Love is a state of mind, a social relationship, and a potent emotion. Love is examined as the emotion of two cross-cultural problems of life, temporality and social identity, the bases of communally shared and equality-matched social relations. It is proposed that there exist a set of primary emotions that combine in pairs to form secondary emotions. Love is defined as a mixture of joy–happiness and acceptance, the prototypical positively valenced adaptive reactions to temporality and identity. As an individual loses a love relationship, the primary emotional foundations of love, joy–happiness and acceptance, can turn into their opposites, disgust–rejection and sadness, respectively. Potentially emerging from these four primary emotions are five secondary emotions that contain disgust and/or sadness. These secondary-level emotions are defined as ambivalence (acceptance and disgust–rejection), bittersweetness (joy–happiness and sadness), derisiveness (joy–happiness and disgust–rejection), resignation (acceptance and sadness/loss), and loneliness (sadness and disgust–rejection). These are hypothesized to be the key emotions of troubled intimacy and are described as they occur during the process of the breakdown and dissolution of love-based social relationships.