, siblings, parents, children, etc.
• Romantic love: Considered similar to platonic love, but involves sexual elements. This the type of love referred to when talking about the love between two partners, such as a boyfriend-girlfriend, husband-wife, boyfriend – boyfriend, girlfriend – girlfriend, etc.

Love or actually the need to be loved is the driving force between all interpersonal relationships that one forms. Love is a psychological need for all humans. We all want to feel loved. Love is, in fact, a part of our survival instinct. It is a function to keep human beings together so that they may procreate and continue the species. However, this is debatable as to why humans need love, whereas many other species procreate well in the absence of love.

Despite the presence or lack of love, humans seek validation. Marriage is a form of validation of an intimate and sexual relationship. It is a legal contract between two people. The act of marriage usually creates legal obligations between the partners. It establishes rights and obligations between the spouses, in terms of money, property, legal rights, etc.

Also see: Difference between love and affair 

Marriage is also known as matrimony or wedlock. Every culture has a marriage which is conducted via a wedding ceremony as conducted by the norms of that culture. Marriage validates the relationship between two people, without which any kind of intimate or sexual relationship between the people is considered inappropriate, and sometimes even downright shameful.

Many cultures and religion have a viewpoint that a marriage can only take place between a man and a woman. Some cultures even accept the polygynous marriage, generally in the favor of man, i.e. one man many females. However, many viewpoints concerning marriage have changed in recent years. Same-sex marriages have been legalized in many sovereign states and jurisdictions. Equal rights between the partners in the marriage have also been supported.

People marry for many reasons, including legal, social, libidinal, emotional, financial, spiritual, and religious. One of the reasons for marriage may or may not be love. Some people may marry for money or social status. Back in the day, arranged marriages were popular and still are in some cultures. These were an agreement between the families, in many instances, the bride and groom don’t even meet before marriage.

Still, views have changed; people do not need to get married to validate their love. In fact, some people spend their entire life together without being married and as said before, some people marry despite the absence of love.

Also read: Difference between love and friendship

Image Courtesy: wahidthe1.blogspot.com, law.msu.edu