Chengwen Song
Love is a central concern in psychology, sociology, and cultural studies, yet existing scholarship has concentrated far more on what love consists of than on the epistemic problem of how actors know, judge, and validate that love is present. Structural theories have clarified the components of love, experiential theories have examined attachment and affect, and cultural approaches have analysed romantic discourse and symbolic expression. Much less attention has been given to the interpretive process through which individuals decide that a feeling, relationship, or social bond should count as love. Building on song2025's Love Confirmation Mechanism (LCM), this article advances the Love Confirmation Mechanism Model (LCMM) as a cross-cultural theoretical extension. The core argument is that love is not simply an internal emotional state but a socially interpretable phenomenon confirmed through multiple forms of evidence. The model identifies four domains of confirmatory signals: affective, relational, symbolic, and institutional. These signals do not possess fixed meaning. Rather, they are interpreted through culturally organised frameworks that shape how actors weigh emotional intensity, behavioural consistency, romantic symbolism, and social legitimacy. By shifting analytic attention from the ontology of love to the epistemology of love recognition, the LCMM makes three contributions. First, it theorises love recognition as a distinct process linking private feeling, interpersonal interpretation, and social validation. Second, it extends the LCM by specifying a multi-signal architecture of confirmation and by distinguishing intrapersonal, interpersonal, and social levels of recognition. Third, it provides a comparative framework for explaining why the same relational act may confirm love in one cultural setting but not in another, while also clarifying how love may be under-recognised, over-recognised, or contested when signals are incongruent or differently weighted. The article concludes by outlining implications for cross-cultural intimacy research, communication studies, and future empirical work on romantic legitimacy.