does true love really exist essay

• Relationships

Is It True Love? An Answer from Origins of Life Research

If you want to make sense of love, check out synergistic co-constraint..

Posted February 17, 2021

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Some say love is transcendent, undefinable. I’m not one of them. Right or wrong, I have a precise definition of love grounded in the scientific origins of life research I’ve been doing for 25 years. Here I’ll give my definition of love, built from the ground up.

Nouns confuse us. We think they refer to static objects which is true of some, not all. Stones are static objects but we organisms aren’t. We don’t just exist; we make effort to persist.

How do we do it?

By means of synergistic co-constraint, which, yes, requires some explaining.

Shake a bag of wristwatch parts and they can be in all sorts of configurations. Put them together as a watch and each part constrains the movement of other parts.

Every time two things bump into each other, there’s co-constraint, each limiting how the other moves. Those bumps get synergistic when things keep co-constraining each other, not randomly but repeatedly and reliably. A watch or any other machine is a system of durable parts engineered to keep co-constraining each other, repeatedly and reliably in other words, synergistically. Like clockwork.

We think of synergy as the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. The whole may be of greater use or interest to us, but realistically, wholes can’t be greater than the sums of their parts. Rather, synergy is the whole being less than the sum of its parts’ total possible movement as in a machine – parts limiting each other’s movement.

We organisms are not machines. When machines run out of energy, they continue to exist. Turn them off and you can turn them back on. When we organisms run out of energy, we die, decomposing quickly.

On even your slouchiest day, you generate 242 billion replacement cells without feeling or thinking about it. A clock just tells time. It doesn’t regenerate itself. We organisms are not durable so we’re always repairing, replacing, and replenishing ourselves. We have to work against our own degeneration.

We organisms are like leaky boats working to bail out water faster than it seeps in, or like sandcastles being eroded by the waves, us trying to rebuild ourselves faster than the waves wash us away.

Still, like clocks, we’re synergistic co-constraints, our parts limiting each other’s movement so they’re not just dithering, doing whatever. Though organizations aren’t organisms, they too operate by synergistic co-constraint, workers holding each other accountable to keep the whole thing going.

Synergistic co-constraints have three basic qualities to track if you want to understand how they work. The energy, the parts, and the constraint relationships – the ways the parts constrain each other’s movement given how they’re positioned.

In a machine the parts and their constraint relationships are constant. The only thing changing is the energy flowing through.

With organisms it’s different. The parts and the energy flow through. You’re not made of stuff like a static object; you’re made through stuff, the energy and parts passing through you. The only quality that stays constant in us is the constraint relationships, like an organization: Same roles filled by different employees passing through. Or like a square dance with people passing through while the dance figures stay the same.

OK, but what’s love got to do with this?

Love means strong preference. There’s a continuum from neutral to like to love.

I find my definition of love in my understanding of synergistic co-constraint: Doing dedicated work to maintain someone or something you depend upon.

By my definition, we can tell who you love two ways: By the constrained effort you make to sustain them, and by what happens to you if you don’t succeed in sustaining them.

Paul McCartney sings “Suddenly, I’m not half the man I used to be.” Poetic lyrics but they’re more than that. To be in love with someone is to be partial to them – literally. If they disappeared, you would not feel whole. Losing your love object, you might feel “at loose ends.”

A watch's parts don’t love each other, but again, organisms are different. My parts love each other. This borders on metaphor, not science, but imagine how your hands and feet love each other when bailing water out of your otherwise sinking boat. You’re limbs do constrained, coordinated work for each other, and if one limb stops working, the other limbs would feel bereft.

When you love someone, they’re a constraint on what you do. Of all the things you could do, you do some things, not others, and why? To sustain your partner because you’d be bereft without them. If the love is mutual you both do that for each other. You co-constrain each other synergistically.

Lip services love takes little effort. If you want to know if someone loves you, look at their dedicated effort to maintain you and the shape they’d be in if they lost you, though factor in whatever else they’re juggling.

Falling in love is trying to get a synergistic co-constraint relationship going, mutual, sustained, dedicated effort to maintain each other because you depend on each other. “To have and to hold” literally: Having is dependence; holding is co-constraining.

I think all love is like that, even the unconscious , unromantic love. Feelings and thoughts aside, apparently I love myself. It shows in all that effort I make to regenerate myself. I have that biological self-love in common with all organisms, even the ones that can’t feel or think. Our synergistic co-constraining parts all doing dedicated work to maintain each other because they depend upon each other.

My definition for love is the same as my definition of addiction in that, stripped of their positive or negative connotations, the two terms amount to the same thing: doing dedicated work to maintain access to something one depends upon. From what I can tell, the only difference between love and addiction is the connotations. If we think a synergistic co-constraint will go well, we call it love. If we think it will go badly, we call it an addiction. “Am I in love or just addicted?” is a reasonable question to ask. Addictions are synergistic for a while but they’ll tend to break down, for example, if you are doing dedicated work to maintain someone who won’t reciprocate for long.

A lot of our love is unconscious and underappreciated. My body does all that regenerative work so reliably without me feeling or noticing it. But if it stopped, I’d be hurting.

I love my machines too but I take them for granted because, especially these days, they’re so reliable. If it ain’t broke, I don’t think about it. I love the internet but I don’t tend to notice that I do. I’m on autopay. I don’t even notice myself making effort to maintain it. Still, when it goes down, I feel it.

Taking our synergistic co-constraints for granted may be a good definition of being spoiled. There’s a lot of that going around these days. We’ve never felt more independent yet been more dependent. We don’t notice our dedicated dependency on infrastructure when it becomes reliable enough to ignore. Our habits are that way too, often unnoticed — some lovable, some addictions that won’t end well.

Still, you’ve got to love being spoiled too. Taking things for granted frees us to fuss over the co-constraint relationships yet to be made reliable, in other words, synergistic, like clockwork.

Jeremy Sherman, Ph.D., MPP, has a wide research agenda — psychology from cradle to grave, life’s origins to our grave situation, grounded in a 25-year close collaboration with Berkeley neuroscientist, biological anthropologist Terrence Deacon.

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Sulking ( c 1870) by Edgar Degas. Courtesy the Met Museum, New York

Why is there such a thing as ‘true love’ but not ‘true grump’?

by Shayla Love   + BIO

What makes an emotion feel true? And how is that connected to your true self? New insights on old philosophical puzzles

In the two years before the publication of her book All About Love (1999), bell hooks went around telling friends, lecture audiences, and even people sitting next to her on planes, buses and in restaurants that she was ‘looking for true love’.

This form of love would be unlike lesser forms of love. ‘True love is a different story,’ hooks wrote in the book. ‘When it happens, individuals usually feel in touch with each other’s core identity.’

With her interpretation of what sets true love apart, hooks anticipated the findings of an intriguing new study into which emotions can and can’t be seen to be ‘true’ – currently released as a preprint online – led by Brian Earp, a senior research fellow in moral psychology at the University of Oxford. Philosophers and psychologists alike have long studied the curious instinct that some experiences, such as love and happiness, can seem ‘truer’ than others, but now Earp and his colleagues Joshua Knobe and Michael Prinzing have expanded the search to a far wider range of other emotions.

The team asked 395 US participants whether it seemed weird or natural to attach the word ‘true’ to feelings such as loneliness, sadness, obsession, grumpiness, lust, awe, calmness, euphoria, appreciation, nostalgia, despair and more. The researchers also asked them to rate the emotions as being bad or good, or whether each emotion could make a person’s life better or worse.

Participants were more willing to say that happiness rather than grumpiness was connected to their true selves

People felt some emotions could be truer than others, and there were some emotions for which attaching ‘true’ just sounded odd, such as ‘true grumpiness’ or ‘true stress’. Predictably, they gave some of the highest trueness ratings for love and happiness, but sadness and fear were also among the most highly rated emotions – suggesting that it’s not only good emotions to which people easily attribute trueness. In fact, there were some positive emotions, such as calmness, awe and amusement, that ranked lower on the trueness scale than sadness and fear.

The experimental philosopher Joshua Knobe , a co-author on the new paper, tells me the data show there seems to be something about true emotions that makes them different – and that it could have to do with how much an emotion is connected to a person’s sense of who they ‘really’ are, their true self – just like hooks’s insight that true love is a meeting of people’s core identities.

Specifically, the results showed a connection between the emotions people think can be true, and the emotions that they thought reflected who they really are deep down. For instance, the participants were more willing to say that happiness rather than grumpiness was connected to their true selves. This makes sense – after all, we talk about happiness as a key part of who someone is, whereas an emotion such as grumpiness can be fleeting: you could be annoyed if your coffee isn’t hot enough, or the train is delayed. ‘People don’t feel in the same way that these [less true emotions] can reflect who you really are deep down,’ Knobe says.

‘It does seem to me to map onto how we think about these emotions as coming from somewhere soul-like,’ says Rebecca Schlegel, a social personality psychologist at Texas A&M University who wasn’t involved in this research.

If ‘true emotions’ somehow reflect our soul or core selves, the new findings could further our understanding about what people mean when they talk about their ‘true self’. Previous work had suggested that people regard their true self as the version of them that is morally good . According to this view, your true self is the one who calls their mother back and picks up litter; if you steal or cheat on a test then you’re acting against your true self. But if true emotions reflect who you are deep down, as the new findings suggest, this would challenge the idea that being your true self is only about being moral.

Feeling a ‘true’ emotion isn’t a reflection of your moral self, but it could be an indication of what you want to do

‘If you’re married, and you should stay with the person you’re married to, but there’s something drawing you to be with another person – it’s wrong but you might still feel that thing,’ Knobe says. You might call it ‘true love’, even if you might at the same time not think it’s morally correct.

According to this view, feeling a ‘true’ emotion isn’t a reflection of your moral self, but it could be an indication of what you want to do, or – more perniciously – people might use it as a form of ‘motivated reasoning’ to justify taking certain courses of action. (Knobe tells me his study didn’t address whether or not people can use trueness as an excuse for morally suspect behaviour, but previous work on the true self has worried about this.) ‘It’s not like what’s always being revealed is your wonderful values,’ says Nina Strohminger, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied beliefs about the ‘true self’ but wasn’t involved in this research. ‘It could also be the desire to selfishly leave your husband and move to Argentina, and hook up with your Argentine lover.’

Of course, the new results don’t tell us objectively what counts as a ‘true emotion’ or the ‘true self’. Ultimately the research only speaks to people’s intuitions about these questions. No matter how widely shared they might be (and more cross-cultural research is needed to establish this), they don’t necessarily reflect the fact that there actually is an objective true version of love, versus a non-true one.

Nonetheless, Schlegel, who calls herself a ‘true self’ agnostic, says it’s still important to understand if there are universally held intuitions about what’s true, because it could impact the way each of us thinks about our actions, how we feel and what we choose to do. The true self and experiencing true emotions might not track a set of external principles or ideals, but instead a person’s personal set of beliefs, desires and what feels meaningful to them at the time.

Could we perhaps use the word ‘true’ as a tool of introspection, to try and assess what matters most to us, and what feels the most real? Again, Knobe says he and his colleagues didn’t study that, so they can’t be prescriptive about attaching the word ‘true’ to feelings and sussing out your response. But the study does suggest this is what people say they feel about true emotions. ‘They seem to think what’s special about [these true emotions] is that they’re really revealing something about you,’ Knobe says. ‘When you feel those emotions, people think you’re learning something pretty fundamental about yourself. You’re learning about who you are.’

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The Concept of True Love Definition Essay

Introduction, understanding the unrealistic notion of true love, the concept of love itself is an illusion, works cited.

The concept of true love is based on the belief that to truly love someone you have to accept them for who they are (including their shortcoming and faults), put their happiness above your own (even if your heart is broken in the process) and that you will always love them even if they are not by your side.

In essence it is a self-sacrificing act wherein a person puts another person’s happiness and well-being above their own. For example in the poem “To my Dear and Loving Husband” by Anne Bradstreet she compares her love for her spouse as “more than whole mines of gold or all the riches that the East doth hold” (Bradstreet, 1). While such an example is archaic it does present itself as an excellent example of the value of true love for other people.

What must be understood though is that in recent years the concept of true has been adopted by popular culture as a needed facet in a person’s life. Various romantic comedies produced by Hollywood all portray characters that at one point or another exhibit tendencies akin to the realization that their life is incomplete without true love and that they should seek it out in the form of female or male character that has been provided as an embodiment of what true love should be.

Due to the influences of popular culture on modern day society this has resulted in more people believing in the concept of true love and actively seeking it out as a result. The inherent problem with this is that true love is an ideal that can be considered the embodiment of every single positive thing that can happen actually happening. In that a person that fits your idea of the perfect partner suddenly appears, that events lead the two of you to be together and that the end result is a classic happily ever after ending.

Unfortunately it must be noted that the concept of the “ideal” is based on the best possible action, event and circumstance actually happening. The fact remains that the real world, unlike in the movies, does not revolve around fortuitous circumstances and the supposed ideal is nothing more than a fanciful notion created by the movie industry.

For example in the story “Rose for Emily” it can be seen that the main character, Emily Grierson, goes to such lengths of retaining love that she murders Homer Barron in order to keep him by her side (Faulkner, 1). The reason behind this action is simple, by the time Homer Barron came into her life she couldn’t experience true love as we know it in the movies due to the effect of reality.

Due to this she creates the illusion of love which she wraps around herself. While most people don’t go to the lengths Emily had done it must be noted that they often follow the same pattern of developing the illusion of true love and retaining its idea. Since the concept of finding true love revolves around finding the ideal partner and that the ideal partner is nothing more than a fanciful creation it can be said that the reality of true love does not exist since it revolves around a fictitious notion and principle.

In the story of Araby readers are introduced to the concept of an unrealistic idea of the embodiment of love wherein the narrator (in the form of a young boy) falls in apparent rapture at the sight of Mangan’s sister. Though she is never mentioned by name the line “I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring: ‘O love! O love!’ many times”, shows that the boy indeed developed substantial feelings for her (Joyce, 1).

It fact it is suggested numerous times in the story that the boy thinks that what he feels is true love and this is exemplified by his action of offering to buy the girl some souvenir from the Araby fair. Yet once he gets there he encounters a full grown woman at a stand idly chatting with men on various nonsensical topics.

It is then that he comes to the realization that he had crafted for himself a false ideal and that what lay before him was an example of what he could gain in the future. It must be noted that in essence this particular encounter shows what happens when an “ideal” meets reality in that the boy had been so presumptuous in crafting an “ideal” for himself that he neglected to take into account the possibility of better things in the future.

The line “I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger” is an indication of the point in the story when the boy comes to the realization that his ideal was false and that he only though that way because of his isolated world (Joyce, 1).

The story itself could be considered a microcosm of reality with Mangan’s sister acting as the concept of true love. The isolated nature of the idea of love developed by the boy in the story could be compared to the propagated concept of true love in movie industry wherein concepts related to the ideal partner as exemplified by various movies are in effect false when compared to the realities people face.

All too often people think of a person as their true love in an isolated fashion, conceptualizing in them in a world devoid of the interference of reality wherein their every move is considered lovely and perfect.

While such a concept is seen in numerous films it can be seen though that this particular point of view is usually false since when the outside world of reality is introduced people tend to see their “ideals” for what they really are and as a result their behaviors towards such loves usually change.

In essence it can be boiled down to true love being a fantasy created through the isolation of an individual from reality and as such can never be truly attained since once reality is introduced the fantasies diminish resulting in reality taking over banishing the illusion and subjecting people to the harsh truths that they neglected to see.

In the story bitch by Roald Dahl readers are introduced to the notion that passion incited through the creation of a simple chemical compound. This notion is actually symbolic of an ongoing thought that feelings of love are nothing more than illusion created by chemicals and hormones in the body that induce such feelings in order to propagate the species.

In fact various studies have do indeed show that love is a chemical reaction in the brain and as such if properly triggered through an outside source it can be assumed that this can in effect create the same feelings of love.

In fact the poem “Love is not all” by Edna St Vinven Millay says its best when she states that “Love is not all, is not meat or drink nor slumber nor roof against the rain”; from this it can be said that love is immaterial, nothing more than an illusion created by man (Millay, 1). For example in the story it can be seen that once males are affected by the chemical they all of sudden give into to primal urgings for procreation and don’t remember their actions afterwards (Dahl, 1).

Such an effect is suggestive of the fact that in essence people only consider love as love when there is a thought that tries to explain it. The loss of memory of events in the story is symbolic of the loss of thought and as a result the loss of the ability to associate a particular action with love.

In effect the story suggests that love itself is nothing more than a chemical reaction and that as logical individuals we try to justify it through other means that what it actually is. If this is so, the concept of true love itself is again proven to be nothing more than an illusion since it can be considered nothing more than a chemical and hormonal reaction rather than originating from some arbitrary and yet to be defined origin.

Faulkner, William. “Rose for Emily”.

Dahl, Roald. “Bitch”- Switch bitch”.

Joyce, James.”Araby”.

Bradstreet, Anne.“To My Dear and Loving Husband”

Millay, Edna.“Love Is Not All”

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IvyPanda. (2018, September 20). The Concept of True Love. https://ivypanda.com/essays/true-love/

"The Concept of True Love." IvyPanda , 20 Sept. 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/true-love/.

IvyPanda . (2018) 'The Concept of True Love'. 20 September.

IvyPanda . 2018. "The Concept of True Love." September 20, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/true-love/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Concept of True Love." September 20, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/true-love/.

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5 The Ordinary Concept of True Love

Brian D. Earp is Senior Research Fellow in Moral Psychology within the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford and Associate Director of the Yale-Hastings Program in Ethics and Health Policy at Yale University and The Hastings Center.

Daniel Do is the co-founder of Cortex Education.

Joshua Knobe is Professor of Philosophy, Psychology, and Linguistics at Yale University.

• Published: 09 June 2021
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When we say that what two people feel for each other is “true love,” we seem to be doing more than simply clarifying that it is in fact love they feel, as opposed to something else. That is, an experience or relationship might be a genuine or actual instance of love without necessarily being an instance of true love . But what criteria do people use to determine whether something counts as true love? This chapter explores three hypotheses. The first holds that the ordinary concept of true love picks out love that is highly prototypical. The second, that it picks out love that is especially good or valuable. The third, that people distinguish between psychological states that are “real” or not, and that it picks out love that is real. Two experiments provide evidence against the first hypothesis and in favor of the second and third. Implications for real-life disagreements about love are also discussed.

1. Introduction

There’s a difference, it seems, between love and true love . Just pick your favorite love story, from a book or a movie, or real life, where you find yourself most convinced of the special connection between the lovers. Where, however cynical or unromantic you may be, you might still be tempted to say such things as “They were made for each other,” and mean it as more than a cliché. And now imagine that one of them dies. The other one grieves, for a good long while. Enough time passes, and the living partner starts a relationship with someone new.

Imagine that this new person is no mere rebound. They are deeply kind, attractive, intelligent, loyal. The surviving half of our original duo falls in love with them. And suppose they really are in love. In other words, what the two of them feel for each other, or what they have between them, counts as genuine (romantic) love on any plausible view. Even so, you might find yourself thinking, with a touch of sadness perhaps, that no matter how wonderful and worthy this new love-relationship is, the only time our protagonist experienced true love was with the one who died.

If you can get yourself to think that (you may have to use your imagination to fill in certain details), then you may be inclined to think that the concept true love is in some way distinct from the concept love . At least, that is how it seems to us: that you can have or experience the latter without the former. Indeed, people use the phrase “true love” in ordinary discourse—in pop songs, poems, and private confessions—as though it expressed a concept all its own, and they seem to think this concept is getting at something important. Something that might justify a marriage, or cause an affair, or inspire a move between countries or a change of careers.

Much seems to hang on this concept, but what are its contours? What (if anything) does it refer to? There has been a mountain of scholarship, in philosophy and other disciplines, on the nature of love, but there has been relatively little work on true love as a topic in its own right.

Of course, that is not to say that existing philosophical work never uses the phrase “true love.” This phrase has occasionally appeared within existing work, but most of these uses are not invoking the concept that will be our primary concern here. Rather, the aim is often to distinguish actual cases of love from phenomena that may superficially appear to be love, but which are really something else: lust, say, or infatuation, or an unhealthy desire to possess the other person. For example, Velleman (1999) writes: “Students and teachers may of course feel desires for intimacy with one another, but such desires are unlikely to be an expression of true love in this context; usually, they express transference-love, in which the other is a target of fantasies.” Similarly, Anglin (1991) argues that if an apparent case of love is the result of some deterministic process, “then it is not true love but mere love-behavior.” 1 In these examples, we suggest, the aim is not to explore a distinct concept of true love but is rather to understand the concept love and, specifically, to do so by distinguishing between actual love and the mere appearance of love.

We suspect there is more to true love than this. More, that is, than the mere marking of a boundary between genuine instances of love and its sundry pretenders. And if you bought into our opening example, you should agree. But if the “true” in true love is not a mere synonym for “actual” and suchlike—what is it?

There are various ways of tackling this question. To keep things focused, we will be looking at one particular kind of love—so-called romantic love—as illustrated by our opening example. This is not to say that the love between a parent and child, for instance, could never appropriately be described as “true.” Perhaps it could, and pursuing this suggestion might ultimately shed light on the scope of the concept of true love: that is, on the range of cases or kinds of love to which the concept applies. But even within the category of romantic love, it seems to us that some examples are liable to be described as “true,” while other examples, though still counting as legitimate (i.e., actual) cases of romantic love, are not liable to be described that way. We are interested in what distinguishes these two sorts of cases.

As an additional constraint, we will concern ourselves with one particular aspect of this puzzle, namely, with the ordinary concept of true love as it applies within this romantic domain. By this, we mean the concept as it exists in the minds of everyday speakers of English, as revealed by the criteria they use to determine which things count as true love and which do not. To make progress on this question, we will be exploring the patterns in people’s ordinary judgments about true love.

Naturally, this will involve looking both at cases of agreement and at cases of disagreement. In some cases, people overwhelmingly agree as to whether something counts as true love or not, and in those cases, an account of the ordinary concept should explain why people make the judgments they do. But of course, when it comes to questions of true love, we also often find considerable disagreement. Often, different people look at the very same phenomenon and make opposite judgments about whether it counts as true love. An account of the ordinary concept should also help us understand what it is that people are disagreeing about in these cases. This will be a core aspect of our inquiry.

If we do successfully uncover at least some of the criteria implicit in the ordinary concept, we immediately face a further question as to whether these criteria are the right ones or whether there might be a reason to revise them or perhaps to abandon them, or even abandon the concept itself. These are important questions, and we will turn to them in the final section of our paper. But before we can ask whether the ordinary criteria are right or wrong, we will need to have a better understanding of what those ordinary criteria actually are.

1.1. Three Hypotheses

In our attempt to understand the ordinary concept of true (romantic) love, we will consider three main hypotheses. The first hypothesis says that true love, on the ordinary concept, is highly prototypical love; the second hypothesis says that it is especially good , valuable , or praiseworthy love, whether or not it is prototypical; the third hypothesis says that, independent of goodness or prototypicality, true love is love that is rooted in the real , in a sense we will be discussing further in what follows. We begin by simply laying out these three hypotheses.

1.1.1. Hypothesis 1: Prototypicality

One hypothesis would be that true love is simply highly prototypical love. On this hypothesis, the criteria associated with the concept of love itself are best understood as a matter of degree. If a relationship, experience, or disposition satisfies these criteria to a certain degree, people might be willing to say that it is an instance of love. But to count as true love , it would not be enough just to scrape over some minimal threshold; the relationship (etc.) would have to satisfy those criteria to a far greater degree.

According to prototype theory—by way of a brief review—members of a category are picked out by a number of features, each of which has a certain amount of weight (the greater the weight, the more important for category membership). Roughly speaking, the more features with the more weight an entity has, the more prototypical it is. 2 So if true love is prototypical love, it would be an instance of love that has most or all of the prototypical features of love that carry the most weight.

As an analogy, think of the concept of a true jock . Plausibly, the concept jock is a prototype concept. As such, the concept is associated with various features that count in favor of someone’s being a member of the category (prioritizing athletics over other activities, holding certain objectifying attitudes toward women, not being particularly invested in high culture, and so on). One natural hypothesis would be that to be a true jock, one has to be a prototypical jock. On this hypothesis, if a person showed many of the features associated with the concept but not quite all, we might be willing on the whole to consider the person a jock, but we would not be willing to consider the person a true jock. Only a person who showed all of the features, and showed those features to a high degree, could be a true jock.

A question now arises as to whether a similar approach could be applied to the concept of true love. In support of the view that it can, research both in philosophy and in psychology has converged on the claim that the concept love is indeed a prototype concept (see what follows). There is now a good deal of evidence in favor of that claim. The key issue then is whether the concept true love is best understood in terms of this prototype.

Within philosophy, Chappell (2018) has defended an account of romantic love that distinguishes “paradigm” cases from what she calls “secondary” or “marginal” cases. She provides strong arguments for the view that this distinction helps us make sense of certain core questions surrounding love. For example, it helps us tell whether someone is really experiencing romantic love in the fullest sense. Take a case in which someone feels strongly benevolent toward another but lacks intimacy or perhaps commitment. Chappell notes that “benevolence is one thing that we call love,” but goes on to argue that benevolence alone would not count as “full-blown love.” 3 Full-blown or paradigmatic love, she suggests, would require something more.

Research in psychology has provided evidence that supports this view. Such research suggests that the ordinary concept of love is indeed a prototype concept, and that it has a number of features apart from just benevolence. Among ordinary people, the most significant of these features appear to be intimacy , passion , and commitment . 4 Roughly speaking, intimacy involves feelings of closeness and connectedness, and a motive to promote the well-being of the other (i.e., a motive of benevolence). Passion encompasses romantic feelings, including physical attraction and sexual desire. And commitment refers to the promise or intention to stay together despite obstacles, along with the belief that the relationship will last. 5

What then does it mean for a person or couple to experience true love? In keeping with the jock analogy, as we noted, one hypothesis is that the person or couple experiences prototypical love. Perhaps people would be willing to categorize a relationship that exhibited just a few of the prototypical features of love as an instance of love, but only a relationship that had all of the features, and to high degree, as an instance of true love. 6

Let’s try this idea out. Imagine a young couple. The partners are consumed by passionate, sexual feelings for each other, and they can’t imagine the relationship ever ending. But they don’t really know each other at a deeper level, so their feelings of intimacy and commitment are potentially premature. It might be right to say that there is at least some sense in which what they feel for each other is love—perhaps they are even “in love” in a way that is often valorized in pop songs and movies 7 —but at the same time, without their having developed a stronger sense of mutual understanding and emotional closeness sufficient to ground a more durable commitment, it might be hard to characterize their relationship as an instance of true love .

Conversely, imagine a long-married couple that has considerable commitment toward their relationship, as evidenced by its sheer longevity, but who have emotionally drifted apart over the years and have a waning sense of romantic passion. Their relationship might well be an instance of love, but again, this would probably not be the first couple you would choose to illustrate the concept of true love.

By contrast, a couple that is emotionally intimate, profoundly committed, and smoldering with passion even after the so-called honeymoon phase—that is, a couple that strongly exhibits each of the most central, prototypical dimensions of the ordinary love concept—would seem to be a couple that experiences true love on almost any reasonable conception. Our first candidate hypothesis, then, is that true love is highly prototypical love.

1.1.2. Hypothesis 2: Goodness

The hypothesis that true love is prototypical love is a plausible first pass, or so we think. But upon reflection, it may not be the whole picture. Instead, it seems that we can imagine loving relationships that are not at all prototypical in the way we just described, but which, if you closely examine them and come to appreciate what makes them valuable, good, or praiseworthy, would still seem to count as true love.

To illustrate this idea, we will tell you about a couple who escaped to the United States from Poland together after the invasion of the Nazis. They were set up by their respective families when they were younger, and went along with what was expected of them. They got married, moved in together, and developed a simple routine that became familiar. Their relationship didn’t involve much deep conversation, and sexual contact was strictly biblical. But by the time the Nazis came, they had built a contented life together. No passion, not much in the way of (overt) emotional disclosure, but a committed partnership nevertheless.

Now imagine their harrowing escape; the miles they traveled together under harsh conditions; what they risked to keep each other alive; what they sacrificed in the way of personal freedom to make sure they found safety as a couple. At several points, we can suppose, each one had the opportunity to abandon the other for a more secure path forward. But they didn’t hesitate to risk their lives to protect their relationship. Clearly, something about their bond was profound.

Now, it seems clear that this is not a prototypical case of romantic love: the couple never poured their hearts out to each other, and sexual passion was never a feature of their relationship. But something about their quiet commitment, and the lengths they went to in order to keep each other safe from harm—and to preserve their way of life in a new country—might seem to warrant the claim that what they had between them was, nevertheless, true love. If our intuitions about this case are not idiosyncratic, there must be more to the concept of true love than mere prototypicality.

What might that something more be? One possibility is that it is something normative: something tied to the notion of goodness or praiseworthiness. In other words, when we say that what this couple has is true love, we are, perhaps among other things, expressing a favorable moral attitude toward their love or toward their relationship more broadly.

The notion that love simpliciter might be a normative concept has support from the existing literature. As Jenkins (2017) has noted, “the word ‘love’ packs a powerful rhetorical punch [and] its associated valence is typically positive rather than negative.” To use the word “love” in reference to an unhealthy or otherwise dysfunctional relationship, Jenkins argues, can be a “dangerously rhetorically effective way of concealing how bad” the relationship really is. 8 Espousing a similar view, hooks (2000) argues that love requires honesty, trust, and respect, and is fundamentally inconsistent with certain negative attitudes or behaviors: “Abuse and neglect,” hooks argues, “negate love” whereas care and affirmation, which are “the opposite of abuse and humiliation, are the foundation of love. No one can rightfully claim to be loving when behaving abusively.” 9

Inspired by these ideas, one natural hypothesis would be that people reserve the phrase “true love” for instances of love that excel along this normative dimension. In other words, perhaps people use this phrase only for instances of love that are especially admirable, or that most fully embody what is valuable, good, or praiseworthy about love.

This hypothesis immediately generates predictions for our question about when people will agree versus disagree about whether something counts as true love. In certain cases, almost everyone will think that a certain instance of love manifests something of deep value (perhaps our story about a couple escaping the Nazis would generate this reaction), and in those cases, the hypothesis predicts that almost everyone should agree that this instance counts as true love. By contrast, in other cases, people with opposing values will have correspondingly opposing views about whether a given instance of love manifests something of deep value. In those cases, the hypothesis predicts that different people should have very different judgments about whether the instance counts as true love. Those people who think that the case manifests something of deep value should say that it is true love, while those who think that it does not should disagree and say that it is not true love.

Importantly, however—and this something we will be testing later—the hypothesis predicts a substantial amount of agreement about whether something is true love among those who agree about whether it is good or bad . For example, among those people who think that a given instance of love is wrong or depraved, there should be strong agreement as to whether that instance of love counts as true love (i.e., agreement that it does not).

1.1.3. Hypothesis 3: Realness

Although there is certainly something tempting about the hypothesis that people use the phrase “true love” only for relationships that they believe to be valuable, good, or praiseworthy, certain strands within existing research suggest a subtler view. As May (2013) has argued, there is a rich tradition in Western thought according to which love, and romantic love in particular, may be risky and all-consuming: dangerous to oneself or others and even threatening to the very fabric of society. 10 Love can be a sort of madness. In fact, the idea that a bond must be “healthy,” consistent with the well-being of the lovers, or something that is fit to be praised to count as love is in some respects a recent innovation. Could there be relationships that are not good—or even highly dysfunctional in certain respects—where it would still be right to say that the couple experienced true love?

Consider Morgan and Robin. Until meeting one another, their relationships had all been fairly uninspired. Suddenly there was a person who made them feel totally alive, filling them with an electric, almost addictive desire. They were that couple at the party who seem so in tune with one another that it makes you wonder about your own relationship. And yet, their love was also tumultuous. A day might begin happily and end in a bitter argument. Their fights occasionally spun out of control (once, Morgan had all the locks changed and Robin couldn’t get back into the apartment for three days). But even in the darkest of times, they felt a passionate connection. Both were convinced that no one else could ever understand them—in all their unique peculiarity—quite so well; and they felt that if they weren’t together, they would be missing out on what was most essential in life.

Suppose that, one day, exhausted from all the drama, they decide to break up for good. They both feel it is time to start building a stable future—to start looking for the kind of partner their parents would approve of. They don’t feel an immediate connection to these new prospects, and they find themselves putting a lot more effort into enjoying one another’s company (is it really necessary to spend multiple weekends together going in detail over potential mutual funds?). Although these relationships lack the intensity they once felt for each other, they are invested in making things work, and over the years, they come to really value their new lives. They can’t help but marvel at how much happier they are now. And they aren’t faking their feelings: they have in fact grown to love their new partners. Even so, we can imagine them thinking to themselves from time to time, perhaps lying awake at night reflecting on old memories, that the other was their “one true love.” Like the couple from the beginning of this paper.

If they would be reasonable in thinking that, how could this be explained? We can imagine different potential answers, but here is one to try: Although their relationship was in many respects unstable and unhealthy, what Robin and Morgan felt for each other was very real . Indeed, one can imagine them looking back at the time they spent together and thinking: “That was such a painful period, but even so, it was the only time in my life I felt fully in touch with something real.” Perhaps this notion of what we will call “realness” plays a role in people’s ordinary concept of true love.

In saying this, we do not mean to be introducing a new technical term. Rather, the suggestion is that people ordinarily distinguish between psychological states, ways of relating, or even periods of their lives that are, in a particular sense, “real” and those that are not. People might mark this distinction by using sentences like: “I was so angry about what happened, but at least I was feeling something real .” Or: “I thought I was doing something meaningful with my life, but it was only when I quit that other job and started working full-time as an artist that I truly experienced anything real .” Although this distinction can be applied to the case of love, or so we propose, the distinction itself does not seem specific to that emotion. Instead, it is a distinction that people can apply to a range of phenomena, including different psychological states (desire, happiness, sadness, hatred, and so forth).

Suppose we go with this hypothesis for the moment. The question that immediately arises is: How do people distinguish between those experiences, for example of love, that are real as opposed to not real—or perhaps less real? One approach to answering this question might be to invoke the notion of a “true self.” A body of empirical work suggests that people quite naturally think that some emotions, thoughts, or actions reflect an agent’s true self, while others do not. 11 Very roughly, this research suggests that a person’s true self is typically regarded as some fundamental part of who they are: not something due to mere socialization, or a desire to fit in, for example.

If people think that a given psychological state does not reflect the agent’s true self, they will see that state as having a peculiar status. Take, for example, the experience of happiness, where this is judged not to reflect the agent’s true self. Typically, people will say that there is a sense in which the agent is in fact happy—they don’t deny that basic description—but they will also say that there is a deeper sense in which she isn’t happy: the happiness is not rooted in her truest self.

Researchers have not reached a consensus about how best to make sense of this sort of judgment, and, beyond that, it is an open question whether judgments about the “realness” of an experience should be understood in terms of the true self at all. We will not be attempting to address those issues here. Rather, we are raising the notion of a true self to give a sense of how one might try to explain what people mean when they judge that a psychological state is (or isn’t) “real.” But giving such an explanation is not the aim of this chapter. Instead, our focus is on the more basic question of whether people’s ordinary concept of true love is structured around such realness judgments.

Even in the absence of a detailed account of what realness is, however, the realness hypothesis makes certain testable predictions. Suppose people agree that what Robin and Morgan feel for each other is love, and our goal is to predict whether they will think it counts as true love. According to the realness hypothesis, their judgments about this question should be predicted by their judgments about the realness of what Robin and Morgan feel. Moreover, judgments of realness should predict judgments of true love even controlling for prototypicality and goodness. To see this, suppose that people determine that Robin and Morgan’s relationship is not a prototypical example of love and that, ultimately, it is not even good. It might seem, then, that they should also fail to regard the relationship, or perhaps what Robin and Morgan feel for each other within the context of the relationship, as an instance of true love. But the realness hypothesis makes a different prediction. It holds that there is a further sort of judgment people can make—a judgment about the realness of what Robin and Morgan feel—and to the extent that people judge this feeling to be real, they should judge that it is true love after all.

To bring out what is surprising and important in this hypothesis, it might be helpful to contrast the phrase “true love” with other phrases that use the word “true.” Suppose that John appears to be in some sense a jock, and we are wondering whether people will agree that he is a “true jock.” Clearly, people’s judgments about this would have nothing to do with whether they agreed with a statement like: “John is real.” It is perfectly obvious that John himself is real, and the only question is whether he falls into a certain category. Thus, the best way to predict whether people think John is a true jock might be to see whether they agree with a statement like: “John is an especially clear and paradigmatic example of a jock.”

On the realness hypothesis, the phrase “true love” should be understood very differently. Suppose again that what Robin and Morgan feel for each other is in some sense love, and we want to predict whether people will judge that it is true love. The realness hypothesis predicts that such judgments will not turn on whether people think their feelings fit into some category (e.g., the category of love). Instead, it predicts that people’s judgments will depend on whether they think the feelings Robin and Morgan have for each other are real . In other words, people’s judgments would not best be predicted by their agreement with a statement like: “What Robin and Morgan feel for each other is an especially clear and paradigmatic example of love.” Rather, they should be predicted by agreement with a statement like: “What Robin and Morgan feel for each other is real.”

2. Experimental Studies

We have presented three hypotheses. The first is that true love, on the ordinary concept, is highly prototypical love. The second is that true love is love that is fundamentally good . The third is that true love is love that is real .

Although these three hypotheses differ from one another at a deeper theoretical level, they will often overlap in practice. For example, since the prototypical features of love are themselves typically considered good, our first and second hypotheses will make similar predictions in most cases. And our second and third hypotheses will make similar predictions in most cases as well: presumably, people will think that if a couple is experiencing love that is real, they are experiencing something good. They might even think that experiencing something real is good in itself.

To tease these hypotheses apart, then, it will be necessary to examine certain cases where prototypicality, goodness, and realness do not coincide, or where they independently vary, and assess the relative contribution of each dimension to intuitive judgments about the existence of true love in a given relationship. That is what we set out to do in a pair of empirical studies.

2.1. Study 1

Our first study looked at prototypicality and realness. We manipulated three features that were associated with prototypical love in previous studies (intimacy, passion, commitment) and also independently manipulated realness. Participants were then asked (1) whether the relationship was an example of prototypical love and (2) whether the relationship was an example of true love.

On the prototypicality hypothesis, according to which true love just is prototypical love, judgments about true love should show the same pattern as judgments about prototypical love. By contrast, on the realness hypothesis, judgments about true love might come apart from judgments about prototypical love, and we should instead find that such judgments are especially influenced by realness.

2.1.1. Method

2.1.1.1. open science.

This study, including planned analyses and exclusion criteria, was preregistered at http://aspredicted.org/blind.php?x=z68ka6 . The open data and materials are available at https://osf.io/ezysq .

2.1.1.2. Participants

Eight hundred four US participants were recruited on Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and received $0.35 for their time. Participants were excluded from the final sample prior to data analysis if they completed the survey in under 100 seconds ( n = 74), provided an incorrect answer to a comprehension check ( n = 269), or provided an incorrect answer to a Captcha test ( n = 50). Our final sample included 481 participants (228 female, 248 male, 5 other; M age = 35.94, SD = 11.06).

2.1.1.3. Procedure

Participants completed an online survey with a between-subjects design. In the first section, we familiarized participants with the notion of a “prototype” by presenting them with examples of more or less prototypical chairs (see the exact study materials online at the previous link for specifics). In the next two sections, they read descriptions of hypothetical entities and judged the extent to which each entity is a prototypical example of a certain concept. They rated prototypicality on a sliding scale of 0–100 (0 = Not at all a prototypical x; 100 = Completely prototypical x). Participants were also asked to make an additional judgment about each entity unrelated to prototypically (also using a 100-point sliding scale). The purpose of these two sections was to ensure that participants were comfortable making prototypicality judgments before moving on to the main section of the survey. We also wanted them to expect a second, variable question that was unrelated to prototypicality so that the “true love” question would not stand out when they came to it.

In the main section of the survey, participants read about a hypothetical relationship between Mario and Jasmine. Each participant was presented with one of sixteen conditions, which varied along four dimensions—intimacy, passion, commitment, and realness. See Table 5.1 .

After reading the vignette, participants were asked to judge the extent to which Mario and Jasmine’s relationship is an example of prototypical love, and the extent to which their relationship is an example of true love. Both questions were presented at the same time on the same page.

Prototypicality.   To what extent would you say that Mario and Jasmine’s relationship is an example of prototypical love? True Love.   To what extent would you say that Mario and Jasmine’s relationship is an example of true love?

Participants rated prototypicality on a sliding scale of 0–100 (0 = Not at all prototypical love; 100 = Completely prototypical love). Similarly, they rated true love on a sliding scale of 0–100 (0 = Not at all true love; 100 = Completely true love).

Participants then completed a comprehension check in which they were asked whether Mario felt certain that his relationship with Jasmine was “real.” They could either answer “Yes” or “No.” Because we are interested in the effect of realness on true love judgments and prototypicality judgments, it was essential that participants answer this question correctly for their given vignette. Those who answered incorrectly were excluded from the final sample, as noted earlier.

Finally, participants provided information about gender, age, and political orientation. They also completed a Captcha test to prove that they are human. Those who answered incorrectly were excluded from the final sample.

2.1.2. Results

Although these data could be analyzed in a number of different ways, our concern here was with one specific question. The study looked at the influence of four different factors (intimacy, passion, commitment, realness) on judgments about two different questions (prototypical love, true love). For each of the different factors, we wanted to know whether it had the same impact on the two questions or whether it had different impacts.

We therefore used a mixed-model repeated measures ANOVA, with question type (prototypicality vs. true love) as a within-subjects factor and intimacy, passion, commitment, and realness as between-subjects factors. Our preregistered prediction was that the effect of realness would be greater on true love judgments than on prototypicality judgments. There were significant main effects of question type, F (1,464) = 6.55, p = .011, ηp 2 = .014; intimacy, F (1,465) = 31.95, p < .001, ηp 2 = .064; passion, F (1,465) = 54.31, p < .001, ηp 2 = .105; and realness, F (1,465) = 91.63, p < .001, ηp 2 = .165. These were qualified by significant two-way interactions between intimacy and passion, F (1,465) = 5.64, p = .018, ηp 2 = .012, and passion and realness, F (1,465) = 10.94, p = .001, ηp 2 = .023. There were no other interactions or main effects for the between-subjects comparisons.

Turning now to the key research question, we looked to see whether there were any interactions between question type and the other factors. As predicted, there was a significant interaction between question type and realness, F (1,465) = 16.716, p < .001, ηp 2 = .035. There was also an interaction between question type and intimacy, F (1,465) = 7.34, p = .007, ηp 2 = .016. To decompose these interactions, we conducted two separate 2 (realness: high, low) × 2 (intimacy: high, low) × 2 (passion: high, low) × 2 (commitment: high, low) ANOVAs on each question type (prototypicality, true love).

The effect sizes for each factor on judgments of prototypicality and true love are depicted in Figure 5.1 . The panel on the left shows the degree to which each factor impacted people’s judgments about prototypical love; the panel on the right shows the degree to which each factor impacted judgments about true love.

As the figure shows, the effect of intimacy on true love judgments, F (1,465) = 43.30, p < .001, ηp 2 = .085, was greater than its effect on prototypicality judgments, F (1,465) = 10.35, p < .001, ηp 2 = .022. And as predicted, the effect of realness on true love judgments, F (1,465) = 118.08, p < .001, ηp 2 = .203, was much greater than its effect on prototypicality judgments, F (1,465) = 32.46, p < .001, ηp 2 = .065.

Effect sizes (ηp) of realness, passion, intimacy, and commitment on judgments of prototypicality and trueness in Study 1. Error bars show 95% confidence interval.

2.1.3. Discussion

In this first study, we found that the pattern of people’s judgments about true love was quite different from the pattern of people’s judgments about prototypical love. This finding provides strong evidence against the prototypicality hypothesis. Given the substantial difference between the pattern found for true love judgments and the pattern found for prototypical love judgments, it is unlikely that the concept of true love is simply the concept of prototypical love.

Our data revealed two different respects in which the pattern of people’s true love judgments departed from that of their prototypical love judgments. First, as predicted, realness had a far larger impact on true love judgments than on prototypical love judgments. Second, intimacy had a somewhat larger impact on true love judgments than on prototypical love judgments. It is possible that these are best understood as two independent effects, but it is also possible that the effect for intimacy could be understood as a byproduct of the effect on realness. That is, it might be that intimacy has a somewhat larger impact on true love judgments because intimacy is itself regarded, at least to some extent, as a cue to realness.

The fact that realness had such a large impact on true love judgments—far larger than the impact of any other factor—provides at least some prima facie support for the realness hypothesis. However, one might also think that this result is misleading. After all, as we alluded to earlier, realness could itself be regarded as something good, at least within the domain of love, so even if the goodness hypothesis were correct, one might still expect to find an impact of realness on true love judgments. We explore this issue more directly in the next study.

2.2. Study 2

In this second study, we turned to a different approach. We constructed a set of cases about which we expected to find a large amount of disagreement, with some participants saying that a given case was clearly an example of true love and other participants saying that the very same case was clearly not an example of true love. We then asked whether each individual participant’s true love judgment in these cases could be predicted by that participant’s own judgments of goodness and of realness.

This method allows us to disentangle these two factors in a way that would not be possible with the method used in our previous study. If we simply tell participants in one condition that a couple is experiencing something real, the participants in that condition will presumably show a tendency on the whole to infer that the couple is experiencing something good, and vice versa. This fact limits our ability to distinguish the influence of these two factors. By contrast, in the present design, we can take advantage of the natural variance across participants in judgments of goodness and realness. In some cases, for example, we might find that some participants agree about whether a given case exhibits goodness, but disagree about whether it exhibits realness. We can then ask whether this natural variance in each type of judgment predicts attributions of true love.

The design of this second study sets up three potential predictions. One possibility is that, once one controls for goodness, the effect of realness on true love judgments is no longer significant. This would suggest that it is really the goodness of a relationship, rather than its realness, that is at the heart of such judgments. A second prediction is the inverse: that once one controls for realness, the effect of goodness disappears. This would suggest that realness is the driving factor. A third possibility is that each factor has an independent effect, even when controlling for the other. This would suggest that both factors actually play a role.

2.2.1. Method

2.2.1.1. open science.

This study, including planned analyses and exclusion criteria, was preregistered at http://aspredicted.org/blind.php?x=sr2ri7 . The open data and materials are available at https://osf.io/ezysq .

2.2.1.2. Participants

Three hundred fifty US participants were recruited on Mechanical Turk (Mturk) and received $0.35 for their time. Participants were excluded from the final sample prior to data analysis if they failed to complete the survey ( n = 0), provided an incorrect answer to a comprehension check ( n = 60), or provided an incorrect answer to a Captcha test ( n = 11). Our final sample included 285 participants (134 female, 150 male, 1 other; M age = 34.43, SD = 11.17).

2.2.1.3. Procedure

Participants were randomly assigned to one of three vignettes detailing a hypothetical relationship between Mario and Jasmine. The abuse vignette describes a passionate relationship interspersed with physical aggression. The puppy love vignette describes a simple but happy relationship between two elementary school children, unencumbered by the complexities of adult relationships. The age difference vignette describes a forbidden relationship between a professor and a student who seem to understand each other on a deeper level (see Appendix for the exact wording of the vignettes).

After reading one of the vignettes just described, participants were asked to judge the extent to which the relationship between the couple, who were named Mario and Jasmine in each vignette, was an example of true love.

True Love.   To what extent would you say that Mario and Jasmine’s relationship is an example of true love?

Participants made their ratings on a sliding scale of 0–100 (0 = Not at all true love; 100 = Completely true love). On the next page, they were asked to judge the extent to which Mario and Jasmine’s relationship was characterized by realness and goodness.

Realness.   When thinking about Jasmine and Mario’s relationship, people might have different intuitions. Some people might think that their relationship is, in some respects, unconventional, but still that what they have between them is ultimately real. Others might disagree and say that, despite appearances, Jasmine and Mario aren’t actually connecting on a real level. What do you think? Do you think that what Jasmine and Mario have between them is real? Goodness.   When thinking about Jasmine and Mario’s relationship, people might have different intuitions. Some people might think that there are certain flaws in how they relate to each other, but that, ultimately, their relationship is good. Others might disagree, and say that, although their relationship is positive in certain ways, ultimately, they have a bad relationship. What do you think? Do you think that what Jasmine and Mario have between them is good?

Participants rated realness on a sliding scale of 0–100 (0 = Completely not real; 100 = Completely real) and goodness on a sliding scale of 0–100 (0 = Completely bad; 100 = Completely good).

Scatterplot showing results from Study 2. X-axis shows goodness. Y-axis shows true love. Color shows realness. To see the full color image, please consult the online version of this article: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199395729.013.38 .

Participants then completed a comprehension check in which they were asked to judge whether a statement about the vignette was true or false. Those who answered incorrectly were excluded from the final sample.

2.2.2. Results

Data were analyzed using linear mixed effect models, with goodness and realness as fixed effects and vignette as a random effect (random intercepts only). All analyses were conducted in R using the lme4 and lmerTest packages.

There was a significant effect such that participants who gave higher goodness judgments also gave higher true love judgments, B = 0.54, SE = 0.06, t = 8.91, p < 0.001, CI = [0.42, 0.66]. However, even controlling for the effect of goodness, there was still a significant effect of realness on true love judgments: B = 0.40, SE = 0.05, t = 7.32, p < 0.001, CI = [0.29, 0.50].

Figure 5.2 shows the results for all three variables. Looking at this figure, one can get a more qualitative sense of the patterns in people’s judgments. For example, consider the puppy love vignette. In that vignette, almost all participants thought that the relationship was a very good one (i.e., the vast majority of points are toward the right-hand side on the x-axis). However, even among these participants, there was considerable disagreement about whether the couple had true love (as seen in the large amount of spread on the y-axis). Judgments of these cases were then predicted by realness (shown in the color of each point). That is, even among participants who agreed that the relationship was a good one, those who thought the couple were experiencing something real tended to say that they had true love, while those who thought that they were not experiencing something real tended to say that they did not have true love.

2.2.3. Discussion

In this second study, we looked at cases in which there was substantial disagreement between different participants as to whether something was an example of true love. We then asked whether participants’ judgments in those cases were predicted by their goodness judgments and by their realness judgments. The results showed two different effects.

First, true love judgments were predicted by goodness judgments. This effect is very much in keeping with existing theoretical work on love 12 and provides evidence that existing theories are getting at something important about people’s ordinary attributions.

Second, and notably, even controlling for goodness judgments, true love judgments were predicted by realness judgments. So we can tentatively conclude that, over and above the role of goodness in people’s ordinary judgments of true love, there is also an important role for realness.

3. General Discussion

We began by noting that there is a conceptual difference between love and true love. Although the phrase “true love” may sometimes be used to distinguish actual cases of love from merely apparent ones, we argued that true love is a concept in its own right, and a seemingly important one in many of our lives. How should this concept be understood? To answer this question, we tested three main hypotheses.

First, we tested the hypothesis that true love is simply prototypical love. As we noted in the Introduction, previous work in both philosophy and psychology has argued that love is a prototype concept. The results of Study 1 strongly support this view: the more a relationship was characterized by paradigmatically loving features, the more the relationship was judged to be an instance of prototypical love. But equally strongly, the results of our first study contradict the hypothesis that true love and prototypical love are themselves the same concept: rather, these concepts are markedly distinct. Most notably, our manipulation of realness had very different effects on judgments about whether a relationship was an instance of prototypical versus true love. Since people’s application of these concepts responded differently to the same manipulation, we have reason to reject the view that they are the same concept.

Second, we tested the hypothesis that true love is love that is especially good or valuable. We found that perceived relationship goodness positively predicts judgments of true love, even when controlling for perceived realness. This is exactly what should be expected given existing accounts of the normative significance of describing something as “love.” Our results provide support for these accounts, and also for the claim that this same point applies to people’s use of the phrase “true love.” Further research should continue to explore this effect. One key question will be whether the effect of goodness is best understood as reflecting something about the nature of people’s very concept of true love or whether it is more a matter of people simply being reluctant to apply the words “true love” to something they regard as bad.

Third, we tested the hypothesis that true love is love that is real. The present findings provide strong support for this third hypothesis. In Study 1, the manipulation of realness had by far the largest effect on judgments of true love, going beyond such features as intimacy, passion, and commitment. In Study 2, realness judgments predicted true love judgments even when controlling for goodness judgments. Taken together, then, the results of these studies suggest a link between the ordinary concept of true love and judgments of realness.

Note that our results point to something distinctive about phrases like “true love” that would not be seen with other sorts of phrases that include the word “true.” For example, in Study 2, participants were not asked to judge the extent to which Mario and Jasmine have “real love.” Instead, they were simply asked whether what Mario and Jasmine have between them is “real.” In other words, participants who did not see their relationship as an instance of true love tended to think that what they had between them was just not real. By contrast, this sort of judgment would not make sense for other phrases that include the word “true.” As we noted earlier, if people think that John is not a true jock, this would not be explained by their thinking that John himself is not real. Similarly, if people think that a certain sculpture is not a true work of art, it is likely not because they think the sculpture itself is not real, and so on.

It is an open question how we should understand people’s judgments that certain emotions or experiences are “real.” We suggested earlier that one way to understand such judgments could be in terms of the notion of a “true self,” and we sketched out a potential explanation along those lines. But we also noted that researchers disagree about how best to interpret “true self” judgments, and we stated that we were not proposing to take a stand on whether people’s ordinary judgments of realness actually should be understood in terms of this notion. We expect that the best approach to addressing such questions will be to expand the inquiry beyond the concept of true love and explore judgments of realness in other domains, or with respect to other kinds of emotions. That is, instead of just looking at judgments of realness insofar as they are relevant to the concept of true love, one might want to explore more generally why people see certain experiences as “real” and others as “not real” (or “less real”). This is an important issue for further research. 13

However, even in the absence of a fully worked-out account of realness, it seems that we can use the observed link between judgments of realness and judgments of true love to explain certain otherwise puzzling aspects of the ordinary concept of true love. Consider the different examples of true love we sketched out at the beginning of this paper: between the Polish couple and between Robin and Morgan. A remarkable fact about these relationships is that they had very different features, even seeming to be near-opposites. The Polish couple had little in the way of emotional closeness or intimacy, and virtually no romantic passion, yet were extraordinarily committed to the relationship. Robin and Morgan, by contrast, were extremely close emotionally and practically burning with romantic passion, yet ultimately, chose to end the relationship in order to find stability and calm with others. If we assume that the concept of true love is closely linked to judgments of realness, we can begin to see why these apparently radically different relationships may both be seen as examples of true love. Though the two relationships differ when it comes to many of their salient features (intimacy, passion, commitment, and so on), there is another respect in which they are actually deeply similar. In both cases, the love that the people feel for each other seems to be real.

Moreover, the account may help us to understand why people so often disagree about whether a given relationship is an instance of true love. Two people can look at the very same romantic relationship, be possessed of the very same facts about it, and reach opposite conclusions about whether it is an instance of true love. We think realness may also have a role in explaining such disagreements, as we alluded to in the Introduction, and as we will now explore more directly.

3.1. Differences and Disagreements

People often disagree about true love: what it is, whether it exists, who has it, and so on. For a concrete example, consider our age difference vignette (see Appendix ), which concerns a relationship between an older professor and his young undergraduate student. Many people responded that this was clearly a case of true love, while many others responded that it was clearly not a case of true love. Disagreements like this one seem to point to something fundamental about the concept of true love and the role it plays in the way people understand their lives and relationships.

The present findings cannot directly tell us which of the opposing views in such cases is the correct one, but they do provide valuable insight into the nature of such disagreement itself. Imagine a person who accepts that there is something very wrong in the relationship described by the age difference vignette, but who nevertheless maintains that the characters in it are experiencing true love. Now imagine a critic who disagrees with this person, asserting that what the characters feel for each other in the vignette is not true love. In light of the present findings, it seems that there are two distinct ways in which such a critic could argue for her view.

One approach would be to draw on the criteria associated with the ordinary concept of true love. In this first approach, the critic would accept the criteria revealed in the studies reported here, and she would then argue that the case in question doesn’t actually fulfill those criteria. For example, focusing on the realness criterion, she could say: “You may think that they are experiencing something real, but you are suffering from a delusion. No relationship between an older professor and a much younger student—especially one he directly supervises—can be rooted in the kind of realness that is necessary for true love.”

Alternatively, the critic could argue against the criteria themselves. For example, she could argue that the ordinary criteria for applying the concept of true love are themselves flawed, and that we should instead adopt criteria according to which nothing can count as true love without being (sufficiently) good. She might then say: “It may well be that their feelings for each other are real. And I recognize that realness is one of the main criteria we ordinarily use to decide whether something counts as true love. But their relationship is deeply wrong, and for that reason, we should reject any criterion according to which their feelings for one another could nevertheless count as true love.”

In short, there are at least two different ways in which people might disagree about true love. First, they might disagree about whether a particular relationship or experience fulfills the criteria associated with the ordinary concept. And second, they might disagree on a deeper level: they might disagree about the criteria themselves. Let us now take a closer look at each kind of disagreement in turn.

3.1.1. Disagreement about Fulfilling Criteria

The results of the present studies shed at least some light on the sorts of disagreements about true love that are rife in ordinary life. In Study 2, we find considerable disagreement between participants about whether the characters in each vignette were experiencing true love, but most of this disagreement simply mirrored the disagreement they showed on the questions about goodness and realness. Among participants who agreed about those other questions, there was actually relatively little disagreement about whether what the characters had between them was an instance of true love.

These results provide some support for a broader picture of the nature of ordinary disagreements regarding true love. In this picture, most of the disagreement is of the first of the two types described previously. People share an understanding of the criteria something has to fulfill to count as true love, but they disagree about whether individual cases do or do not fulfill these criteria.

To flesh out this picture, we would need a better understanding of the disagreement people show regarding each of the criteria themselves. When it comes to judgments of goodness, this disagreement seems at least relatively straightforward. We can easily imagine a case in which two people agree that the criteria involve a role for goodness but just have radically different views about which things are good. The key question now is whether we can make sense of the idea that an analogous situation might arise when it comes to realness. Can we make sense of the idea that two people might agree that the criteria involve a role for realness but have radically different views about which things are real?

There does seem to be some intuitive sense in which this is possible. To dramatize the point, take the puppy love vignette (see Appendix ). We can imagine one person saying, “What could be more real than the innocent, uncomplicated, uncorrupted love of two youngsters who have nothing but pure affection for one another?” Whereas another might say: “To the contrary, a love that has not endured any struggles, nor been tested by life’s various predicaments, is just kid stuff—it isn’t real in the way required for true love.” Here, the two people seem to have deeply different views about which individual things count as real, but it does not seem that they are just talking past each other. Instead, it seems that they share a certain concept—the concept of realness—and simply disagree about which things fall under that concept.

In short, people have quite different views about which individual things count as “true love,” but the present findings suggest that this is not simply because different people are using that phrase in completely different ways. Rather, it seems that people share certain criteria for the use of this phrase, and are then engaged in a substantive disagreement about which things fulfill those criteria. A key step along the way to developing a better understanding of the nature of that substantive disagreement will be to develop a better understanding of the ordinary concept of realness.

3.1.2. Disagreement about the Criteria Themselves

Suppose that two people disagree, not about whether a given relationship meets some shared criterion for true love, but about whether a given criterion, such as realness, is the right criterion for picking out category members. There are at least two ways in which someone might take issue with the ordinary concept of true love by disagreeing about one or more of its criteria. Specifically, there could be a naturalistic disagreement about the criteria, and there could be a normative disagreement about the criteria.

A naturalistic disagreement would be premised on the belief that there really is such a thing as true love in the word, and that the ordinary concept of true love, in placing so much emphasis on realness, say, does not succeed in uniquely picking it out. A scientific reductionist, for example, might identify true love with some biological process related to reproduction, or a particular brain state, and argue that it is this feature which ought to be central to the concept on grounds of descriptive accuracy. A proponent of this view, then, might then wish to engage in what has been called naturalist conceptual engineering . 14 That is, the proponent might try to promote what they take to be a more accurate or finely discriminating conception of true love and encourage its wider adoption among ordinary people.

A normative disagreement would be premised on a different kind of belief. This would be a moral or sociopolitical belief that the ordinary concept of true love is not desirable in its current form, given certain normative ends. As Haslanger (2012) argues, the operative concept of X may be different from what she calls the “manifest” concept (the concept people explicitly take themselves to be applying when they pick out X); and this in turn may be different from what she calls the “target” concept—the concept people should apply when picking out X, all things considered. 15

To see what a normative disagreement about the concept of true love might look like, let us imagine someone speaking to a troubled friend, perhaps one of the characters in our abuse vignette (see Appendix ). “If your partner abuses you,” we’ll imagine this person saying, “no matter how much you may feel affection for each other … what you have between you is not true love .” Now suppose this was a direct response to the other person saying: “I know the abuse is wrong, but what we have is true love and that is more important than anything else.” We would have two different uses, then, of the same concept that are mutually incompatible.

Suppose that both of these (hypothetically) operative uses were circulating in the language community. Depending on our aims and values, we might think that it would be normatively better —all things considered—if the use that excludes abuse became more intuitive and widely employed, while the use that is compatible with abuse became counterintuitive among most ordinary language users. Supposing that was our goal, we might wish to undertake what Haslanger calls an “ameliorative” project, or what has recently been termed moral conceptual engineering . That is, we might try to promote the first use of true love and encourage its greater uptake among ordinary people.

4. Conclusion

The concept of true love is important. It matters to people’s lives, and it is often cited as a justification for decisions or behaviors that might (otherwise) be seen as extreme or unwarranted. “Why did you leave your spouse of thirty years?” “Because I found true love with someone else.” “Why did you quit your job and move to Europe?” “Because I found true love with someone who lives in Portugal.” People will disagree about whether, or to what extent, such appeals can in fact justify certain acts or choices. And they will disagree about which relationships qualify as true love.

The present findings do not directly resolve these disagreements, but they do shed light on the nature of the disagreements themselves. As we have seen, these findings help us understand the criteria underlying the disagreements found in ordinary life, and they help us understand what we would be seeking to modify if we sought to modify those criteria. Putting this point in a slightly different way: the findings help us understand what we disagree about when we disagree about true love. 16

5. Appendix (Study 2 Vignettes)

5.1. puppy love.

When Jasmine was in sixth grade, she fell head over heels for a boy named Mario. Every day after school, they would take a walk in the park and let their imaginations run wild. Seeing each other was always the highlight of their day. Their bond was solidified during a school trip to France. They would sneak out in the dead of night and explore the streets of Paris together. Near the end of the trip, after a string of exhilarating escapades, they shared their first kiss. It felt so natural, so safe. Simultaneously innocent and totally electric.

Nothing about their relationship was ever complicated. They never had to endure hardships together or make real sacrifices for each other. They never worried about whether they shared the same values or whether their life trajectories were in line. Such things never occurred to them. At that young age, the notions of sexual intimacy and long-term commitment weren’t even on their radar. Just being together in the moment was enough. Everything was so simple and felt so fun and beautiful.

Now Jasmine is an adult, and in a committed relationship with a man named Jim. With Jim, things are not so simple. They care deeply about each other and feel warmly about each other on most days. They support each other through difficult times. But there is the usual mess of adult life to deal with: paying bills, getting along with in-laws, quarreling over little things after a long day at work. When she finds herself exhausted from all the tensions and complexities of her current relationship, Jasmine often thinks about her relationship with Mario from all those years back. She knows it seems silly, but sometimes, she feels as though her relationship with Mario was the only time she was ever really in love. It was pure in a way her adult relationships never were, or even could be.

Jasmine has been in a romantic relationship with Mario for seven years. Mario is tough. It’s part of why she was attracted to him in the first place. His brooding eyes, his physical strength. She knows that he would protect her from danger. When other men objectify her or make suggestive comments, Mario steps in without hesitation, and sends them scampering away at the mere sight of his imposing frame. He is loyal. A man of few words. But when he speaks, it is with intention. He also has deep practical knowledge, a way of being in tune with the environment. When Jasmine and Mario make love, it’s like two parallel universes coming together and they lose themselves in the ecstasy of connection. Jasmine has never felt this alive with another man—a feeling of intensity and fullness that infuses her life with indescribable energy and meaning.

Mario is completely devoted to Jasmine. He has never had eyes for anyone else. He is usually kind and gentle, but sometimes, his emotions get the better of him. He punched a wall in their apartment once, breaking through the plaster (he quickly apologized and then repaired the wall himself). On another occasion, he knocked over a piece of furniture in frustration, causing a piece to crack. One time, Mario even hit Jasmine when he was really angry about something she had said, leaving a scar above one of her eyebrows. At first, she was in shock. She considered leaving him. But she decided to stay when he broke down and told her about his own abusive childhood and agreed to work on his anger.

In time, Jasmine came to think of Mario’s aggressive episodes as somehow bound up with his protective nature. A kind of misdirection of the very strength and decisiveness that made her feel so safe when they weren’t fighting. She even grew to like the little scar above her eyebrow—a reminder of Mario’s ability to overpower her. This makes her feel vulnerable in a way that resonates with something deep inside her. His unpredictable aggression, interrupting long periods of quiet care and companionship, makes her want to surrender herself to him, to give herself over to him completely. There is an ever-present, charged tension between them, part eroticism, part fear, part mutual obsession.

5.3. Age Gap

Mario is a 50-year-old professor at a prestigious university. He recently got to know a very bright 21-year-old undergraduate student from one of his classes named Jasmine. When they first met to discuss her senior thesis research over coffee, they immediately realized just how much chemistry they had, despite their very different ages and life experiences. Throughout his whole career, Mario has always felt distant from other people given his eccentric personality and unusual worldview. Most of his colleagues don’t know what to make of him, but Jasmine seems to understand him on a deeper level.

Everything he says just clicks with her and she appreciates all of his strange idiosyncrasies. Furthermore, Mario is incredibly impressed by Jasmine’s insight. (Her friends have always called her an “old soul” and consider her wise beyond her years.) He often forgets that he is in the presence of an undergraduate student and views her as an equal. He has always fantasized about being with a much younger woman, and Jasmine has always had a thing for older men. Every time they met up, there was sexual tension in the air. One thing led to another, and now they’re in a discreet romantic relationship.

Mario and Jasmine both know that they are violating university policy—especially given Mario’s supervisory role over Jasmine—and they go to great lengths to conceal their relationship from other students, colleagues, and administrators. Ultimately, they feel that whatever might be met with disapproval about their relationship is overshadowed by the level of sync they feel together—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, and physically.

1. David J. Velleman , “Love as a Moral Emotion,” Ethics 109, no. 2 (1999): 338–374 ; W. S. Anglin , Free Will and the Christian Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 20.

2. Eleanor Rosch and Carolyn B. Mervis , “Family Resemblances: Studies in the Internal Structure of Categories,” Cognitive Psychology 7, no. 4 (1975): 573–605 ; Edward E. Smith and Douglas L. Medin , Categories and Concepts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).

3. Sophie Grace Chappell , “Love and Knowledge,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Love , ed. C. Grau and A. Smuts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 8.

4. Arthur Aron and Lori Westbay , “Dimensions of the Prototype of Love,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70, no. 3 (1996): 535–551.

5. Robert J. Sternberg , “A Triangular Theory of Love,” Psychological Review 93, no. 2 (1986): 119–135.

6. Note that this hypothesis is not committed to any specific view about which features are included in the prototype. For example, there are subtle but real differences between the account in Chappell (2018 , see note 3 ) and the account in Aron and Westbay (1996 , see note 4 ), and these accounts thus generate different predictions about which specific qualities of a relationship will most strongly influence people’s judgments about whether the relationship is a prototypical example of love. The hypothesis under discussion here does not itself require taking a position on any of these issues, however. Rather, it says that the features of a relationship that influence people’s prototypical love judgments—whatever those features turn out to be—will be the very same features that influence people’s true love judgments, and that they will do so in the same way and to the same degree. So, although we happen to use the features of love unearthed by Aron and Westbay’s classic empirical work to test this hypothesis, we might just as well have used the features proposed by Chappell, or even other features not included in either account (see, e.g., Carrie Jenkins , What Love Is [New York: Basic Books, 2017] ; Brian D. Earp and Julian Savulescu , “Love’s Dimensions,” in Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships [Redwood, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020] ). The key point is that, if prototypical love and true love are in fact the same concept, then, whatever the effect of a given set of features on judgments about the former, it should be roughly the same as the effect of equivalent features on judgments about the latter.

7. For a critical discussion of love being conceived this way, see John Cottingham , “Love and Religion” in The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Love , ed. C. Grau and A. Smuts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

8. C. S. I. Jenkins , “ ‘Addicted’? To ‘love’?” Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 24, no. 1 (2017): 93–96, pp. 94–95.

9. bell hooks , All about Love: New Visions (New York: Harper, 2000), 22.

10. Simon May , Love: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).

11. See for example, Julian De Freitas and Mina Cikara , “Deep Down My Enemy Is Good: Thinking about the True Self Reduces Intergroup Bias,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 74 (2018): 307–316 ; Andrew G. Christy , Rebecca J. Schlegel , and Andrei Cimpian . “Why Do People Believe in a ‘True Self’? The Role of Essentialist Reasoning about Personal Identity and the Self,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 117, no. 2 (2019): 386–416 ; Nina Strohminger , Joshua Knobe , and George Newman . “The True Self: A Psychological Concept Distinct from the Self.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 12, no. 4 (2017): 551–560.

See Jenkins (2017) , note 8 ; hooks (2000) , note 9 .

13. In particular, it might be helpful to look at judgments of realness insofar as they are related to people’s ordinary judgments of happiness. Existing studies show that people are reluctant to say that an agent is happy when that agent has a morally bad life—see Jonathan Phillips et al., “True Happiness: The Role of Morality in the Folk Concept of Happiness,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 146, no. 2 (2017): 165–181 —and studies find that this tendency is mediated in part by judgments about whether agents actually are happy deep down in their true selves: see George E. Newman , Julian De Freitas , and Joshua Knobe , “Beliefs about the True Self Explain Asymmetries Based on Moral Judgment,” Cognitive Science 39, no. 1 (2015): 96–125. This effect seems likely to be related in some important way to the ones we have been exploring in the present paper. For further discussion, see Jonathan Phillips , Luke Misenheimer , and Joshua Knobe , “The Ordinary Concept of Happiness (And Others Like It),” Emotion Review 3, no. 3 (2011): 320–322.

14. Walter Veit and Heather Browning , “Two Kinds of Conceptual Engineering,” PhilSci Archive (2020), http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/17452

15. Sally Haslanger , Resisting Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Thank you to the editors, Christopher Grau and Aaron Smuts, for pushing the philosophy of love forward with the collection of essays in this volume, and for constructive feedback on an earlier draft of this chapter. Thank you also to Mario Attie Picker, Raja Halwani, Bennett Helm, Hichem Naar, Sven Nyholm, and Joan Ongchoco for helpful critical comments and discussion. Finally, thank you to Alina Simone for helping us craft one of the examples of potential true love.

Aron, Arthur , and Lori Westbay . “ Dimensions of the Prototype of Love. ” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70, no. 3 ( 1996 ): 535–551.

Google Scholar

Chappell, Sophie Grace. “Love and Knowledge.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Love , edited by C. Grau and A. Smuts , 1–19. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018 .

Christy, Andrew G. , Rebecca J. Schlegel , and Andrei Cimpian . “ Why Do People Believe in a ‘True Self’? The Role of Essentialist Reasoning about Personal Identity and the Self. ” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 117, no. 2 ( 2019 ): 386–416.

De Freitas, Julian , and Mina Cikara . “ Deep Down My Enemy Is Good: Thinking about the True Self Reduces Intergroup Bias. ” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 74 ( 2018 ): 307–316.

Earp, Brian D. , and Julian Savulescu . “ Love’s Dimensions. ” In Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationship s, 16–35. Redwood, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020 .

Google Preview

Haslanger, Sally.   Resisting Reality . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012 .

hooks, bell.   All about Love: New Visions . New York: Harper, 2000 .

Jenkins, Carrie.   What Love Is . New York: Basic Books, 2017 .

May, Simon.   Love: A History . New Haven: Yale University Presds, 2013 .

Newman, George E. , Julian De Freitas , and Joshua Knobe . “ Beliefs about the True Self Explain Asymmetries Based on Moral Judgment. ” Cognitive Science 39, no. 1 ( 2015 ): 96–125.

Phillips, Jonathan , Julian De Freitas , Christian Mott , June Gruber , and Joshua Knobe . “ True Happiness: The Role of Morality in the Folk Concept of Happiness. ” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 146, no. 2 ( 2017 ): 165–181.

Phillips, Jonathan , Luke Misenheimer , and Joshua Knobe . “ The Ordinary Concept of Happiness (And Others Like It). ” Emotion Review 3, no. 3 ( 2011 ): 320–322.

Rosch, Eleanor , and Carolyn B. Mervis , “ Family Resemblances: Studies in the Internal Structure of Categories. ” Cognitive Psychology 7, no. 4 ( 1975 ): 573–605.

Smith, Edward E. , and Douglas L. Medin . Categories and Concepts . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981 .

Sternberg, Robert J. “ A Triangular Theory of Love. ” Psychological Review 93, no. 2 ( 1986 ): 119–135.

Strohminger, Nina , Joshua Knobe , and George Newman . “ The True Self: A Psychological Concept Distinct from the Self. ” Perspectives on Psychological Science 12., no. 4 ( 2017 ): 551–560.

Velleman, David J. “ Love as a Moral Emotion. ” Ethics 109, no. 2 ( 1999 ): 338–374.

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This essay focuses on personal love, or the love of particular persons as such. Part of the philosophical task in understanding personal love is to distinguish the various kinds of personal love. For example, the way in which I love my wife is seemingly very different from the way I love my mother, my child, and my friend. This task has typically proceeded hand-in-hand with philosophical analyses of these kinds of personal love, analyses that in part respond to various puzzles about love. Can love be justified? If so, how? What is the value of personal love? What impact does love have on the autonomy of both the lover and the beloved?

1. Preliminary Distinctions

2. love as union, 3. love as robust concern, 4.1 love as appraisal of value, 4.2 love as bestowal of value, 4.3 an intermediate position, 5.1 love as emotion proper, 5.2 love as emotion complex, 6. the value and justification of love, other internet resources, related entries.

In ordinary conversations, we often say things like the following:

• I love chocolate (or skiing).
• I love doing philosophy (or being a father).
• I love my dog (or cat).
• I love my wife (or mother or child or friend).

However, what is meant by ‘love’ differs from case to case. (1) may be understood as meaning merely that I like this thing or activity very much. In (2) the implication is typically that I find engaging in a certain activity or being a certain kind of person to be a part of my identity and so what makes my life worth living; I might just as well say that I value these. By contrast, (3) and (4) seem to indicate a mode of concern that cannot be neatly assimilated to anything else. Thus, we might understand the sort of love at issue in (4) to be, roughly, a matter of caring about another person as the person she is, for her own sake. (Accordingly, (3) may be understood as a kind of deficient mode of the sort of love we typically reserve for persons.) Philosophical accounts of love have focused primarily on the sort of personal love at issue in (4); such personal love will be the focus here (though see Frankfurt (1999) and Jaworska & Wonderly (2017) for attempts to provide a more general account that applies to non-persons as well).

Even within personal love, philosophers from the ancient Greeks on have traditionally distinguished three notions that can properly be called “love”: eros , agape , and philia . It will be useful to distinguish these three and say something about how contemporary discussions typically blur these distinctions (sometimes intentionally so) or use them for other purposes.

‘ Eros ’ originally meant love in the sense of a kind of passionate desire for an object, typically sexual passion (Liddell et al., 1940). Nygren (1953a,b) describes eros as the “‘love of desire,’ or acquisitive love” and therefore as egocentric (1953b, p. 89). Soble (1989b, 1990) similarly describes eros as “selfish” and as a response to the merits of the beloved—especially the beloved’s goodness or beauty. What is evident in Soble’s description of eros is a shift away from the sexual: to love something in the “erosic” sense (to use the term Soble coins) is to love it in a way that, by being responsive to its merits, is dependent on reasons. Such an understanding of eros is encouraged by Plato’s discussion in the Symposium , in which Socrates understands sexual desire to be a deficient response to physical beauty in particular, a response which ought to be developed into a response to the beauty of a person’s soul and, ultimately, into a response to the form, Beauty.

Soble’s intent in understanding eros to be a reason-dependent sort of love is to articulate a sharp contrast with agape , a sort of love that does not respond to the value of its object. ‘ Agape ’ has come, primarily through the Christian tradition, to mean the sort of love God has for us persons, as well as our love for God and, by extension, of our love for each other—a kind of brotherly love. In the paradigm case of God’s love for us, agape is “spontaneous and unmotivated,” revealing not that we merit that love but that God’s nature is love (Nygren 1953b, p. 85). Rather than responding to antecedent value in its object, agape instead is supposed to create value in its object and therefore to initiate our fellowship with God (pp. 87–88). Consequently, Badhwar (2003, p. 58) characterizes agape as “independent of the loved individual’s fundamental characteristics as the particular person she is”; and Soble (1990, p. 5) infers that agape , in contrast to eros , is therefore not reason dependent but is rationally “incomprehensible,” admitting at best of causal or historical explanations. [ 1 ]

Finally, ‘ philia ’ originally meant a kind of affectionate regard or friendly feeling towards not just one’s friends but also possibly towards family members, business partners, and one’s country at large (Liddell et al., 1940; Cooper, 1977). Like eros , philia is generally (but not universally) understood to be responsive to (good) qualities in one’s beloved. This similarity between eros and philia has led Thomas (1987) to wonder whether the only difference between romantic love and friendship is the sexual involvement of the former—and whether that is adequate to account for the real differences we experience. The distinction between eros and philia becomes harder to draw with Soble’s attempt to diminish the importance of the sexual in eros (1990).

Maintaining the distinctions among eros , agape , and philia becomes even more difficult when faced with contemporary theories of love (including romantic love) and friendship. For, as discussed below, some theories of romantic love understand it along the lines of the agape tradition as creating value in the beloved (cf. Section 4.2 ), and other accounts of romantic love treat sexual activity as merely the expression of what otherwise looks very much like friendship.

Given the focus here on personal love, Christian conceptions of God’s love for persons (and vice versa ) will be omitted, and the distinction between eros and philia will be blurred—as it typically is in contemporary accounts. Instead, the focus here will be on these contemporary understandings of love, including romantic love, understood as an attitude we take towards other persons. [ 2 ]

In providing an account of love, philosophical analyses must be careful to distinguish love from other positive attitudes we take towards persons, such as liking. Intuitively, love differs from such attitudes as liking in terms of its “depth,” and the problem is to elucidate the kind of “depth” we intuitively find love to have. Some analyses do this in part by providing thin conceptions of what liking amounts to. Thus, Singer (1991) and Brown (1987) understand liking to be a matter of desiring, an attitude that at best involves its object having only instrumental (and not intrinsic) value. Yet this seems inadequate: surely there are attitudes towards persons intermediate between having a desire with a person as its object and loving the person. I can care about a person for her own sake and not merely instrumentally, and yet such caring does not on its own amount to (non-deficiently) loving her, for it seems I can care about my dog in exactly the same way, a kind of caring which is insufficiently personal for love.

It is more common to distinguish loving from liking via the intuition that the “depth” of love is to be explained in terms of a notion of identification: to love someone is somehow to identify yourself with him, whereas no such notion of identification is involved in liking. As Nussbaum puts it, “The choice between one potential love and another can feel, and be, like a choice of a way of life, a decision to dedicate oneself to these values rather than these” (1990, p. 328); liking clearly does not have this sort of “depth” (see also Helm 2010; Bagley 2015). Whether love involves some kind of identification, and if so exactly how to understand such identification, is a central bone of contention among the various analyses of love. In particular, Whiting (2013) argues that the appeal to a notion of identification distorts our understanding of the sort of motivation love can provide, for taken literally it implies that love motivates through self -interest rather than through the beloved’s interests. Thus, Whiting argues, central to love is the possibility that love takes the lover “outside herself”, potentially forgetting herself in being moved directly by the interests of the beloved. (Of course, we need not take the notion of identification literally in this way: in identifying with one’s beloved, one might have a concern for one’s beloved that is analogous to one’s concern for oneself; see Helm 2010.)

Another common way to distinguish love from other personal attitudes is in terms of a distinctive kind of evaluation, which itself can account for love’s “depth.” Again, whether love essentially involves a distinctive kind of evaluation, and if so how to make sense of that evaluation, is hotly disputed. Closely related to questions of evaluation are questions of justification: can we justify loving or continuing to love a particular person, and if so, how? For those who think the justification of love is possible, it is common to understand such justification in terms of evaluation, and the answers here affect various accounts’ attempts to make sense of the kind of constancy or commitment love seems to involve, as well as the sense in which love is directed at particular individuals.

In what follows, theories of love are tentatively and hesitantly classified into four types: love as union, love as robust concern, love as valuing, and love as an emotion. It should be clear, however, that particular theories classified under one type sometimes also include, without contradiction, ideas central to other types. The types identified here overlap to some extent, and in some cases classifying particular theories may involve excessive pigeonholing. (Such cases are noted below.) Part of the classificatory problem is that many accounts of love are quasi-reductionistic, understanding love in terms of notions like affection, evaluation, attachment, etc., which themselves never get analyzed. Even when these accounts eschew explicitly reductionistic language, very often little attempt is made to show how one such “aspect” of love is conceptually connected to others. As a result, there is no clear and obvious way to classify particular theories, let alone identify what the relevant classes should be.

The union view claims that love consists in the formation of (or the desire to form) some significant kind of union, a “we.” A central task for union theorists, therefore, is to spell out just what such a “we” comes to—whether it is literally a new entity in the world somehow composed of the lover and the beloved, or whether it is merely metaphorical. Variants of this view perhaps go back to Aristotle (cf. Sherman 1993) and can also be found in Montaigne ([E]) and Hegel (1997); contemporary proponents include Solomon (1981, 1988), Scruton (1986), Nozick (1989), Fisher (1990), and Delaney (1996).

Scruton, writing in particular about romantic love, claims that love exists “just so soon as reciprocity becomes community: that is, just so soon as all distinction between my interests and your interests is overcome” (1986, p. 230). The idea is that the union is a union of concern, so that when I act out of that concern it is not for my sake alone or for your sake alone but for our sake. Fisher (1990) holds a similar, but somewhat more moderate view, claiming that love is a partial fusion of the lovers’ cares, concerns, emotional responses, and actions. What is striking about both Scruton and Fisher is the claim that love requires the actual union of the lovers’ concerns, for it thus becomes clear that they conceive of love not so much as an attitude we take towards another but as a relationship: the distinction between your interests and mine genuinely disappears only when we together come to have shared cares, concerns, etc., and my merely having a certain attitude towards you is not enough for love. This provides content to the notion of a “we” as the (metaphorical?) subject of these shared cares and concerns, and as that for whose sake we act.

Solomon (1988) offers a union view as well, though one that tries “to make new sense out of ‘love’ through a literal rather than metaphoric sense of the ‘fusion’ of two souls” (p. 24, cf. Solomon 1981; however, it is unclear exactly what he means by a “soul” here and so how love can be a “literal” fusion of two souls). What Solomon has in mind is the way in which, through love, the lovers redefine their identities as persons in terms of the relationship: “Love is the concentration and the intensive focus of mutual definition on a single individual, subjecting virtually every personal aspect of one’s self to this process” (1988, p. 197). The result is that lovers come to share the interests, roles, virtues, and so on that constitute what formerly was two individual identities but now has become a shared identity, and they do so in part by each allowing the other to play an important role in defining his own identity.

Nozick (1989) offers a union view that differs from those of Scruton, Fisher, and Solomon in that Nozick thinks that what is necessary for love is merely the desire to form a “we,” together with the desire that your beloved reciprocates. Nonetheless, he claims that this “we” is “a new entity in the world…created by a new web of relationships between [the lovers] which makes them no longer separate” (p. 70). In spelling out this web of relationships, Nozick appeals to the lovers “pooling” not only their well-beings, in the sense that the well-being of each is tied up with that of the other, but also their autonomy, in that “each transfers some previous rights to make certain decisions unilaterally into a joint pool” (p. 71). In addition, Nozick claims, the lovers each acquire a new identity as a part of the “we,” a new identity constituted by their (a) wanting to be perceived publicly as a couple, (b) their attending to their pooled well-being, and (c) their accepting a “certain kind of division of labor” (p. 72):

A person in a we might find himself coming across something interesting to read yet leaving it for the other person, not because he himself would not be interested in it but because the other would be more interested, and one of them reading it is sufficient for it to be registered by the wider identity now shared, the we . [ 3 ]

Opponents of the union view have seized on claims like this as excessive: union theorists, they claim, take too literally the ontological commitments of this notion of a “we.” This leads to two specific criticisms of the union view. The first is that union views do away with individual autonomy. Autonomy, it seems, involves a kind of independence on the part of the autonomous agent, such that she is in control over not only what she does but also who she is, as this is constituted by her interests, values, concerns, etc. However, union views, by doing away with a clear distinction between your interests and mine, thereby undermine this sort of independence and so undermine the autonomy of the lovers. If autonomy is a part of the individual’s good, then, on the union view, love is to this extent bad; so much the worse for the union view (Singer 1994; Soble 1997). Moreover, Singer (1994) argues that a necessary part of having your beloved be the object of your love is respect for your beloved as the particular person she is, and this requires respecting her autonomy.

Union theorists have responded to this objection in several ways. Nozick (1989) seems to think of a loss of autonomy in love as a desirable feature of the sort of union lovers can achieve. Fisher (1990), somewhat more reluctantly, claims that the loss of autonomy in love is an acceptable consequence of love. Yet without further argument these claims seem like mere bullet biting. Solomon (1988, pp. 64ff) describes this “tension” between union and autonomy as “the paradox of love.” However, this a view that Soble (1997) derides: merely to call it a paradox, as Solomon does, is not to face up to the problem.

The second criticism involves a substantive view concerning love. Part of what it is to love someone, these opponents say, is to have concern for him for his sake. However, union views make such concern unintelligible and eliminate the possibility of both selfishness and self-sacrifice, for by doing away with the distinction between my interests and your interests they have in effect turned your interests into mine and vice versa (Soble 1997; see also Blum 1980, 1993). Some advocates of union views see this as a point in their favor: we need to explain how it is I can have concern for people other than myself, and the union view apparently does this by understanding your interests to be part of my own. And Delaney, responding to an apparent tension between our desire to be loved unselfishly (for fear of otherwise being exploited) and our desire to be loved for reasons (which presumably are attractive to our lover and hence have a kind of selfish basis), says (1996, p. 346):

Given my view that the romantic ideal is primarily characterized by a desire to achieve a profound consolidation of needs and interests through the formation of a we , I do not think a little selfishness of the sort described should pose a worry to either party.

The objection, however, lies precisely in this attempt to explain my concern for my beloved egoistically. As Whiting (1991, p. 10) puts it, such an attempt “strikes me as unnecessary and potentially objectionable colonization”: in love, I ought to be concerned with my beloved for her sake, and not because I somehow get something out of it. (This can be true whether my concern with my beloved is merely instrumental to my good or whether it is partly constitutive of my good.)

Although Whiting’s and Soble’s criticisms here succeed against the more radical advocates of the union view, they in part fail to acknowledge the kernel of truth to be gleaned from the idea of union. Whiting’s way of formulating the second objection in terms of an unnecessary egoism in part points to a way out: we persons are in part social creatures, and love is one profound mode of that sociality. Indeed, part of the point of union accounts is to make sense of this social dimension: to make sense of a way in which we can sometimes identify ourselves with others not merely in becoming interdependent with them (as Singer 1994, p. 165, suggests, understanding ‘interdependence’ to be a kind of reciprocal benevolence and respect) but rather in making who we are as persons be constituted in part by those we love (cf., e.g., Rorty 1986/1993; Nussbaum 1990).

Along these lines, Friedman (1998), taking her inspiration in part from Delaney (1996), argues that we should understand the sort of union at issue in love to be a kind of federation of selves:

On the federation model, a third unified entity is constituted by the interaction of the lovers, one which involves the lovers acting in concert across a range of conditions and for a range of purposes. This concerted action, however, does not erase the existence of the two lovers as separable and separate agents with continuing possibilities for the exercise of their own respective agencies. [p. 165]

Given that on this view the lovers do not give up their individual identities, there is no principled reason why the union view cannot make sense of the lover’s concern for her beloved for his sake. [ 4 ] Moreover, Friedman argues, once we construe union as federation, we can see that autonomy is not a zero-sum game; rather, love can both directly enhance the autonomy of each and promote the growth of various skills, like realistic and critical self-evaluation, that foster autonomy.

Nonetheless, this federation model is not without its problems—problems that affect other versions of the union view as well. For if the federation (or the “we”, as on Nozick’s view) is understood as a third entity, we need a clearer account than has been given of its ontological status and how it comes to be. Relevant here is the literature on shared intention and plural subjects. Gilbert (1989, 1996, 2000) has argued that we should take quite seriously the existence of a plural subject as an entity over and above its constituent members. Others, such as Tuomela (1984, 1995), Searle (1990), and Bratman (1999) are more cautious, treating such talk of “us” having an intention as metaphorical.

As this criticism of the union view indicates, many find caring about your beloved for her sake to be a part of what it is to love her. The robust concern view of love takes this to be the central and defining feature of love (cf. Taylor 1976; Newton-Smith 1989; Soble 1990, 1997; LaFollette 1996; Frankfurt 1999; White 2001). As Taylor puts it:

To summarize: if x loves y then x wants to benefit and be with y etc., and he has these wants (or at least some of them) because he believes y has some determinate characteristics ψ in virtue of which he thinks it worth while to benefit and be with y . He regards satisfaction of these wants as an end and not as a means towards some other end. [p. 157]

In conceiving of my love for you as constituted by my concern for you for your sake, the robust concern view rejects the idea, central to the union view, that love is to be understood in terms of the (literal or metaphorical) creation of a “we”: I am the one who has this concern for you, though it is nonetheless disinterested and so not egoistic insofar as it is for your sake rather than for my own. [ 5 ]

At the heart of the robust concern view is the idea that love “is neither affective nor cognitive. It is volitional” (Frankfurt 1999, p. 129; see also Martin 2015). Frankfurt continues:

That a person cares about or that he loves something has less to do with how things make him feel, or with his opinions about them, than with the more or less stable motivational structures that shape his preferences and that guide and limit his conduct.

This account analyzes caring about someone for her sake as a matter of being motivated in certain ways, in part as a response to what happens to one’s beloved. Of course, to understand love in terms of desires is not to leave other emotional responses out in the cold, for these emotions should be understood as consequences of desires. Thus, just as I can be emotionally crushed when one of my strong desires is disappointed, so too I can be emotionally crushed when things similarly go badly for my beloved. In this way Frankfurt (1999) tacitly, and White (2001) more explicitly, acknowledge the way in which my caring for my beloved for her sake results in my identity being transformed through her influence insofar as I become vulnerable to things that happen to her.

Not all robust concern theorists seem to accept this line, however; in particular, Taylor (1976) and Soble (1990) seem to have a strongly individualistic conception of persons that prevents my identity being bound up with my beloved in this sort of way, a kind of view that may seem to undermine the intuitive “depth” that love seems to have. (For more on this point, see Rorty 1986/1993.) In the middle is Stump (2006), who follows Aquinas in understanding love to involve not only the desire for your beloved’s well-being but also a desire for a certain kind of relationship with your beloved—as a parent or spouse or sibling or priest or friend, for example—a relationship within which you share yourself with and connect yourself to your beloved. [ 6 ]

One source of worry about the robust concern view is that it involves too passive an understanding of one’s beloved (Ebels-Duggan 2008). The thought is that on the robust concern view the lover merely tries to discover what the beloved’s well-being consists in and then acts to promote that, potentially by thwarting the beloved’s own efforts when the lover thinks those efforts would harm her well-being. This, however, would be disrespectful and demeaning, not the sort of attitude that love is. What robust concern views seem to miss, Ebels-Duggan suggests, is the way love involves interacting agents, each with a capacity for autonomy the recognition and engagement with which is an essential part of love. In response, advocates of the robust concern view might point out that promoting someone’s well-being normally requires promoting her autonomy (though they may maintain that this need not always be true: that paternalism towards a beloved can sometimes be justified and appropriate as an expression of one’s love). Moreover, we might plausibly think, it is only through the exercise of one’s autonomy that one can define one’s own well-being as a person, so that a lover’s failure to respect the beloved’s autonomy would be a failure to promote her well-being and therefore not an expression of love, contrary to what Ebels-Duggan suggests. Consequently, it might seem, robust concern views can counter this objection by offering an enriched conception of what it is to be a person and so of the well-being of persons.

Another source of worry is that the robust concern view offers too thin a conception of love. By emphasizing robust concern, this view understands other features we think characteristic of love, such as one’s emotional responsiveness to one’s beloved, to be the effects of that concern rather than constituents of it. Thus Velleman (1999) argues that robust concern views, by understanding love merely as a matter of aiming at a particular end (viz., the welfare of one’s beloved), understand love to be merely conative. However, he claims, love can have nothing to do with desires, offering as a counterexample the possibility of loving a troublemaking relation whom you do not want to be with, whose well being you do not want to promote, etc. Similarly, Badhwar (2003) argues that such a “teleological” view of love makes it mysterious how “we can continue to love someone long after death has taken him beyond harm or benefit” (p. 46). Moreover Badhwar argues, if love is essentially a desire, then it implies that we lack something; yet love does not imply this and, indeed, can be felt most strongly at times when we feel our lives most complete and lacking in nothing. Consequently, Velleman and Badhwar conclude, love need not involve any desire or concern for the well-being of one’s beloved.

This conclusion, however, seems too hasty, for such examples can be accommodated within the robust concern view. Thus, the concern for your relative in Velleman’s example can be understood to be present but swamped by other, more powerful desires to avoid him. Indeed, keeping the idea that you want to some degree to benefit him, an idea Velleman rejects, seems to be essential to understanding the conceptual tension between loving someone and not wanting to help him, a tension Velleman does not fully acknowledge. Similarly, continued love for someone who has died can be understood on the robust concern view as parasitic on the former love you had for him when he was still alive: your desires to benefit him get transformed, through your subsequent understanding of the impossibility of doing so, into wishes. [ 7 ] Finally, the idea of concern for your beloved’s well-being need not imply the idea that you lack something, for such concern can be understood in terms of the disposition to be vigilant for occasions when you can come to his aid and consequently to have the relevant occurrent desires. All of this seems fully compatible with the robust concern view.

One might also question whether Velleman and Badhwar make proper use of their examples of loving your meddlesome relation or someone who has died. For although we can understand these as genuine cases of love, they are nonetheless deficient cases and ought therefore be understood as parasitic on the standard cases. Readily to accommodate such deficient cases of love into a philosophical analysis as being on a par with paradigm cases, and to do so without some special justification, is dubious.

Nonetheless, the robust concern view as it stands does not seem properly able to account for the intuitive “depth” of love and so does not seem properly to distinguish loving from liking. Although, as noted above, the robust concern view can begin to make some sense of the way in which the lover’s identity is altered by the beloved, it understands this only an effect of love, and not as a central part of what love consists in.

This vague thought is nicely developed by Wonderly (2017), who emphasizes that in addition to the sort of disinterested concern for another that is central to robust-concern accounts of love, an essential part of at least romantic love is the idea that in loving someone I must find them to be not merely important for their own sake but also important to me . Wonderly (2017) fleshes out what this “importance to me” involves in terms of the idea of attachment (developed in Wonderly 2016) that she argues can make sense of the intimacy and depth of love from within what remains fundamentally a robust-concern account. [ 8 ]

4. Love as Valuing

A third kind of view of love understands love to be a distinctive mode of valuing a person. As the distinction between eros and agape in Section 1 indicates, there are at least two ways to construe this in terms of whether the lover values the beloved because she is valuable, or whether the beloved comes to be valuable to the lover as a result of her loving him. The former view, which understands the lover as appraising the value of the beloved in loving him, is the topic of Section 4.1 , whereas the latter view, which understands her as bestowing value on him, will be discussed in Section 4.2 .

Velleman (1999, 2008) offers an appraisal view of love, understanding love to be fundamentally a matter of acknowledging and responding in a distinctive way to the value of the beloved. (For a very different appraisal view of love, see Kolodny 2003.) Understanding this more fully requires understanding both the kind of value of the beloved to which one responds and the distinctive kind of response to such value that love is. Nonetheless, it should be clear that what makes an account be an appraisal view of love is not the mere fact that love is understood to involve appraisal; many other accounts do so, and it is typical of robust concern accounts, for example (cf. the quote from Taylor above , Section 3 ). Rather, appraisal views are distinctive in understanding love to consist in that appraisal.

In articulating the kind of value love involves, Velleman, following Kant, distinguishes dignity from price. To have a price , as the economic metaphor suggests, is to have a value that can be compared to the value of other things with prices, such that it is intelligible to exchange without loss items of the same value. By contrast, to have dignity is to have a value such that comparisons of relative value become meaningless. Material goods are normally understood to have prices, but we persons have dignity: no substitution of one person for another can preserve exactly the same value, for something of incomparable worth would be lost (and gained) in such a substitution.

On this Kantian view, our dignity as persons consists in our rational nature: our capacity both to be actuated by reasons that we autonomously provide ourselves in setting our own ends and to respond appropriately to the intrinsic values we discover in the world. Consequently, one important way in which we exercise our rational natures is to respond with respect to the dignity of other persons (a dignity that consists in part in their capacity for respect): respect just is the required minimal response to the dignity of persons. What makes a response to a person be that of respect, Velleman claims, still following Kant, is that it “arrests our self-love” and thereby prevents us from treating him as a means to our ends (p. 360).

Given this, Velleman claims that love is similarly a response to the dignity of persons, and as such it is the dignity of the object of our love that justifies that love. However, love and respect are different kinds of responses to the same value. For love arrests not our self-love but rather

our tendencies toward emotional self-protection from another person, tendencies to draw ourselves in and close ourselves off from being affected by him. Love disarms our emotional defenses; it makes us vulnerable to the other. [1999, p. 361]

This means that the concern, attraction, sympathy, etc. that we normally associate with love are not constituents of love but are rather its normal effects, and love can remain without them (as in the case of the love for a meddlesome relative one cannot stand being around). Moreover, this provides Velleman with a clear account of the intuitive “depth” of love: it is essentially a response to persons as such, and to say that you love your dog is therefore to be confused.

Of course, we do not respond with love to the dignity of every person we meet, nor are we somehow required to: love, as the disarming of our emotional defenses in a way that makes us especially vulnerable to another, is the optional maximal response to others’ dignity. What, then, explains the selectivity of love—why I love some people and not others? The answer lies in the contingent fit between the way some people behaviorally express their dignity as persons and the way I happen to respond to those expressions by becoming emotionally vulnerable to them. The right sort of fit makes someone “lovable” by me (1999, p. 372), and my responding with love in these cases is a matter of my “really seeing” this person in a way that I fail to do with others who do not fit with me in this way. By ‘lovable’ here Velleman seems to mean able to be loved, not worthy of being loved, for nothing Velleman says here speaks to a question about the justification of my loving this person rather than that. Rather, what he offers is an explanation of the selectivity of my love, an explanation that as a matter of fact makes my response be that of love rather than mere respect.

This understanding of the selectivity of love as something that can be explained but not justified is potentially troubling. For we ordinarily think we can justify not only my loving you rather than someone else but also and more importantly the constancy of my love: my continuing to love you even as you change in certain fundamental ways (but not others). As Delaney (1996, p. 347) puts the worry about constancy:

while you seem to want it to be true that, were you to become a schmuck, your lover would continue to love you,…you also want it to be the case that your lover would never love a schmuck.

The issue here is not merely that we can offer explanations of the selectivity of my love, of why I do not love schmucks; rather, at issue is the discernment of love, of loving and continuing to love for good reasons as well as of ceasing to love for good reasons. To have these good reasons seems to involve attributing different values to you now rather than formerly or rather than to someone else, yet this is precisely what Velleman denies is the case in making the distinction between love and respect the way he does.

It is also questionable whether Velleman can even explain the selectivity of love in terms of the “fit” between your expressions and my sensitivities. For the relevant sensitivities on my part are emotional sensitivities: the lowering of my emotional defenses and so becoming emotionally vulnerable to you. Thus, I become vulnerable to the harms (or goods) that befall you and so sympathetically feel your pain (or joy). Such emotions are themselves assessable for warrant, and now we can ask why my disappointment that you lost the race is warranted, but my being disappointed that a mere stranger lost would not be warranted. The intuitive answer is that I love you but not him. However, this answer is unavailable to Velleman, because he thinks that what makes my response to your dignity that of love rather than respect is precisely that I feel such emotions, and to appeal to my love in explaining the emotions therefore seems viciously circular.

Although these problems are specific to Velleman’s account, the difficulty can be generalized to any appraisal account of love (such as that offered in Kolodny 2003). For if love is an appraisal, it needs to be distinguished from other forms of appraisal, including our evaluative judgments. On the one hand, to try to distinguish love as an appraisal from other appraisals in terms of love’s having certain effects on our emotional and motivational life (as on Velleman’s account) is unsatisfying because it ignores part of what needs to be explained: why the appraisal of love has these effects and yet judgments with the same evaluative content do not. Indeed, this question is crucial if we are to understand the intuitive “depth” of love, for without an answer to this question we do not understand why love should have the kind of centrality in our lives it manifestly does. [ 9 ] On the other hand, to bundle this emotional component into the appraisal itself would be to turn the view into either the robust concern view ( Section 3 ) or a variant of the emotion view ( Section 5.1 ).

In contrast to Velleman, Singer (1991, 1994, 2009) understands love to be fundamentally a matter of bestowing value on the beloved. To bestow value on another is to project a kind of intrinsic value onto him. Indeed, this fact about love is supposed to distinguish love from liking: “Love is an attitude with no clear objective,” whereas liking is inherently teleological (1991, p. 272). As such, there are no standards of correctness for bestowing such value, and this is how love differs from other personal attitudes like gratitude, generosity, and condescension: “love…confers importance no matter what the object is worth” (p. 273). Consequently, Singer thinks, love is not an attitude that can be justified in any way.

What is it, exactly, to bestow this kind of value on someone? It is, Singer says, a kind of attachment and commitment to the beloved, in which one comes to treat him as an end in himself and so to respond to his ends, interests, concerns, etc. as having value for their own sake. This means in part that the bestowal of value reveals itself “by caring about the needs and interests of the beloved, by wishing to benefit or protect her, by delighting in her achievements,” etc. (p. 270). This sounds very much like the robust concern view, yet the bestowal view differs in understanding such robust concern to be the effect of the bestowal of value that is love rather than itself what constitutes love: in bestowing value on my beloved, I make him be valuable in such a way that I ought to respond with robust concern.

For it to be intelligible that I have bestowed value on someone, I must therefore respond appropriately to him as valuable, and this requires having some sense of what his well-being is and of what affects that well-being positively or negatively. Yet having this sense requires in turn knowing what his strengths and deficiencies are, and this is a matter of appraising him in various ways. Bestowal thus presupposes a kind of appraisal, as a way of “really seeing” the beloved and attending to him. Nonetheless, Singer claims, it is the bestowal that is primary for understanding what love consists in: the appraisal is required only so that the commitment to one’s beloved and his value as thus bestowed has practical import and is not “a blind submission to some unknown being” (1991, p. 272; see also Singer 1994, pp. 139ff).

Singer is walking a tightrope in trying to make room for appraisal in his account of love. Insofar as the account is fundamentally a bestowal account, Singer claims that love cannot be justified, that we bestow the relevant kind of value “gratuitously.” This suggests that love is blind, that it does not matter what our beloved is like, which seems patently false. Singer tries to avoid this conclusion by appealing to the role of appraisal: it is only because we appraise another as having certain virtues and vices that we come to bestow value on him. Yet the “because” here, since it cannot justify the bestowal, is at best a kind of contingent causal explanation. [ 10 ] In this respect, Singer’s account of the selectivity of love is much the same as Velleman’s, and it is liable to the same criticism: it makes unintelligible the way in which our love can be discerning for better or worse reasons. Indeed, this failure to make sense of the idea that love can be justified is a problem for any bestowal view. For either (a) a bestowal itself cannot be justified (as on Singer’s account), in which case the justification of love is impossible, or (b) a bestowal can be justified, in which case it is hard to make sense of value as being bestowed rather than there antecedently in the object as the grounds of that “bestowal.”

More generally, a proponent of the bestowal view needs to be much clearer than Singer is in articulating precisely what a bestowal is. What is the value that I create in a bestowal, and how can my bestowal create it? On a crude Humean view, the answer might be that the value is something projected onto the world through my pro-attitudes, like desire. Yet such a view would be inadequate, since the projected value, being relative to a particular individual, would do no theoretical work, and the account would essentially be a variant of the robust concern view. Moreover, in providing a bestowal account of love, care is needed to distinguish love from other personal attitudes such as admiration and respect: do these other attitudes involve bestowal? If so, how does the bestowal in these cases differ from the bestowal of love? If not, why not, and what is so special about love that requires a fundamentally different evaluative attitude than admiration and respect?

Nonetheless, there is a kernel of truth in the bestowal view: there is surely something right about the idea that love is creative and not merely a response to antecedent value, and accounts of love that understand the kind of evaluation implicit in love merely in terms of appraisal seem to be missing something. Precisely what may be missed will be discussed below in Section 6 .

Perhaps there is room for an understanding of love and its relation to value that is intermediate between appraisal and bestowal accounts. After all, if we think of appraisal as something like perception, a matter of responding to what is out there in the world, and of bestowal as something like action, a matter of doing something and creating something, we should recognize that the responsiveness central to appraisal may itself depend on our active, creative choices. Thus, just as we must recognize that ordinary perception depends on our actively directing our attention and deploying concepts, interpretations, and even arguments in order to perceive things accurately, so too we might think our vision of our beloved’s valuable properties that is love also depends on our actively attending to and interpreting him. Something like this is Jollimore’s view (2011). According to Jollimore, in loving someone we actively attend to his valuable properties in a way that we take to provide us with reasons to treat him preferentially. Although we may acknowledge that others might have such properties even to a greater degree than our beloved does, we do not attend to and appreciate such properties in others in the same way we do those in our beloveds; indeed, we find our appreciation of our beloved’s valuable properties to “silence” our similar appreciation of those in others. (In this way, Jollimore thinks, we can solve the problem of fungibility, discussed below in Section 6 .) Likewise, in perceiving our beloved’s actions and character, we do so through the lens of such an appreciation, which will tend as to “silence” interpretations inconsistent with that appreciation. In this way, love involves finding one’s beloved to be valuable in a way that involves elements of both appraisal (insofar as one must thereby be responsive to valuable properties one’s beloved really has) and bestowal (insofar as through one’s attention and committed appreciation of these properties they come to have special significance for one).

One might object that this conception of love as silencing the special value of others or to negative interpretations of our beloveds is irrational in a way that love is not. For, it might seem, such “silencing” is merely a matter of our blinding ourselves to how things really are. Yet Jollimore claims that this sense in which love is blind is not objectionable, for (a) we can still intellectually recognize the things that love’s vision silences, and (b) there really is no impartial perspective we can take on the values things have, and love is one appropriate sort of partial perspective from which the value of persons can be manifest. Nonetheless, one might wonder about whether that perspective of love itself can be distorted and what the norms are in terms of which such distortions are intelligible. Furthermore, it may seem that Jollimore’s attempt to reconcile appraisal and bestowal fails to appreciate the underlying metaphysical difficulty: appraisal is a response to value that is antecedently there, whereas bestowal is the creation of value that was not antecedently there. Consequently, it might seem, appraisal and bestowal are mutually exclusive and cannot be reconciled in the way Jollimore hopes.

Whereas Jollimore tries to combine separate elements of appraisal and of bestowal in a single account, Helm (2010) and Bagley (2015) offer accounts that reject the metaphysical presupposition that values must be either prior to love (as with appraisal) or posterior to love (as with bestowal), instead understanding the love and the values to emerge simultaneously. Thus, Helm presents a detailed account of valuing in terms of the emotions, arguing that while we can understand individual emotions as appraisals , responding to values already their in their objects, these values are bestowed on those objects via broad, holistic patterns of emotions. How this amounts to an account of love will be discussed in Section 5.2 , below. Bagley (2015) instead appeals to a metaphor of improvisation, arguing that just as jazz musicians jointly make determinate the content of their musical ideas through on-going processes of their expression, so too lovers jointly engage in “deep improvisation”, thereby working out of their values and identities through the on-going process of living their lives together. These values are thus something the lovers jointly construct through the process of recognizing and responding to those very values. To love someone is thus to engage with them as partners in such “deep improvisation”. (This account is similar to Helm (2008, 2010)’s account of plural agency, which he uses to provide an account of friendship and other loving relationships; see the discussion of shared activity in the entry on friendship .)

5. Emotion Views

Given these problems with the accounts of love as valuing, perhaps we should turn to the emotions. For emotions just are responses to objects that combine evaluation, motivation, and a kind of phenomenology, all central features of the attitude of love.

Many accounts of love claim that it is an emotion; these include: Wollheim 1984, Rorty 1986/1993, Brown 1987, Hamlyn 1989, Baier 1991, and Badhwar 2003. [ 11 ] Thus, Hamlyn (1989, p. 219) says:

It would not be a plausible move to defend any theory of the emotions to which love and hate seemed exceptions by saying that love and hate are after all not emotions. I have heard this said, but it does seem to me a desperate move to make. If love and hate are not emotions what is?

The difficulty with this claim, as Rorty (1980) argues, is that the word, ‘emotion,’ does not seem to pick out a homogeneous collection of mental states, and so various theories claiming that love is an emotion mean very different things. Consequently, what are here labeled “emotion views” are divided into those that understand love to be a particular kind of evaluative-cum-motivational response to an object, whether that response is merely occurrent or dispositional (‘emotions proper,’ see Section 5.1 , below), and those that understand love to involve a collection of related and interconnected emotions proper (‘emotion complexes,’ see Section 5.2 , below).

An emotion proper is a kind of “evaluative-cum-motivational response to an object”; what does this mean? Emotions are generally understood to have several objects. The target of an emotion is that at which the emotion is directed: if I am afraid or angry at you, then you are the target. In responding to you with fear or anger, I am implicitly evaluating you in a particular way, and this evaluation—called the formal object —is the kind of evaluation of the target that is distinctive of a particular emotion type. Thus, in fearing you, I implicitly evaluate you as somehow dangerous, whereas in being angry at you I implicitly evaluate you as somehow offensive. Yet emotions are not merely evaluations of their targets; they in part motivate us to behave in certain ways, both rationally (by motivating action to avoid the danger) and arationally (via certain characteristic expressions, such as slamming a door out of anger). Moreover, emotions are generally understood to involve a phenomenological component, though just how to understand the characteristic “feel” of an emotion and its relation to the evaluation and motivation is hotly disputed. Finally, emotions are typically understood to be passions: responses that we feel imposed on us as if from the outside, rather than anything we actively do. (For more on the philosophy of emotions, see entry on emotion .)

What then are we saying when we say that love is an emotion proper? According to Brown (1987, p. 14), emotions as occurrent mental states are “abnormal bodily changes caused by the agent’s evaluation or appraisal of some object or situation that the agent believes to be of concern to him or her.” He spells this out by saying that in love, we “cherish” the person for having “a particular complex of instantiated qualities” that is “open-ended” so that we can continue to love the person even as she changes over time (pp. 106–7). These qualities, which include historical and relational qualities, are evaluated in love as worthwhile. [ 12 ] All of this seems aimed at spelling out what love’s formal object is, a task that is fundamental to understanding love as an emotion proper. Thus, Brown seems to say that love’s formal object is just being worthwhile (or, given his examples, perhaps: worthwhile as a person), and he resists being any more specific than this in order to preserve the open-endedness of love. Hamlyn (1989) offers a similar account, saying (p. 228):

With love the difficulty is to find anything of this kind [i.e., a formal object] which is uniquely appropriate to love. My thesis is that there is nothing of this kind that must be so, and that this differentiates it and hate from the other emotions.

Hamlyn goes on to suggest that love and hate might be primordial emotions, a kind of positive or negative “feeling towards,” presupposed by all other emotions. [ 13 ]

The trouble with these accounts of love as an emotion proper is that they provide too thin a conception of love. In Hamlyn’s case, love is conceived as a fairly generic pro-attitude, rather than as the specific kind of distinctively personal attitude discussed here. In Brown’s case, spelling out the formal object of love as simply being worthwhile (as a person) fails to distinguish love from other evaluative responses like admiration and respect. Part of the problem seems to be the rather simple account of what an emotion is that Brown and Hamlyn use as their starting point: if love is an emotion, then the understanding of what an emotion is must be enriched considerably to accommodate love. Yet it is not at all clear whether the idea of an “emotion proper” can be adequately enriched so as to do so. As Pismenny & Prinz (2017) point out, love seems to be too varied both in its ground and in the sort of experience it involves to be capturable by a single emotion.

The emotion complex view, which understands love to be a complex emotional attitude towards another person, may initially seem to hold out great promise to overcome the problems of alternative types of views. By articulating the emotional interconnections between persons, it could offer a satisfying account of the “depth” of love without the excesses of the union view and without the overly narrow teleological focus of the robust concern view; and because these emotional interconnections are themselves evaluations, it could offer an understanding of love as simultaneously evaluative, without needing to specify a single formal object of love. However, the devil is in the details.

Rorty (1986/1993) does not try to present a complete account of love; rather, she focuses on the idea that “relational psychological attitudes” which, like love, essentially involve emotional and desiderative responses, exhibit historicity : “they arise from, and are shaped by, dynamic interactions between a subject and an object” (p. 73). In part this means that what makes an attitude be one of love is not the presence of a state that we can point to at a particular time within the lover; rather, love is to be “identified by a characteristic narrative history” (p. 75). Moreover, Rorty argues, the historicity of love involves the lover’s being permanently transformed by loving who he does.

Baier (1991), seeming to pick up on this understanding of love as exhibiting historicity, says (p. 444):

Love is not just an emotion people feel toward other people, but also a complex tying together of the emotions that two or a few more people have; it is a special form of emotional interdependence.

To a certain extent, such emotional interdependence involves feeling sympathetic emotions, so that, for example, I feel disappointed and frustrated on behalf of my beloved when she fails, and joyful when she succeeds. However, Baier insists, love is “more than just the duplication of the emotion of each in a sympathetic echo in the other” (p. 442); the emotional interdependence of the lovers involves also appropriate follow-up responses to the emotional predicaments of your beloved. Two examples Baier gives (pp. 443–44) are a feeling of “mischievous delight” at your beloved’s temporary bafflement, and amusement at her embarrassment. The idea is that in a loving relationship your beloved gives you permission to feel such emotions when no one else is permitted to do so, and a condition of her granting you that permission is that you feel these emotions “tenderly.” Moreover, you ought to respond emotionally to your beloved’s emotional responses to you: by feeling hurt when she is indifferent to you, for example. All of these foster the sort of emotional interdependence Baier is after—a kind of intimacy you have with your beloved.

Badhwar (2003, p. 46) similarly understands love to be a matter of “one’s overall emotional orientation towards a person—the complex of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings”; as such, love is a matter of having a certain “character structure.” Central to this complex emotional orientation, Badhwar thinks, is what she calls the “look of love”: “an ongoing [emotional] affirmation of the loved object as worthy of existence…for her own sake” (p. 44), an affirmation that involves taking pleasure in your beloved’s well-being. Moreover, Badhwar claims, the look of love also provides to the beloved reliable testimony concerning the quality of the beloved’s character and actions (p. 57).

There is surely something very right about the idea that love, as an attitude central to deeply personal relationships, should not be understood as a state that can simply come and go. Rather, as the emotion complex view insists, the complexity of love is to be found in the historical patterns of one’s emotional responsiveness to one’s beloved—a pattern that also projects into the future. Indeed, as suggested above, the kind of emotional interdependence that results from this complex pattern can seem to account for the intuitive “depth” of love as fully interwoven into one’s emotional sense of oneself. And it seems to make some headway in understanding the complex phenomenology of love: love can at times be a matter of intense pleasure in the presence of one’s beloved, yet it can at other times involve frustration, exasperation, anger, and hurt as a manifestation of the complexities and depth of the relationships it fosters.

This understanding of love as constituted by a history of emotional interdependence enables emotion complex views to say something interesting about the impact love has on the lover’s identity. This is partly Rorty’s point (1986/1993) in her discussion of the historicity of love ( above ). Thus, she argues, one important feature of such historicity is that love is “ dynamically permeable ” in that the lover is continually “changed by loving” such that these changes “tend to ramify through a person’s character” (p. 77). Through such dynamic permeability, love transforms the identity of the lover in a way that can sometimes foster the continuity of the love, as each lover continually changes in response to the changes in the other. [ 14 ] Indeed, Rorty concludes, love should be understood in terms of “a characteristic narrative history” (p. 75) that results from such dynamic permeability. It should be clear, however, that the mere fact of dynamic permeability need not result in the love’s continuing: nothing about the dynamics of a relationship requires that the characteristic narrative history project into the future, and such permeability can therefore lead to the dissolution of the love. Love is therefore risky—indeed, all the more risky because of the way the identity of the lover is defined in part through the love. The loss of a love can therefore make one feel no longer oneself in ways poignantly described by Nussbaum (1990).

By focusing on such emotionally complex histories, emotion complex views differ from most alternative accounts of love. For alternative accounts tend to view love as a kind of attitude we take toward our beloveds, something we can analyze simply in terms of our mental state at the moment. [ 15 ] By ignoring this historical dimension of love in providing an account of what love is, alternative accounts have a hard time providing either satisfying accounts of the sense in which our identities as person are at stake in loving another or satisfactory solutions to problems concerning how love is to be justified (cf. Section 6 , especially the discussion of fungibility ).

Nonetheless, some questions remain. If love is to be understood as an emotion complex, we need a much more explicit account of the pattern at issue here: what ties all of these emotional responses together into a single thing, namely love? Baier and Badhwar seem content to provide interesting and insightful examples of this pattern, but that does not seem to be enough. For example, what connects my amusement at my beloved’s embarrassment to other emotions like my joy on his behalf when he succeeds? Why shouldn’t my amusement at his embarrassment be understood instead as a somewhat cruel case of schadenfreude and so as antithetical to, and disconnected from, love? Moreover, as Naar (2013) notes, we need a principled account of when such historical patterns are disrupted in such a way as to end the love and when they are not. Do I stop loving when, in the midst of clinical depression, I lose my normal pattern of emotional concern?

Presumably the answer requires returning to the historicity of love: it all depends on the historical details of the relationship my beloved and I have forged. Some loves develop so that the intimacy within the relationship is such as to allow for tender, teasing responses to each other, whereas other loves may not. The historical details, together with the lovers’ understanding of their relationship, presumably determine which emotional responses belong to the pattern constitutive of love and which do not. However, this answer so far is inadequate: not just any historical relationship involving emotional interdependence is a loving relationship, and we need a principled way of distinguishing loving relationships from other relational evaluative attitudes: precisely what is the characteristic narrative history that is characteristic of love?

Helm (2009, 2010) tries to answer some of these questions in presenting an account of love as intimate identification. To love another, Helm claims, is to care about him as the particular person he is and so, other things being equal, to value the things he values. Insofar as a person’s (structured) set of values—his sense of the kind of life worth his living—constitutes his identity as a person, such sharing of values amounts to sharing his identity, which sounds very much like union accounts of love. However, Helm is careful to understand such sharing of values as for the sake of the beloved (as robust concern accounts insist), and he spells this all out in terms of patterns of emotions. Thus, Helm claims, all emotions have not only a target and a formal object (as indicated above), but also a focus : a background object the subject cares about in terms of which the implicit evaluation of the target is made intelligible. (For example, if I am afraid of the approaching hailstorm, I thereby evaluate it as dangerous, and what explains this evaluation is the way that hailstorm bears on my vegetable garden, which I care about; my garden, therefore, is the focus of my fear.) Moreover, emotions normally come in patterns with a common focus: fearing the hailstorm is normally connected to other emotions as being relieved when it passes by harmlessly (or disappointed or sad when it does not), being angry at the rabbits for killing the spinach, delighted at the productivity of the tomato plants, etc. Helm argues that a projectible pattern of such emotions with a common focus constitute caring about that focus. Consequently, we might say along the lines of Section 4.3 , while particular emotions appraise events in the world as having certain evaluative properties, their having these properties is partly bestowed on them by the overall patterns of emotions.

Helm identifies some emotions as person-focused emotions : emotions like pride and shame that essentially take persons as their focuses, for these emotions implicitly evaluate in terms of the target’s bearing on the quality of life of the person that is their focus. To exhibit a pattern of such emotions focused on oneself and subfocused on being a mother, for example, is to care about the place being a mother has in the kind of life you find worth living—in your identity as a person; to care in this way is to value being a mother as a part of your concern for your own identity. Likewise, to exhibit a projectible pattern of such emotions focused on someone else and subfocused on his being a father is to value this as a part of your concern for his identity—to value it for his sake. Such sharing of another’s values for his sake, which, Helm argues, essentially involves trust, respect, and affection, amounts to intimate identification with him, and such intimate identification just is love. Thus, Helm tries to provide an account of love that is grounded in an explicit account of caring (and caring about something for the sake of someone else) that makes room for the intuitive “depth” of love through intimate identification.

Jaworska & Wonderly (2017) argue that Helm’s construal of intimacy as intimate identification is too demanding. Rather, they argue, the sort of intimacy that distinguishes love from mere caring is one that involves a kind of emotional vulnerability in which things going well or poorly for one’s beloved are directly connected not merely to one’s well-being, but to one’s ability to flourish. This connection, they argue, runs through the lover’s self-understanding and the place the beloved has in the lover’s sense of a meaningful life.

Why do we love? It has been suggested above that any account of love needs to be able to answer some such justificatory question. Although the issue of the justification of love is important on its own, it is also important for the implications it has for understanding more clearly the precise object of love: how can we make sense of the intuitions not only that we love the individuals themselves rather than their properties, but also that my beloved is not fungible—that no one could simply take her place without loss. Different theories approach these questions in different ways, but, as will become clear below, the question of justification is primary.

One way to understand the question of why we love is as asking for what the value of love is: what do we get out of it? One kind of answer, which has its roots in Aristotle, is that having loving relationships promotes self-knowledge insofar as your beloved acts as a kind of mirror, reflecting your character back to you (Badhwar, 2003, p. 58). Of course, this answer presupposes that we cannot accurately know ourselves in other ways: that left alone, our sense of ourselves will be too imperfect, too biased, to help us grow and mature as persons. The metaphor of a mirror also suggests that our beloveds will be in the relevant respects similar to us, so that merely by observing them, we can come to know ourselves better in a way that is, if not free from bias, at least more objective than otherwise.

Brink (1999, pp. 264–65) argues that there are serious limits to the value of such mirroring of one’s self in a beloved. For if the aim is not just to know yourself better but to improve yourself, you ought also to interact with others who are not just like yourself: interacting with such diverse others can help you recognize alternative possibilities for how to live and so better assess the relative merits of these possibilities. Whiting (2013) also emphasizes the importance of our beloveds’ having an independent voice capable of reflecting not who one now is but an ideal for who one is to be. Nonetheless, we need not take the metaphor of the mirror quite so literally; rather, our beloveds can reflect our selves not through their inherent similarity to us but rather through the interpretations they offer of us, both explicitly and implicitly in their responses to us. This is what Badhwar calls the “epistemic significance” of love. [ 16 ]

In addition to this epistemic significance of love, LaFollette (1996, Chapter 5) offers several other reasons why it is good to love, reasons derived in part from the psychological literature on love: love increases our sense of well-being, it elevates our sense of self-worth, and it serves to develop our character. It also, we might add, tends to lower stress and blood pressure and to increase health and longevity. Friedman (1993) argues that the kind of partiality towards our beloveds that love involves is itself morally valuable because it supports relationships—loving relationships—that contribute “to human well-being, integrity, and fulfillment in life” (p. 61). And Solomon (1988, p. 155) claims:

Ultimately, there is only one reason for love. That one grand reason…is “because we bring out the best in each other.” What counts as “the best,” of course, is subject to much individual variation.

This is because, Solomon suggests, in loving someone, I want myself to be better so as to be worthy of his love for me.

Each of these answers to the question of why we love understands it to be asking about love quite generally, abstracted away from details of particular relationships. It is also possible to understand the question as asking about particular loves. Here, there are several questions that are relevant:

• What, if anything, justifies my loving rather than not loving this particular person?
• What, if anything, justifies my coming to love this particular person rather than someone else?
• What, if anything, justifies my continuing to love this particular person given the changes—both in him and me and in the overall circumstances—that have occurred since I began loving him?

These are importantly different questions. Velleman (1999), for example, thinks we can answer (1) by appealing to the fact that my beloved is a person and so has a rational nature, yet he thinks (2) and (3) have no answers: the best we can do is offer causal explanations for our loving particular people, a position echoed by Han (2021). Setiya (2014) similarly thinks (1) has an answer, but points not to the rational nature of persons but rather to the other’s humanity , where such humanity differs from personhood in that not all humans need have the requisite rational nature for personhood, and not all persons need be humans. And, as will become clear below , the distinction between (2) and (3) will become important in resolving puzzles concerning whether our beloveds are fungible, though it should be clear that (3) potentially raises questions concerning personal identity (which will not be addressed here).

It is important not to misconstrue these justificatory questions. Thomas (1991) , for example, rejects the idea that love can be justified: “there are no rational considerations whereby anyone can lay claim to another’s love or insist that an individual’s love for another is irrational” (p. 474). This is because, Thomas claims (p. 471):

no matter how wonderful and lovely an individual might be, on any and all accounts, it is simply false that a romantically unencumbered person must love that individual on pain of being irrational. Or, there is no irrationality involved in ceasing to love a person whom one once loved immensely, although the person has not changed.

However, as LaFollette (1996, p. 63) correctly points out,

reason is not some external power which dictates how we should behave, but an internal power, integral to who we are.… Reason does not command that we love anyone. Nonetheless, reason is vital in determining whom we love and why we love them.

That is, reasons for love are pro tanto : they are a part of the overall reasons we have for acting, and it is up to us in exercising our capacity for agency to decide what on balance we have reason to do or even whether we shall act contrary to our reasons. To construe the notion of a reason for love as compelling us to love, as Thomas does, is to misconstrue the place such reasons have within our agency. [ 17 ]

Most philosophical discussions of the justification of love focus on question (1) , thinking that answering this question will also, to the extent that we can, answer question (2) , which is typically not distinguished from (3) . The answers given to these questions vary in a way that turns on how the kind of evaluation implicit in love is construed. On the one hand, those who understand the evaluation implicit in love to be a matter of the bestowal of value (such as Telfer 1970–71; Friedman 1993; Singer 1994) typically claim that no justification can be given (cf. Section 4.2 ). As indicated above, this seems problematic, especially given the importance love can have both in our lives and, especially, in shaping our identities as persons. To reject the idea that we can love for reasons may reduce the impact our agency can have in defining who we are.

On the other hand, those who understand the evaluation implicit in love to be a matter of appraisal tend to answer the justificatory question by appeal to these valuable properties of the beloved. This acceptance of the idea that love can be justified leads to two further, related worries about the object of love.

The first worry is raised by Vlastos (1981) in a discussion Plato’s and Aristotle’s accounts of love. Vlastos notes that these accounts focus on the properties of our beloveds: we are to love people, they say, only because and insofar as they are objectifications of the excellences. Consequently, he argues, in doing so they fail to distinguish “ disinterested affection for the person we love” from “ appreciation of the excellences instantiated by that person ” (p. 33). That is, Vlastos thinks that Plato and Aristotle provide an account of love that is really a love of properties rather than a love of persons—love of a type of person, rather than love of a particular person—thereby losing what is distinctive about love as an essentially personal attitude. This worry about Plato and Aristotle might seem to apply just as well to other accounts that justify love in terms of the properties of the person: insofar as we love the person for the sake of her properties, it might seem that what we love is those properties and not the person. Here it is surely insufficient to say, as Solomon (1988, p. 154) does, “if love has its reasons, then it is not the whole person that one loves but certain aspects of that person—though the rest of the person comes along too, of course”: that final tagline fails to address the central difficulty about what the object of love is and so about love as a distinctly personal attitude. (Clausen 2019 might seem to address this worry by arguing that we love people not as having certain properties but rather as having “ organic unities ”: a holistic set of properties the value of each of which must be understood in essential part in terms of its place within that whole. Nonetheless, while this is an interesting and plausible way to think about the value of the properties of persons, that organic unity itself will be a (holistic) property held by the person, and it seems that the fundamental problem reemerges at the level of this holistic property: do we love the holistic unity rather than the person?)

The second worry concerns the fungibility of the object of love. To be fungible is to be replaceable by another relevantly similar object without any loss of value. Thus, money is fungible: I can give you two $5 bills in exchange for a $10 bill, and neither of us has lost anything. Is the object of love fungible? That is, can I simply switch from loving one person to loving another relevantly similar person without any loss? The worry about fungibility is commonly put this way: if we accept that love can be justified by appealing to properties of the beloved, then it may seem that in loving someone for certain reasons, I love him not simply as the individual he is, but as instantiating those properties. And this may imply that any other person instantiating those same properties would do just as well: my beloved would be fungible. Indeed, it may be that another person exhibits the properties that ground my love to a greater degree than my current beloved does, and so it may seem that in such a case I have reason to “trade up”—to switch my love to the new, better person. However, it seems clear that the objects of our loves are not fungible: love seems to involve a deeply personal commitment to a particular person, a commitment that is antithetical to the idea that our beloveds are fungible or to the idea that we ought to be willing to trade up when possible. [ 18 ]

In responding to these worries, Nozick (1989) appeals to the union view of love he endorses (see the section on Love as Union ):

The intention in love is to form a we and to identify with it as an extended self, to identify one’s fortunes in large part with its fortunes. A willingness to trade up, to destroy the very we you largely identify with, would then be a willingness to destroy your self in the form of your own extended self. [p. 78]

So it is because love involves forming a “we” that we must understand other persons and not properties to be the objects of love, and it is because my very identity as a person depends essentially on that “we” that it is not possible to substitute without loss one object of my love for another. However, Badhwar (2003) criticizes Nozick, saying that his response implies that once I love someone, I cannot abandon that love no matter who that person becomes; this, she says, “cannot be understood as love at all rather than addiction” (p. 61). [ 19 ]

Instead, Badhwar (1987) turns to her robust-concern account of love as a concern for the beloved for his sake rather than one’s own. Insofar as my love is disinterested — not a means to antecedent ends of my own—it would be senseless to think that my beloved could be replaced by someone who is able to satisfy my ends equally well or better. Consequently, my beloved is in this way irreplaceable. However, this is only a partial response to the worry about fungibility, as Badhwar herself seems to acknowledge. For the concern over fungibility arises not merely for those cases in which we think of love as justified instrumentally, but also for those cases in which the love is justified by the intrinsic value of the properties of my beloved. Confronted with cases like this, Badhwar (2003) concludes that the object of love is fungible after all (though she insists that it is very unlikely in practice). (Soble (1990, Chapter 13) draws similar conclusions.)

Nonetheless, Badhwar thinks that the object of love is “phenomenologically non-fungible” (2003, p. 63; see also 1987, p. 14). By this she means that we experience our beloveds to be irreplaceable: “loving and delighting in [one person] are not completely commensurate with loving and delighting in another” (1987, p. 14). Love can be such that we sometimes desire to be with this particular person whom we love, not another whom we also love, for our loves are qualitatively different. But why is this? It seems as though the typical reason I now want to spend time with Amy rather than Bob is, for example, that Amy is funny but Bob is not. I love Amy in part for her humor, and I love Bob for other reasons, and these qualitative differences between them is what makes them not fungible. However, this reply does not address the worry about the possibility of trading up: if Bob were to be at least as funny (charming, kind, etc.) as Amy, why shouldn’t I dump her and spend all my time with him?

A somewhat different approach is taken by Whiting (1991). In response to the first worry concerning the object of love, Whiting argues that Vlastos offers a false dichotomy: having affection for someone that is disinterested —for her sake rather than my own—essentially involves an appreciation of her excellences as such. Indeed, Whiting says, my appreciation of these as excellences, and so the underlying commitment I have to their value, just is a disinterested commitment to her because these excellences constitute her identity as the person she is. The person, therefore, really is the object of love. Delaney (1996) takes the complementary tack of distinguishing between the object of one’s love, which of course is the person, and the grounds of the love, which are her properties: to say, as Solomon does, that we love someone for reasons is not at all to say that we only love certain aspects of the person. In these terms, we might say that Whiting’s rejection of Vlastos’ dichotomy can be read as saying that what makes my attitude be one of disinterested affection—one of love—for the person is precisely that I am thereby responding to her excellences as the reasons for that affection. [ 20 ]

Of course, more needs to be said about what it is that makes a particular person be the object of love. Implicit in Whiting’s account is an understanding of the way in which the object of my love is determined in part by the history of interactions I have with her: it is she, and not merely her properties (which might be instantiated in many different people), that I want to be with; it is she, and not merely her properties, on whose behalf I am concerned when she suffers and whom I seek to comfort; etc. This addresses the first worry, but not the second worry about fungibility, for the question still remains whether she is the object of my love only as instantiating certain properties, and so whether or not I have reason to “trade up.”

To respond to the fungibility worry, Whiting and Delaney appeal explicitly to the historical relationship. [ 21 ] Thus, Whiting claims, although there may be a relatively large pool of people who have the kind of excellences of character that would justify my loving them, and so although there can be no answer to question (2) about why I come to love this rather than that person within this pool, once I have come to love this person and so have developed a historical relation with her, this history of concern justifies my continuing to love this person rather than someone else (1991, p. 7). Similarly, Delaney claims that love is grounded in “historical-relational properties” (1996, p. 346), so that I have reasons for continuing to love this person rather than switching allegiances and loving someone else. In each case, the appeal to both such historical relations and the excellences of character of my beloved is intended to provide an answer to question (3) , and this explains why the objects of love are not fungible.

There seems to be something very much right with this response. Relationships grounded in love are essentially personal, and it would be odd to think of what justifies that love to be merely non-relational properties of the beloved. Nonetheless, it is still unclear how the historical-relational propreties can provide any additional justification for subsequent concern beyond that which is already provided (as an answer to question (1) ) by appeal to the excellences of the beloved’s character (cf. Brink 1999). The mere fact that I have loved someone in the past does not seem to justify my continuing to love him in the future. When we imagine that he is going through a rough time and begins to lose the virtues justifying my initial love for him, why shouldn’t I dump him and instead come to love someone new having all of those virtues more fully? Intuitively (unless the change she undergoes makes her in some important sense no longer the same person he was), we think I should not dump him, but the appeal to the mere fact that I loved him in the past is surely not enough. Yet what historical-relational properties could do the trick? (For an interesting attempt at an answer, see Kolodny 2003 and also Howard 2019.)

If we think that love can be justified, then it may seem that the appeal to particular historical facts about a loving relationship to justify that love is inadequate, for such idiosyncratic and subjective properties might explain but cannot justify love. Rather, it may seem, justification in general requires appealing to universal, objective properties. But such properties are ones that others might share, which leads to the problem of fungibility. Consequently it may seem that love cannot be justified. In the face of this predicament, accounts of love that understand love to be an attitude towards value that is intermediate between appraisal and bestowal, between recognizing already existing value and creating that value (see Section 4.3 ) might seem to offer a way out. For once we reject the thought that the value of our beloveds must be either the precondition or the consequence of our love, we have room to acknowledge that the deeply personal, historically grounded, creative nature of love (central to bestowal accounts) and the understanding of love as responsive to valuable properties of the beloved that can justify that love (central to appraisal accounts) are not mutually exclusive (Helm 2010; Bagley 2015).

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• Aristotle , Nicomachean Ethics , translated by W.D. Ross.
• Moseley, A., “ Philosophy of Love ,” in J. Fieser (ed.), Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

character, moral | emotion | friendship | impartiality | obligations: special | personal identity | Plato: ethics | Plato: rhetoric and poetry | respect | value: intrinsic vs. extrinsic

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