does true love really exist essay

The Concept of True Love Definition Essay

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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”

• A Shared Theme between Two Works
• Measuring the Depth of Despair: When There Is no Point in Living
• Critique for ‘A Rose for Emily’
• Iago’s Character as Embodiment of the Darker Side Which All the People Have
• Grotesque in "A Rose for Emily" by W. Faulkner
• Franz Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’ and Joseph Conrad’s ‘The Heart of Darkness’. Theme Analysis
• Coming-of-Age Fiction: "The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath
• Langston Hughes’ I, Too, Sing America and Nikki Giovanni’s Ego Tripping: Analysis of Two Poems
• “The Lesson” and “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
• ‘Out, Out’ by Robert Frost: Themes of Moving On and Sorrow
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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/.

Bibliography

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

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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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Dear Tyler and Jay: Does true love exist?

We love the questions that you all have been sending in! Not only do they encompass different types of love, but they touch on the various experiences that students have around love, dating, and relationships, while being mindful of the different identities which students possess. This week, we invited Johns Hopkins Student Assistance Program (JHSAP) clinician, Ann Yu Natterer , to share some advice for ADHD-ers and other neurodivergent folks around love, so read more below!

Q: Does true love exist?

A: I appreciate this question because I think it has crossed many people’s minds, mine included. My take is that true love exists, but maybe not in the way we have been told it does.

To quote bell hooks in All About Love : “Our culture makes love a compelling fantasy…we often confuse perfect passion with perfect love.”

People think that love is a feeling, which is true, but those feelings only last so long. Doing things sustained by that feeling can only get people so far. True love is the active choice to continuously extend the same attention, interest, and prioritization to your partner when your feelings change as you would at the beginning when things were more fun and exciting.

hooks also says: “To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability as responsibility…Usually we imagine that true love will be intensely pleasurable and romantic, full of love and light. In truth, love is all about work.”

True love is hard work, in which all parties are willing to go through growing pains for the relationship. (Important note: the hard work of true love does not encompass suffering through cheating, abuse, or emotional unavailability.)

Love is learning how to be vulnerable and effectively communicate your feelings. Love is showing gratitude for things your partner already does. Love is being curious about them, their opinions, and their perspective, especially if you think you already know them. It’s small consistent actions over big showy displays. It’s being calmly in love versus being madly in love.

Don’t forget true love can exist outside of romantic relationships. It’s you and your friends hyping each other up in a group chat, a sibling who stand up for you, and your pet sensing that you had a bad day and curling up next to you.

I leave you with another quote from All About Love and a strong recommendation to read it: “The truth is far too many people in our culture don’t know what love is. And this not knowing feels like a terrible secret, a lack that we have to cover up. Had I been given a clear definition of love earlier in my life it would not have taken me so long to become a loving person. Had I shared with others a common understanding of love earlier in my life it would not have taken me so long to become a more loving person. Had I shared with others a common understanding of what it means to love it would have been easier to create love.”

Read about love, learn about love, and be about love, and there’s a strong chance you’ll find others who do the same.

Q: I love my friends but we’re all SO busy with work and school and family/partners stuff, and sometimes trying to schedule time to hang out all together is yet another source of stress. What’s a good way for a friend group to navigate a bunch of busy schedules?

A: I love this question because it’s such a real feeling that making time or trying to be present for our friends can be a stressor when we have a million things going on in our own lives. I also pride you on wanting to make the time because it makes a huge difference in the quality of your friendships.

That being said, a good way to navigate a bunch of busy schedules is to find a way for your friends to schedule time. For some, this looks like having an actual calendar that everyone populates with their scheduled events/commitments for everyone to see, which could help with visually finding a day/time for everyone to meet up.

Also, make plans in advance! If everyone is busy, it might be easier to plan a couple weeks out to ensure that everyone has availability and can already commit to spending time together. You can also try making your hang-outs a regularly scheduled event, so that it’s already built into everyone’s schedules to take away the stress of finding a day and time that everyone is available. (That’s how this group of undergrads established a recurring Family Dinner night that’s been going strong for a year and a half.)

I’d also like to mention that it’s okay if not everyone can attend everything or if you really don’t have the time! Being confident in your friendships means understanding that we all have personal lives and might not always have the capacity to spend quality time with loved ones. Always trust that your friends know you well enough to support you no matter what, and that even when it seems impossible, you will eventually find time to spend together because you care.

Q: How do you tell attachment from genuine attraction? (ADHD-er Edition)

A: I’m not an expert on ADHD, but I’ll try my best. Let’s talk about attraction versus attachment. Attraction can be seen as an initial interest in someone based on physical appearance or personality. Maybe you like the style of someone you see on the shuttle, or maybe even their laugh, voice, or sense of humor. Attraction can be fleeting or consistent, and can grow deeper as you get to know someone and find more qualities you like about them.

Attachment is giving stronger importance to that person in your life. Romantic love can usually be broken down into three stages: lust, attraction, and then attachment. Not everyone sees relationships this way, but hopefully it helps show a way to distinguish the last two stages.

So, how would ADHD affect relationships and attraction? Healthy relationships release neurochemicals to the body that make us feel good, like oxytocin and dopamine. Dopamine is the reward neurochemical released in our brain that motivates us to do things. It’s released when we’re doing things for our well-being and survival, like when you satisfy hunger or thirst, push through a difficult task, or spend time with people you care about.

Dopamine is released and regulated differently in folks with ADHD. It can take more dopamine for a person to feel the same enjoyment, interest, or focus on certain tasks, including relationships. It might also mean novel exciting experiences, like getting to know someone new, can be particularly rewarding for folks with ADHD. The intensity of attraction might taper off the longer you know someone. When the novelty and excitement fades, it might affect the transition from the attraction phase to the stable, consistent attachment phase. The neurochemicals released during the initial attraction phase might be felt more strongly by folks with ADHD, so they might be more inclined to seek out novel experiences and people to experience that again and again with others.

People with ADHD also have brain differences that affect emotional processing, memory, and higher cognitive function. This difference could affect the intensity a new relationship can bring, remembering things (like texting back during the attachment phase), or proper planning for time together. Some of these regions are activated when people are in committed relationships. Areas that deal with dopamine like the ventral tegmentum area (VTA) and nucleus accumbens (NA), as well as the hippocampus (which deals with memory, social and emotional learning), are activated when people are in love. These three areas of the brain are different in folks with ADHD. The differences in the VTA and NA can contribute to intense responses and hyper-fixation with romantic experiences, and the differences in the hippocampus can affect how people with ADHD learn from and process the experience.

Some studies suggest that some college students with ADHD find meaningful connections with others with similar ADHD symptom types and severity. Purposefully seeking out friendships with fellow ADHD-ers might be a good addition to your overall well-being. Whether you’re single or partnered, or if that partner is ND or NT, it’s nice to have friends who really ‘get’ you and can provide support as you navigate romance and life in general.

If the difference between attachment and attraction is something you’d like to explore more, I recommend finding a counselor who specializes in ADHD to better understand the way it affects relationships.

As a JHSAP clinician with a background in couples counseling and considerable experience working with ADHD-ers and other neurodivergent folks, I think Jay did a great job of explaining the neuroscience of the ADHD mind. If I had anything to add to her answer, it’s this: if you’re moving out of the honeymoon phase and into the stable attachment phase in any kind of relationship, communication skills are important.

I’m a huge fan of the Gottman Institute in general and their three key skills for intimate conversations in particular. They are:

• Put your feelings into words . Using ‘I’ statements avoids putting blame on your partner for whatever is causing conflict. This step shows ownership and accountability, rather than blame and victimizing. It also shifts the focus of the thought process to what each individual can or cannot do, rather than demanding change from the other person.
• Ask open-ended questions . This approach allows the other person to respond more freely and with fewer constraints. It also helps facilitate bringing up topics that may have otherwise been avoided or overlooked.
• Express empathy . Try to see where your partner’s coming from without feeling defensive about what led them to feeling that way. Acknowledge their feelings without having to formulate a rationale for your actions.

None of these are exactly easy for anyone, but in my experience skills No. 1 and No. 2 can be particularly challenging for people with ADHD. It may be more difficult for them to articulate what they feel, or to listen to and really absorb the answers to open-ended questions, especially if your partner is talking for a long time.

Fortunately, like any skill, you can improve these with practice.

Parroting (also known as reflective listening), in which you repeat back what you heard your partner said, can be a useful tool in intimate conversations. Here’s an example of parroting:

Partner 1 : You seem unhappy lately. Can you tell me what’s been going on?

Partner 2 : I feel like we don’t communicate enough, and I am sick of always being the one to initiate all conversations. I don’t feel loved because you’re not texting me as much as you used to when we first started dating.

Partner 1 : Thanks for sharing that. So what I’m hearing is that you feel like we aren’t communicating enough, and this is due to fact that I’m not texting you as much as I used to when we first started dating. You also feel like you’ve been the one to start all conversations. Am I getting this right?

Parroting can seem childish or weird at first, but you’d be surprised at how much it can do to prevent misunderstandings. A lot can get lost in translation when two people are having a conversation, and I don’t just mean across language barriers. I’m talking about syntax, cultural differences, and regional barriers too. It’s especially true when people are emotionally riled up and their listening skills are not at their best. Parroting fosters active listening and allows you to focus on what your partner is saying (and not on what your response is going to be).

Another strategy that I’ve found is useful for people with ADHD is to have concrete relationship goals versus abstract ones. An abstract goal is “We should communicate better.” A concrete goal is “Let’s have a morning check-in text every day, or every other day.” Note: more communication is not always better. Find a happy medium that works well for both parties.

Avoid viewing ADHD as a problem or some sort of deficit that one or both parties in a relationship have to work around. Look at it as a part of who that individual is, and try to understand as much about it as you can and work with it. There are perks of dating people with ADHD; they’re usually fun and energetic and passionate! Rather than seeing this neurodivergence as a flaw, view it as a part of who an individual is as a whole person.

Thank you Ann for sharing your thoughts with us this week! Readers can email [email protected] if you have any follow-up questions, and we wish you all a happy, safe Spring break! Until next time, keep sending in your questions about love, dating, and relationships!

https://forms.office.com/r/eH6N8yDteG

Note: DT&J is intended to educate and spark discussion. The advice offered is intended for informational purposes only, and is not intended to replace or substitute for any professional, financial, medical, legal, or other professional advice. If you have specific concerns or a situation in which you require professional, psychological, or medical help, you should consult with an appropriately trained and qualified specialist. If you need help getting started, you can email [email protected] .

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How Will I Know If I've Found True Love?

Lasting connection and intimacy take work

Maskot / Getty Images

The desire for love is universal. It's rare to encounter a human being who has never yearned for true love, but what does the term even mean?

We associate "true love" with fairytales and Disney, or with extravagant weddings and romantic films about couples overcoming adversity together and building a beautiful life together.

The concept of true love is even puzzling to researchers, with academic literature indicating love is an experience that boils down to a collection of emotions that further our ability to survive.

While there certainly is truth in this, from the drive to reproduce to the intense attachment that can provide support during the end of our lives, deep love can be hard to spot.

It isn’t uncommon to wonder if you’ve found true love, or if the love you once thought was your end game is fading, and if true love even lasts. We’ve got you. This article will help you spot and learn how to nurture deep, secure , love in—hopefully—its truest form.

Take the Love Quiz

Our fast and free love quiz can help you determine if what you've got is the real deal or simply a temporary fling or infatuation.

Characteristics of True Love

To learn how to identify true love, it's important to understand the characteristics of it. A key component of true love is an unwavering sense of mutually feeling respected and valued. Speaking poorly of each other and breaking the agreed-upon boundaries of the relationship exist as the antithesis of these traits.

Lauren Consul, LMFT

Secure love isn’t a fixed endpoint; it’s a continual journey where partners actively and consistently show up for themselves, each other, and the relationship.

Unconditional acceptance and support are also key to true love. The same way you don’t speak poorly of each other, it is also important that you accept and support one another in the best and worst of times. This doesn’t mean that you evade difficult truths. In true love, you can trust that you can be honest. Furthermore, you can trust that your partner is honest with you.

But, true love isn’t only about respect, values, and boundaries. There are also enchanting elements that keep you in the relationship when times feel tough.

To dig deeper into the magic, we talked to licensed marriage and family therapist Lauren Consul , “Secure love isn’t a fixed endpoint; it’s a continual journey where partners actively and consistently show up for themselves, each other , and the relationship.” This is a key point to remember—true love isn’t the end of a book. It’s the process of writing an evolving story. “It involves experiencing a sense of safety, assurance, and significance in the eyes of your partner,” she continued. This type of connection helps develop a deep emotional bond and intimacy. 

How Does True Love Feel?

When it comes to the concept of love, it isn’t uncommon to hear people say you’ll just know . There’s good reason for this. An element of love is unspeakable, it is a feeling above all. “It goes beyond merely being heard; it’s about feeling that your words hold importance for your partner,” shares Consul. This feeling indicates emotional connection, trust, and vulnerability . 

True love feels less like adrenaline and more like the sense of calm you're left with after receiving a much-needed hug. It doesn't leave you with questions or mixed-up emotions and feels authentic in a deeper way than what many of us have experienced.

However, things can get tricky. You can have a deep love for someone and also no longer wish to continue in a relationship with them. Though this may seem contradictory, such a predicament isn’t an indicator of a lack of depth, “True love doesn’t conquer all…it coexists with external circumstances that may end the relationship journey , but does not end the love,” says Consul.

Similarly, she shares that someone can also love another but be unable to truly express that love because they have yet to do important internal work. Alas, this is when we end up in the unfortunate predicament of emotional unavailability . Yet, in a secure loving relationship, both parties are dedicated to doing the work to ensure they are available for the sweetness a relationship can bring.

How Do I Find It?

Dating to find true love can be a daunting task in a world where many people are just looking for casual connections. However, with some persistence, focus, and self-work, it is possible to not only find your match but to enjoy the journey along the way.

“With dating, a crucial aspect is self-awareness . That means understanding both your positive attributes and the baggage you carry,” explains Consul. She continued by acknowledging that while it is important to honor your strengths and deservingness of a great relationship, it is more critical that you’re aware of your baggage, generational patterns, trauma, and triggers . Once you have cultivated that awareness, you can do the deep self-work required to ensure you can show up to a romantic relationship with emotional availability and patience. 

As for the logistics of dating? Somatic psychotherapist, coach, and mindfulness teacher Francesca Maximé gave us her thoughts: “ Dating apps are always going to be an option, but try to meet people in real life.”

She suggests volunteering, joining a sports league, or taking a class as options. She continued by explaining that getting to know someone through a shared interest can take the pressure off of the early days of dating. 

Maintaining True Love

So, you’ve found the love. How do you keep it? According to Consul, the bedrock of a thriving, long-term relationship lies in sustained curiosity. Curiosity helps avoid assumptions, which in turn avoids judgment while fostering intimacy and solutions.

Beyond curiosity is effective communication . Research shows that the way a couple navigates conflict is directly indicative of the quality of the relationship. Conflict isn’t bad for a relationship and is a great way couples can learn how to navigate challenges together. 

“Frequently, we fall into the trap of making assumptions because we believe we know our partner inside out. However, this can gradually erode a relationship, leading to disconnection.” You can cultivate a sense of curiosity by continually asking questions. It can be as simple as, “What is your favorite food right now?” Or, “What is something new you’ve learned lately?” Though these questions may seem elementary, you’ll be surprised at what conversations they can open up.

Francesca Maximé, somatic psychotherapist

True love is much more about secure functioning together. It increases your capacity to be kind and selfless, have boundaries, and be a discerning individual, all at the same time with your lover,.

Another tool to tap into is the Gottman Institute’s Card Deck app . The Gottman Institute , founded by the creators of the Gottman Method Drs. John and Julie Gottman, is committed to providing research-based therapy and support to couples around the world. Their Card Deck app utilizes a series of open-ended questions and activities that are designed to increase emotional connection, understanding, and intimacy. 

If you’re noticing things are feeling particularly rocky within your relationship, consider seeking out therapy. Couples therapy is an excellent tool that can help you streamline your communication, physical connection, and emotional understanding of one another. If you’re not sure where to begin, Inclusive Therapists is an excellent therapist directory where you can search for therapists based on identity, modality, location, fee, and more. 

Keep in Mind

While true love takes work, your fruits of labor will be well worth it. “True love is much more about secure functioning together. It increases your capacity to be kind and selfless, have boundaries, and be a discerning individual, all at the same time with your lover,” explains Maximé.

If you’ve found it, trust that you can sustain it. If you’re looking for it, trust it is waiting for you. 

Seshadri KG. The neuroendocrinology of love . Indian J Endocrinol Metab. 2016;20(4):558-563. doi:  10.4103/2230-8210.183479

De Netto PM, Quek KF, Golden KJ. Communication, the heart of a relationship: examining capitalization, accommodation, and self-construal on relationship satisfaction . Front Psychol. 2021;12:767908. doi:  10.3389/fpsyg.2021.767908

By Julia Childs Heyl, MSW Julia Childs Heyl, MSW, is a clinical social worker and writer. As a writer, she focuses on mental health disparities and uses critical race theory as her preferred theoretical framework. In her clinical work, she specializes in treating people of color experiencing anxiety, depression, and trauma through depth therapy and EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) trauma therapy.

What Is True Love? (17 Things That Define True Love)

True love is very hard to describe in words, it's one of those experiences that are better had than read about or explained. So what is true love? True love isn't just a feeling but it involves deep feelings of passion, warmth, tenderness, sentiment, and desire for your partner, unconditionally. 

These feelings often confuse people since you can still have them for someone you're infatuated with and it's hard to tell the difference especially when the feelings towards this person are very strong. Regardless, true love is very wildly sought out. Everyone wants to find their 'one true love' and remain in love till death does them part. 

However, true love is not only about longevity and it may not be limited to just one person per lifetime. In fact, there are a truckload of things people don't know about true love, so if you're currently in a hot, spicy relationship and you're wondering, “what is true love, really?” then stick around and I'll point out 17 characteristics of true love. 

Table of Contents

17 Things That Define True Love

1. true love is unconditional.

One definition of true love is unconditional love. If your feelings towards your partner come with no strings attached, that's a tell-tale sign that you've found true love. It doesn't just end there, however, these feelings have to be reciprocated. This means that, no matter what the circumstance may be, your feelings don't change towards each other. 

For example, if you and your partner happened to go into debt or if you found out he had a drug or alcohol addiction, would you still care about him? Would you stand by him till the problem was solved or managed? If you can honestly say you would, then you may just have found true love.

2. Complete acceptance

Another thing that defines true love is complete and total acceptance. True love isn't just about loving your partner's best qualities, it also means accepting them for exactly who they are. This means that you need to fall in love , care for and accept them even if they hate some of the things you love. 

Or they don't agree with certain things you believe in, or there are some things about themselves that they still need to work on. 

Acceptance is all about understanding that your partner may never be 'perfect' but you love them just the way they are. This is also where understanding comes in, you fully understand that they're who they are and you're not trying to change them into who you think they should be.

3. You're comfortable sharing anything with them

It's not worth being with someone who you can't be open and honest or who isn't open and honest with you. When you've found true love, you should be able to honestly and openly discuss anything with the person you love. 

For example, you aren't hiding an issue from your past, you aren't hiding certain experiences you may have gone through and you're not afraid to share even your challenges with this person. If it's true love, it means that when you're in a difficult situation , they're one of the first people you go to for advice or the first shoulder you go to cry on. 

Healthy communication fuels intimacy and true love should be intimate both emotionally and physically, without fear of being vulnerable with each other.

4. You're comfortable being yourself around your partner

True love should bring out your authentic self and not silence it. Your partner should be able to induce the best version of your true self and vice versa. If you're not comfortable being yourself around your partner, that is probably not true love. 

You should never feel the need to play into what you feel the other person expects you to be just because you're afraid to lose them. Or, try to impress them by feigning interest in the things they're interested in, true love means that you're not afraid to be yourself around your partner. 

It means that you're able to act and talk in a way that reflects your true and authentic self, allowing your partner to experience you in your entirety and allowing you to experience all of him too.

5. True love means mutual respect

True love can also be defined by due regard between both parties. Being able and willing to respect each other's space, pet peeves, likes & dislikes, wishes, decisions, and beliefs, is a core part of finding true love. 

True love can also be a choice; you can decide that you want to truly love a partner and that you won't accept anything less than true, authentic love. This way, you can also decide that you choose to value your partner and everything about them and also decide not to tolerate disrespect from your partner. 

However, if you both truly love each other, valuing each other will not be an issue; you won’t have problems giving or receiving kindness. Regard includes care, kindness, thoughtfulness, and compassion. You'd notice that you often empathize with each other, solve problems fairly, you’d be willing to see things from each other's perspectives and sort out issues mindfully.

6. You share similar values

It's not impossible for two people with completely different values and principles to end up together and actually make things work. However, it may prove to be very strenuous and mentally stressful for both parties. 

In most cases, it ends up very badly. True love usually involves two people with the same or similar views, principles, values, and boundaries, coming together to build on those things together. 

Our values and morals are what make us what we are, so compromising them could make you lose your true personality. This is why true love involves being on the same page with your partner in terms of distinguishing right from wrong, despite your different family or religious backgrounds. 

7. You feed each other's energies

Have you ever been in a relationship where it felt like your partner’s personality was draining you? It's the worst feeling ever! It's healthy to be around people whose happiness levels feed yours and the other way round. With true love, partners feed off each other's happy feelings; pay attention to your emotions, ask yourself if making your partner happy also makes you happy. 

Does doing thoughtful deeds, surprising them, and spending quality time with them give you a good feeling? True love is when you and your spouse actually want to bring joy and happiness to each other, not out of duty or necessity but because these actions bring you pure joy.

8. True love is a partnership

True love is commitment, devotion, and complete dedication to each other. It's both partners taking action together as a team to make each other's lives better. True love isn't born from a selfish feeling, it looks out for the good of both parties as a unit. 

So if you're in a relationship to fulfill only your own desires or achieve only your own goals then this is not true love. If you're both truly in love, you'd each factor each other in when you're making a choice, or when you're doing or saying anything at all. 

Use this tool to check whether he actually is who he says he is Whether you're married or have just started seeing someone, infidelity rates are on the rise and have increased over 40% in the last 20 years, so you have all the right to be worried.

Perhaps you want to know if he's texting other women behind your back? Or whether he has active Tinder or dating profile? Or worse yet, whether he has a criminal record or is cheating on you?

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Also, with true love, there's no pride or ego. Instead of thinking 'me' you'd think 'we', your aim would not be to prove how good you're at things or how right you are, but your aim would be to promote the image of the other person as well as yourself. To make your relationship work, you’d need to think of your partner as your teammate. 

9. There are no bad intentions involved

True love always wants the best for the other party, partners always tend to support and root for each other, unconditionally. There's no envy or jealousy when something great happens for the other partner. 

Instead, they keep encouraging and supporting their partner. If for some reason you've noticed that your partner gets jealous when you achieve things or they keep fighting for the spotlight, this isn't true love. 

When a person truly loves you, they're rooting for your success and they take actions to make sure that you get ahead. The same goes for you too, you'd know you've found true love if you notice you're happy when your significant other is making it; just make sure the feelings are reciprocated. 

10. It's not demanding

True love does not have unrealistic expectations, it does not require heaven and earth from the other party, rather it is accepting. Trying to change your partner or expecting him to morph into the prince charming you have in your head is not true love. 

The reason you made the choice to be in a relationship with him is probably that you loved him. If this is the case, then you ought to accept him just the way he is. True love does not make selfish and impossible demands nor does it demand perfection, instead it is understanding and accepting of a loved one.

11. True love is giving

Most people get into a relationship with the aim of getting things; either material things, attention, or public admiration. These are very faulty foundations to build a relationship on. No one who truly loves you would turn you into a tool to be used, they won't see you as an object but will view you and treat you like a complete, multi-dimensional human being. 

It's also not a loving relationship if either party is afraid of committing to love the other party completely, there should be no fear and no holding back. 

Also, true love cannot be used as a bargaining chip; showing care and affection only when the other party fulfills a need. This type of love is very conditional and is nothing close to genuine.

Doing things like giving him the cold shoulder when you aren't pleased with him or telling him you love him only when he gets the house chores done won't do at all. You need to love him at all times, whether you're pleased with him or not.

12. True love is built on friendship

People sometimes take this fact too far, yes it's true that every most meaningful relationship began as a long-lasting friendship. However, this does not mean that you have to be friends with each other since nursery school before you end up with a person. Also, it's not all friendships that blossom into relationships. 

However, true love does involve being friends, you should be able to relate with your spouse as a friend. You need to still be able to hang out together, have heart-to-heart talks, dream together, plan together, joke about stuff, and play like kids. 

Most older couples have confessed that sexual passions fade out at some point, but what keeps a relationship going is friendliness. True friends stick together forever.

13. True love starts with you

Self-love is something that everyone has probably heard of, or read about in this era. Lately, there has been a new wave of realization by the general public that you can't give what you don't have. If you don't have money, you can't give out money, if you don't have food you can't give that out either and if you don’t love yourself, you can't possibly love anyone else. 

Most people view self-love as means to an end, in the sense that they strive to achieve self-love so they can find true love, then they throw out everything they built and learned about loving themselves. This is not the way forward, you need to learn to love yourself forever, not just for a limited amount of time. 

Don't neglect the quality time you spend with yourself, don't forget to pamper yourself from time to time, don't forget to invest in yourself, and don't forget to appreciate yourself. This is the only way you will attract and allow true and honest love into your life. It will give you higher personal standards and will make you see yourself in a better light.

14. True love is committed

When we talk of commitment most people's minds go straight to marriage. Marriage is one of the biggest commitments but it's not all that defines commitment in a relationship. Commitment involves putting all your eggs in one basket, being completely in on something. 

Lots of people get into relationships with a double mind, whenever things aren't going their way they just focus their attention on someone else or allow themselves to get distracted by multiple other people. 

People who have commitment issues have no business being in relationships, they should work on themselves first. You can't be one leg in and one leg out of a relationship, you need to decide to commit to knowing and experiencing your partner in their entirety. It's hard work, but it does pay off, and it yields true and lasting love.

15. True love is certain

You can't and probably won't commit to something you don't believe in. You can't commit to a person if you aren't sure they're worth your time, your love, and your affection. If for some reason you have a bad feeling, before or during the relationship then it's probably not true love. 

This is where your intuition comes in, if questions about your partner, relationship, present, and future keep popping up in your head, then it would be wise to pump the breaks on that one first, while you calm down and figure out why your heart is so troubled about these things. 

It may even be a 'you' problem, you may need to figure out where you're headed, what exactly are your life goals and where you'd like to be in five years. True love feels natural and brings you peace. It doesn't feel uncertain, painful, or difficult. When you do find your one true love, you will feel at peace and comfortable enough to build a future and fulfill your dreams with him. 

16. True love is open

When you've found true love, you don't feel the need to keep secrets, you're comfortable enough to share everything with your partner. When you have real feelings for a person, you're not only about sharing a home and your body with that person, you're also sharing your ups and downs, your everyday experiences, and all the other mundane details in between. 

If for some reason, you aren't free enough to share your secrets with your spouse, there's definitely something wrong. Perhaps, you're afraid to seem imperfect to him or you're afraid that he may not like the real you. If you can't trust him to know both your good side, the bad side, the awkward side, and the embarrassing side, then this is not true love.

17. True love is not dramatic

Playing games with people's hearts has no place in a relationship; it's immature and completely unnecessary. Relationships, where they keep playing games, are mostly relationships built on lust, infatuation, or false admiration. If a person truly loves you, they won't want to hurt you by any means, so they won't risk playing any games or stirring up drama. 

Playing emotional games is a selfish act, it's only when you're only thinking only of yourself and your personal desire that you will stoop to emotionally neglecting a person for fun. Playing games is also an indicator that you do not regard your partner, you can't use a person you value for your own amusement. 

For example, if a person fakes a pregnancy or fakes a suicide attempt just to keep their partner committed in the relationship, this is a form of drama. This is very far from true love, if you find yourself in this type of situation, whether as the offender or the victim, then you need to end things as soon as you can. 

True love is a lasting and deep connection between two lovers who are in a committed, happy and healthy relationship. True love does not just involve passion and affection but also involves mutual regard and understanding between both couples. An example of this is a couple who've been together for 40 years and still deeply love and care for each other.

You'd know you're experiencing true love when your relationship is a give and take. It becomes tiring when only one person carries all the weight in the relationship. Also, if you can honestly tell yourself that you're both happy being with each other then you can say that it's true love. 

Most people think that true love takes shape immediately. They picture this whole, " love at first sight" scenario and imagine that things will shape up from there. However, most times this is not the case, true love blooms gradually, it takes time to mature. Sometimes it starts with an infatuation then grows into something deeper.

There's a saying that goes, "true love never dies", however, this is not entirely accurate. Even the best couples sometimes end up separating because the love has faded out or because it has evolved into something else. People change, circumstances change and emotions follow suit. 

Yes, true love exists, but like every real, good, and valuable thing, it may not come easy and it's rare to find. A lot of people mistake love for compatibility or feel that love should be with just one person per lifetime. This isn't true for everyone, some people are fortunate to find multiple 'true loves' in one lifetime.

I hope you enjoyed this article, remember true love comes naturally. Don't try to force it or morph not into what it's not, be patient and love yourself first and you'll attract someone who will love you just as much. Please let us know what you think about this topic in the comment section and be sure to share it. 

Utilize this tool to verify if he's truly who he claims to be Whether you're married or just started dating someone, infidelity rates have risen by over 40% in the past 20 years, so your concerns are justified.

Do you want to find out if he's texting other women behind your back? Or if he has an active Tinder or dating profile? Or even worse, if he has a criminal record or is cheating on you?

This tool can help by uncovering hidden social media and dating profiles, photos, criminal records, and much more, potentially putting your doubts to rest.

Sonya Schwartz

More from this category.

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Why Am I So Hard on Myself? 9 Tips to Improve Self-Esteem

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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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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• 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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Does True Love Really Exist?

As teenagers, it is natural for us to start thinking about love, whether it be on the physical level, or an emotional level. When we were little, we were all convinced that all love stories were going to be our love stories. Epic, romantic, exciting, the lived-happily-ever-after kind of fairytale love story.

It’s interesting when I think about true love, and if it really exists. When I was little all I could think about was “wow that’s so romantic I wish that would happen to me!”. But after a while, reality started settling into my adolescent mind, and I started to hate the idea of a fairy tale, because I was convinced that they were all fake and would never happen. That is - until I witnessed the love story of my grandmother. My grandmother became a widow in her 60s - no longer “young and beautiful”, as people would say. But she met someone, who also became widowed in his old age. I’m not certain how they met, but one thing I know for sure is that they loved each other, and they knew it. It’s amazing how love finds people - even when people are old and widowed, they can still somehow find their way to each other. This could prove to be an example of how true love does exist.

But if true love really exists, why are there so many couples out there, who thought they were the “one”s and their love would last forever, then ended in heartbreak? Is true love just an illusion?

I guess it all depends on the perspective. What you define as true love. Do you define true love as the love people have for each other when they would do anything for each other, be there for each other at all times, but it’s not necessarily forever? Or do you define true love as - well, forever, basically, even if the people in that relationship only care about themselves, blinded by the illusion of lust as love? Or must it be a fairytale love story, with its climax and its happy ending and the Prince saving the Princess from an ugly fate?

Although I still find enjoyment from watching romantic movies and reading love stories, I have a strong aversion against the notion behind these stories. The reason being that these stories always make it seem like there is only one boy or only one girl in the entire universe, and there aren’t other options around… This just doesn’t happen in real life. It would be nice if it did, of course, but in real life, the boy or girl you like has so many other options than you, and you never know if he will like you back or that someone out of all these other people is going to catch their eye. As a result you end up adoring a situation that is just probably never going to happen, and your heart breaks as you curse the world for not handing you what you want. (Yeah, I know I sound cheesy. Sorry, can’t help it, I myself am going through this right now…)

In conclusion, I can’t really answer if true love really exists or not. It all depends on the perspective and opinion of yourself. It’s not that I hate the idea of love, I just don’t think people should be too in love with the idea of love, or you could mistake infatuation for love and fall into unnecessary trouble. I guess what I’m saying is to be careful with love. It’s not a thing that comes easy, and it very often makes us lose our sense of self. It’s easy to get carried away with feelings that may seem like love, but is really just lust in disguise. Not to mention the way our brains just can’t seem to shut up about the person we like. Don’t rush into love, as Emily Ferrell once said, “before you fall in love, make sure there is someone to catch you”.

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Favorite Quote: Not Everything Happens For A Reason. But Everything Results In Consequences. Be Prepared. Don't Be Just Another Idiot Standing There Saying, "What Happened?" Be The Person Giving The Answers. -My Own Original Quote.

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5 Reasons To Rethink Your Belief That Love Doesn’t Exist

Disclosure: this page may contain affiliate links to select partners. We receive a commission should you choose to make a purchase after clicking on them. Read our affiliate disclosure.

If you’re one of the many people who believe that love doesn’t exist, chances are it’s for a good reason.

After all, we often have aversions to things if we associate them with negativity, and trauma certainly falls into that category.

A visit to Reddit or Quora to determine whether or not love exists will yield many arguments for or against it. Folks who have had unpleasant experiences with love are usually in the “against” camp and will cite all manner of reasons to justify why “love” is just a combination of hormonal fluctuations and self-preservation techniques.

In contrast, many who have experienced love will swear that it’s real, and beautiful, and worth fighting and dying for.

So, if you’re having trouble believing in love, how can you get over that?

Speak to an accredited and experienced therapist to help you change your belief that love doesn’t exist. You may want to try speaking to one via BetterHelp.com for quality care at its most convenient.

Does love really exist?

Absolutely yes, and that’s not an idealistic response. Love exists in countless forms, felt by humans and animals alike. We see love manifest between friends, family members, pets and their people, and wild creatures great and small.

So why hesitate to believe in it?

Maybe you grew up surrounded by people who didn’t know how to treat one another lovingly. Or perhaps you were betrayed by someone you loved and who claimed to love you in turn. These experiences can make anyone believe that love isn’t real. After all, if it were, then you wouldn’t have been hurt that badly.

Furthermore, it hurts far less to believe that it isn’t real, rather than thinking that it is and you just haven’t felt it.

But love does exist, and it’s worth experiencing – despite the potential hurts that may go along with it. And here’s why:

1. Your experiences with love thus far are only part of the greater picture.

When I first started dating my last partner, I asked him whether he liked seafood. He replied that he didn’t eat fish because he grew up eating it and couldn’t stand it. He’d been forced to eat breaded frozen fish sticks and “Filet-o-Fish” burgers from McDonald’s, and hated fish forever after.

That was it. That was the extent of his experience with eating any kind of seafood.

He was hesitant to try it ever again, so I started to offer things to him clandestinely. When he huffed a bunch of appetizers I had made, I commented on how he had just eaten Cajun fish cakes and apparently adored them. I added tuna to pasta puttanesca, put extra fish sauce in padh Thai, and added clams to potato and corn chowder.

Why am I talking about fish here? Because this guy who was dead-set against eating it, who had decided that seafood was disgusting and he didn’t want anything to do with it, ended up enraptured with the stuff. It may be weird to compare this experience with love, but the baseline is the same.

If your only experiences with love so far have been as bland, tasteless, and uninspiring as warmed-up breaded fish sticks, it’s no wonder you don’t have a high opinion of it.

2. The exposure you had to unhealthy relationships was not an accurate picture.

If you grew up in a family where “love” was associated with abuse, manipulation, or neglect, then it’s not surprising that you have skepticism or reluctance to allow love into your life.

Many of us grew up experiencing love that was conditional or used as a weapon. Parents only loved us when we were behaving the way they wanted us to, and then that love was withheld if and when we dared to step out of line.

Others grew up with parents who claimed to love each other, but were physically violent towards one another, or communicated with screams and threats rather than compassionate loving kindness.

When these are the only examples that one has experienced, how can one be expected to have blind faith that love can be different?

If the word “hello” was always accompanied by a kick in the ribs, it’s only natural that one would flinch in expectation of pain every time they heard that word. Similarly, they would feel like they had to suspend their disbelief if and when they watched a film or read a book in which that word was used joyfully.

If you grew up in a situation where love was associated with pain and abuse, it can take a long time and a lot of effort to shift your perspective. Furthermore, a lot of damage can be done on all sides if you try to have romantic relationships before trying to heal those wounds within yourself.

People who sincerely want to love you may come into your life, but you might push them away because you’re afraid of getting hurt again. Or you may find yourself perpetuating unhealthy cycles because you’re just going by what you know.

Therapy is often put forward as a solution to many of a person’s issues, and there’s a good reason for that. Therapists who have experience with helping people heal from poisonous family dynamics have tools and techniques under their belts that can be immensely helpful.

Trying to muddle through and heal oneself might take a lot longer and hurt a lot more than is necessary, as opposed to allowing a counsellor to offer advice and methods to work through these challenges.

See it kind of like allowing a medical professional to set a broken leg properly and offer some physiotherapy exercises to help it heal. You could of course sort it out yourself, but the healing process would take a lot longer and you might end up with a life-long limp rather than a strong limb that can support you properly.

3. ‘Love Actually’ is not how love actually is.

Ideas of what love is supposed to look like can be unrealistic. That two-hour film about an “epic” love story is unlikely to show you how all aspects of love can unfold between people.

After all, entertainment and social media posts are nice to look at, but they’re curated to give off a certain feeling or aesthetic.

Love can be kind, beautiful, and exciting, but it can also be difficult and messy. When people love one another, the ideal is to love each other because of everything that goes in with them, not despite the mess.

It’s wonderful to walk with a loved one during the first snowfall, and excruciating to stay by their side during painful medical treatments to try to keep them alive. It’s gorgeous having breakfast in bed together, and awful yelling at one another about orange juice because you’re both hideously sleep deprived because of a screamy newborn.

But when people truly love each other, they’re willing to sacrifice their own well-being for the sake of the other’s health and happiness.

Real love can also be quite boring at times. For example, it might involve sitting at a table together for hours to work out a family budget with a newly reduced income.

Love can also be immensely comfortable. It’s beautiful knowing someone so intimately that you understand how their minds and bodies work, and to be known that well in turn.

Sometimes love means standing by the other person’s side through thick and thin. Other times, it means letting go of them so they can follow a dream or live in a way that’s more authentic to their own soul’s longing.

4. Romantic connection is merely one form that love can take.

Many cultures have both acknowledged and categorized different types of love . In English, we use the word “love” to describe many different forms, but just because love can manifest differently doesn’t mean that these various forms are any greater or lesser than any other.

You may not have experienced romantic love before, or you might have grown up in a home environment where you didn’t receive much loving kindness from your caregivers. But chances are you’ve experienced love in different forms before.

Do you have close friendships with people you care about, and who are eager to help you during difficult times? Or perhaps you have an animal companion whom you dote upon and fuss over. These are very powerful examples of love, and are just a couple of the ways that love can manifest.

Healthcare workers show love to their patients when they tend to their wounds and try to alleviate their suffering. Gardeners who dearly love their plants will water them diligently and spend hours removing insect pests from brittle leaves. A person who works in a religious capacity may show love to members of their congregation by making home visits to the sick, or volunteering to stay with someone in hospice so they don’t die alone, if they have no family to sit with them.

If you open your eyes – and your heart – to some of the many, wonderful ways that love can unfold, you’ll realize just how many opportunities there are to experience it. Once you see the care and devotion that people are capable of, you’ll start to get an idea of how that can manifest in just about everyone’s life.

5. Hurt and miscommunication can occur when we don’t speak the same language.

Have you already read our article on the five different love languages ? If you haven’t yet, please start there.

Countless people have been hurt and disappointed in various relationships because of miscommunication between love languages. Many of us express and understand love in different ways, and if those around us quite literally speak a different language than us, then we won’t feel seen or cared for, and neither will they.

I’ll give you an example of this: recently, I helped to counsel some friends who were going through a rough patch in their relationship. He didn’t feel cared for or loved by her, and she felt like he was being both too needy and insincere towards her. When we broke down why both of them were feeling this way, we found the crux of the matter was their opposing “love languages” (LL).

His primary LL is verbal expression, and his secondary one is gift-giving. In contrast, her primary LL is physical affection, and her secondary one is acts of service. In essence, what’s been happening with them is that they’ve both been trying to show love in the way that they understand, and that they would want to receive. But since their languages oppose one another, the messages are being misconstrued and lost on both sides.

When he let her know that she didn’t tell him often enough that she loves him, she got upset about the fact that she shows him a million times a day but he doesn’t seem to see it. Meanwhile, she was getting annoyed by his constant compliments, and simply buying her “random crap,” like he was trying too hard.

It was only by digging into these issues that they were able to “get” that they were saying the same things to one another, in the only ways that they knew how.

If you’re of the mindset that love doesn’t exist, consider the possibility that the way you give and receive love might be the opposite from those around you. Try to pull back and see various situations from other perspectives, and you might glean something new about past experiences.

Quite often, experiencing the kind of love we’ve wanted but never received can be remedied by connecting with others who actually speak our language.

5 Ways To Rekindle Your Faith That Love Exists

There are many sources out there to help spark your faith in love. The key is to make sure that what’s helping to kindle love in your heart is something sincere, rather than a form of escapism or martyrdom.

1. Turn to real life examples, rather than fantasy.

One of the best things you can do is immerse yourself in real-life love stories. Romance novels and films are lovely and all, and if they help to start melting your heart a little bit, that’s great! Just make sure that you counterbalance the fantasy with reality too.

For example, delve into the story of Isidor and Ida Straus . Their names might not be familiar to you right now, but if you’ve ever seen the film Titanic, they’re the elderly couple that chose to die together rather than be separated. Yes, that scene was based on real life.

When the first-class passengers were being ushered into lifeboats, Ida refused to get in unless her husband was allowed with her. When he wasn’t, she stepped back out, gave her fur coat to her maid, and walked with Isidor to the prow of the ship to die by his side.

Although that story might be over a century old at this point, there are many other stories out there that are just like it. In fact, you may come across many of them on social media. Instagram is full of accounts of couples who fought all manner of hardships to be together, or who weathered great difficulties as a devoted team.

Like Stephanie and Christian Nielson , who survived a terrible plane crash together. Stephanie got third-degree burns over 80% of her body, and Christian had severe burns as well. Their shared experience brought them even closer together and inspired them to become motivational speakers, and to help other burn victims.

Or Shane and Hannah Burcaw , who have an incredibly loving relationship that transcends Shane’s physical limitations due to his Spinal Muscular Atrophy.

2. Throw out your wishlist.

As mentioned earlier, many people have unrealistic ideas of what love really looks like. We’ll expand upon that a bit by saying that many people have ideas of what they want love to look or be like. When love doesn’t unfold (or look) the way they want it to, they get jaded and disappointed and figure that it doesn’t exist at all.

This is rather like being at a gourmet, international buffet luncheon and saying there’s nothing to eat, simply because they’re not serving the dish that you were expecting to see.

When you relax into the journey that life is taking you on, you make room for the unexpected. Things tend to fall into place when they’re ready to unfold naturally, and forcing them will prevent them from thriving.

You may have a clear picture in your mind about what love “should” look like. Furthermore, you might have envisioned scenarios playing out a specific way. Then, when they don’t, you think that’s proof that love doesn’t exist, rather than acknowledging that other people aren’t actors on our life’s film set, and that situations never unfold the way we want them to.

Instead of actively pursuing something that you think you want, focus on your own interests and let what’s meant for you come to you. Like befriending a wild animal, love will make its way to you when you’re not trying to claw after it, cling to it, or force it to be with you.

3. Be willing to love unconditionally: without the intention to receive in turn.

One of the best ways to experience love is to give it to others. The key here is to ensure that it’s a gift freely given – not done with the expectation that you’ll be loved back.

This kind of love often manifests in parenting, if the parents are kind, compassionate people. They’ll pour love into their children, making sure they feel safe, wanted, encouraged, and accepted unconditionally. Some people foster or adopt children in order to ensure that they have the best possible start in life, and don’t expect anything in return.

Although it might sting a bit when we give love to others that they don’t give back to us in kind, love inevitably shows up in a different form. In fact, sometimes our love can be the catalyst for immense change in someone else’s life, but their life isn’t going to include you.

And that’s okay. Do you know why? Because your life is going to take a different direction than expected as well.

Quite often, we’ll pursue things (or people) we think we want with every fiber of our being, and are then devastated when things don’t turn out the way we wanted. In reality, that very situation is often a blessing in disguise, even if we don’t see it as such until years later.

You might have been badly hurt – even abandoned – by someone you loved dearly, and it may have shattered you to the core in the moment. But by doing so, they saved you from a life that would have caused you abject misery. They have their own path to follow now, with valuable lessons that they learned through the experience. And more importantly, they have given you the most precious gift of all: freedom from them.

If you were stuck with this person, you wouldn’t have the opportunity to meet and love the others who will come into your life. In fact, these wonderful other folks might have already made an appearance, and are patiently waiting for you to truly see them.

4. Take the initiative to work through the reasons why you believe that love doesn’t exist.

Whether you choose to do your own shadow work, or you do so with the help of a therapist is up to you. The key is to address all the reasons why you’ve come to conclude that love doesn’t exist.

This may involve looking into the shadowy corners that you’ve been avoiding for a long time. It means being brutally honest with yourself and dealing with all kinds of emotions and wounds that have been festering and eating away at you.

You’ll need to ask yourself some intense questions that pertain specifically to the situations that led you to lose your belief in love.

See if you’re perpetuating unhealthy cycles in the hope of changing the past. One common example of this would be dating someone whose personality is similar to what you’ve experienced from an abusive parent or ex-partner. Many people unconsciously gravitate towards people who exhibit similar behaviors towards them, in the hope that this time things will work out differently. That this time, the neglectful person will wake up and acknowledge and appreciate them. Or the abusive person will become loving and kind instead.

Additionally, check in with yourself to see whether you’re still holding on to unpleasant experiences from your past far longer than you need to.

Most of us have had traumatic experiences – that’s part of human existence. The key is whether we’ve learned from those situations and tried to heal past them, or if we’ve held onto them and made them part of our existence.

Are you purposely keeping old wounds open so you can benefit from the victimhood associated with them? Or are you making a point of understanding why those things happened so as not to experience them again in future?

If you’re hung up on crappy experiences with former lovers or awful family members, then take real action to heal from them. Do severance rituals that can help cut lingering ties. Or do something more drastic and move across the country. Make some big changes in your life that define a clear shift from the person you were before to the one you are now.

5. Spend time with those who are truly loving.

One of the best ways to make you rethink your belief that love doesn’t exist is to immerse yourself in the company of those who are sincerely loving.

Think of all the people you know and have spent time with. There’s a good chance you’ve noticed that some of them are far more kind and loving than others. Being in their company might have pulled at your heartstrings because of how sweetly they behaved, or how others thrived in their presence.

These are the people you’ll want to spend more time with.

Limit your exposure to those who spout bitterness and anger, and immerse yourself in the company of those who love and give of themselves generously. Maybe they’re parents who dote on their children, or partners who openly adore one another. Perhaps they’re local elders who do volunteer work for the community.

We are all influenced by those around us, even on a subconscious level. As such, be very discerning with the company you keep. Spending time with bitter, angry people will sow bitter seeds within you, and will attract other spiky weeds in turn. In contrast, being around others who are loving and kind will brighten your spirits and help to open your heart.

Like calls to like, and when you exude love and joy, that’s exactly what you’ll attract in kind.

Work on yourself, be the kind of person you would want to have in your own life, and see what unfolds. There’s a very high probability that it’ll be far more beautiful than you ever expected.

Would you like to believe in love but currently don’t? Talking to someone can really help. It’s a great way to get your thoughts and your worries out of your head so you can work through them.

A therapist is often the best person you can talk to. Why? Because they are trained to help people in situations like yours. They can help you to identify the root causes of your current disbelief in love and be a helping hand as you work through those things.

BetterHelp.com is a website where you can connect with a therapist via phone, video, or instant message.

You might not think your problems are big enough to warrant professional therapy but please don’t do yourself that disservice. Nothing is insignificant if it is affecting your mental well-being.

Too many people try to muddle through and do their best to overcome issues that they never really get to grips with. If it’s at all possible in your circumstances, therapy is 100% the best way forward.

Here’s that link again if you’d like to learn more about the service BetterHelp.com provide and the process of getting started.

You may also like:

• How To Be Open To Love: 8 Ways To Let Yourself Be Loved
• 5 FALSE Reasons Why You Think You Don’t Deserve Love
• 10 Reasons Why You’re Scared To Be In A Relationship
• 13 Reasons For Optimism If You Worry You’ll Never Find Love
• Are Some People Meant To Be Alone And Destined To Stay Single?
• “No One Wants To Date Me” – 11 Ways To Improve Your Chances
• 12 Signs You’re Too Picky When It Comes To Your Love Life

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About The Author

Catherine Winter is an herbalist, INTJ empath, narcissistic abuse survivor, and PTSD warrior currently based in Quebec's Laurentian mountains. In an informal role as confidant and guide, Catherine has helped countless people work through difficult times in their lives and relationships, including divorce, ageing and death journeys, grief, abuse, and trauma recovery, as they navigate their individual paths towards healing and personal peace.

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Is Love at First Sight Real?

A compelling idea, but is there scientific evidence to support it.

Posted January 27, 2018 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma

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• Love at first sight is a strong initial attraction that could later become a relationship.
• Love at first sight is usually one-sided, but the other person may later adjust their recollection and believe they experienced it, too.
• Love at first sight can happen multiple times.

Love at first sight: Is it possible? Do people really meet and in moments simply know they're meant to be? New evidence suggests: Yes, they do.

The idea is wonderfully romantic: Two strangers see each other "across a crowded room," there's an instant attraction , an electric spark, and suddenly they've found their match and never look back. In a world where dating often requires a lot of work—that comes with disappointment, rejection, and uncertainty—falling in love at first sight has strong appeal.

People say it happens all the time. If you start with personal testaments, love at first sight seems like the real deal. Prince Harry reportedly experienced it, saying he knew Meghan Markle was the one for him the "very first time we met" (BBC interview). Portia de Rossi has said pretty much the same about Ellen DeGeneres, as has Matt Damon about his wife, Luciana. Of course, celebrities have no monopoly on the phenomenon; some evidence suggests that about 60 percent of people have experienced it (Naumann, 2004). You probably have friends who swear this happened to them, or maybe you yourself just "knew" in that very first moment you laid eyes on your current partner.

But did it really happen?

Rarely have scientists empirically studied love at first sight, but new research out of the Netherlands offers evidence in support of the phenomenon (Zsok, Haucke, De Wit, & Barelds, 2017). The researchers asked nearly 400 men and women to complete surveys about potential romantic partners immediately after first encountering those individuals. This included indicating their agreement with the statement, "I am experiencing love at first sight with this person," as well as reporting how physically attractive they found the person, and how much passion ( sexual attraction) they felt. Data collection was dispersed across three contexts—online; in the lab (where pictures of potential partners were shown); and in person (where individuals saw each other face-to-face).

With a real-time measure of love at first sight, what exactly did Zsoks and colleagues (2017) learn?

1. Love at first sight isn't just biased memory .

People really do report experiencing love at first sight, or the instant they encounter a person. It's a strong initial attraction that could later become a relationship. One compelling counter-argument—that people have biased memories and essentially create the illusion of having fallen for each other instantly—isn't an appropriate explanation for all cases of love at first sight.

2. You're more likely to feel love at first sight with beautiful people

In this study, strangers were more likely to report experiencing love at first sight with physically attractive others; in fact, one rating higher in attractiveness on the scale that the researchers used corresponded with a nine times greater likelihood that others would report that electric love-at-first-sight feeling.

3. Men report love at first sight more than women.

The researchers aren't sure why this happens, but it begs for more investigation. Might women be less inclined to this experience because they are more selective in whom they might date, as other research has shown? Men might, for example, report this experience with multiple potential partners. But whether this translates into relationships is another question.

4. Love at first sight isn't usually mutual.

A comparison of participant reports of love at first sight showed that it's typically a one-sided phenomenon; this suggests that shared instant love isn't very common. The researchers suspect, however, that one partner's intense initial experience could help shape the other person's recollection, shifting it toward a belief that he or she also experienced love at first sight.

5. Love at first sight isn't really "love."

The kind of qualities that are known to reflect love— intimacy , commitment, passion—are not particularly strong in those first moments when people say they've fallen in love at first sight. At least, these emotions are not experienced to the same degree as they are by people in established relationships. The extent to which people in relationships report feeling intimacy and commitment and passion toward their partners far exceeds reports of these emotions by people who experience love at first sight. Yet the love-at-first-sight experience appears open to these emotions to a greater extent than first meetings where love at first sight is not reported.

In sum, science favors the romantics. Love at first sight actually is experienced by people, but it's not so much "love" or "passion," Instead, it's a strong pull or attraction that makes someone particularly open to the possibilities of a relationship (Zsoks et al., 2017). Love at first sight can happen multiple times, and maybe the instances where it fizzles or simply never translates into a relationship are forgotten. But when love at first sight does launch a sustained relationship, the story is a great one.

Naumann, E. (2004). Love at first sight: The stories and science behind instant attraction. Sourcebooks, Inc..

Zsok, F., Haucke, M., De Wit, C. Y., & Barelds, D. P. (2017). What kind of love is love at first sight? An empirical investigation. Personal Relationships, 24 , 869-885.

Theresa DiDonato, Ph.D., is a social psychologist and a professor of psychology at Loyola University Maryland.

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Does true love really exist?

1. when you open file, please read the file carefully.

2. this research paper need 10 resources. there are 7 resources that you need to find. the rest of 3 sources, you can use whatever source you want. (1) You must use one book source as The Bloody Chamber, one book source you research, at least one article from a scholarly journal, and the fourth source can be either one of your choosing (either book or scholarly journal source) (2) 2 Web/Media sources: (3) 1 Multimedia source:

3. when you write, please don’t use fancy sentences or words. just use plain and easy understanding English.

4. there is a book that you need to use as a source for this research paper. it’s called “the bloody chamber”. you can find stories from this website. http://www.angelfire.com/falcon/rote/CARTER.html you don’t need to read all of the stories. Since i want to use Topic 1 – Does true love really exist? so, all you need to do is read 4 stories only, the bloody chamber, the erl-king, The Tiger’s Bride and the The Courtship of Mr. Lyon Place this order with us and get 18% discount now! to earn your discount enter this code: special18 If you need assistance chat with us now by clicking the live chat button.