The word "love" is lately acquiring many spurious meanings. They have in common that they reduce love to desire. Ortega y Gasset said that "love and desire must be separated. From love desires are born, but these are not love itself. We desire many things that we do not love, that are indifferent to us on the sentimental plane".

The current reduction of love to desire is a clear symptom that love is in crisis. For Gustav Thibon, this crisis is only a particular case in the realm of values: "the present multiplicity and rapidity of excitations devoid of biological and spiritual counterweights is the impure and forced adaptation of the inner world to the outer world".

We live in times that the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called "liquid times". Nothing is consolidated, everything is fleeting and precarious, superficial and perishable. Impatience beats patience, banality beats depth, the ephemeral beats the permanent. And the liquid to the solid.

A liquid has a volume that is almost always constant, but with a variable shape, adapting to the container, while a solid resists changes in shape and volume.

Bauman analyzes current sentimental relationships, contrasting those of a "solid" character and deep emotional roots, with those of a "liquid" character, that is, transient, which arises, flows and is not retained, but simply passes.

Liquid love is a superficial love, because it is based on fragile sentimental bonds, which can be easily broken and in which what matters is the present moment, without ties, commitment or project for the future. In this "love", individualism prevails, in such a way that once a specific need for affection, sex or emotional support is satisfied, the feeling does not last or deepen creating bonds between two people, but is diluted (like a liquid that escapes between the fingers) until it disappears. The ephemerality of this subject of relationship makes Bauman speak not of relationships, but of simple connections. Liquid love is consumed (like any other product) and is lived only in the moment.

Three examples of liquid love: a sporadic intimate relationship, in which there is a totally superficial bond; a relationship after a brief meeting to immediately satisfy sexual desire; a relationship between couples who live together but without any commitment, because the idea is to be able to end the relationship at any time.

This subject of relationships has serious consequences: immersed in a consumer society, love itself can become just another "disposable" product. Emotional dissatisfaction is another consequence of this love that, once a desire is satisfied, can leave a deep sense of emptiness, because human beings need affective bonds to trust and rely on.

Gilles Lipovetsky in his essay on the Revolution of lightness, talks about the plurality of lightness. "Erected as a principle or ideal of life, lightness is unacceptable and irresponsible. And any Education based on the principle of lightness leads to failure".

Lipovetsky warns of the paradox that this life of lightness with its effects of marked consumption, of tendency to the sensual, "does not run without various frustrations and dissatisfactions". Moreover, he explains where its weight is most implacable: "in the domains of affective, professional and subjective life, in the domains charged with deep existential meaning". Thus arise muddy loves, disillusionment, narcissism, inner insecurity and lack of spirituality. These are the ingredients of an unhappy life.

In spite of this, solid love remains a vital and existential necessity. And even in liquid times it is possible to build a solid love: committed, of submission total and forever, as source of happiness.

The idea that one has of love has a great influence on how that relationship is lived. To love is to want the good for the other (Aristotle). This good consists in helping him/her to be "more other", to grow inside, to develop as a person. It is the love of benevolence. For Javier Hervada, love is essentially "the first reaction of the feeling and the will that pleases the good. The root of that movement in which love consists is the goodness and value of being, which becomes an attractive force that moves the will".