real love does not 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”

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• Franz Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’ and Joseph Conrad’s ‘The Heart of Darkness’. Theme Analysis
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• ‘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/.

• Relationships

Is There Really True Love?

To find true love, focus on giving, not receiving..

Posted December 23, 2017 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

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Is there an emotional bond that deserves to be called true love? Is true love possible? In their 1986 hit song, the Judds sang: “Grandpa, take me back to yesterday ... Did lovers really fall in love to stay and stand beside each other come what may?”

The lyrics reflect the declining stability of marital relationships over four decades. Although the U.S. divorce rate declined slightly three years in a row from 2013 to 2016, typical marriages still have only about a 50% chance of lasting. For years, marriage rates declined, in part because young adults have waited longer to get married. Many say that they don’t intend to ever get married.

The belief that love is true when it lasts is not an outdated concept. In her 2015 song, True Love , Ariana Grande describes how her relationship grew into true love from kisses to a commitment to last forever. But how can a person know that a relationship will last forever? Lovers don’t expect that even a genuine relationship will consist only of passionate positive emotions. In 1960, Buddy Holly’s song, True Love Ways , was released posthumously. Written as a wedding gift for his wife, Holly’s song predicted: “Sometimes we’ll sigh; sometimes we’ll cry ... Throughout the days our true love ways will bring us joys to share with those who really care.”

Looking back on his marriage in his song, Remember When , Alan Jackson recounts the ups and downs over the years: “There was joy, there was hurt ... We came together, fell apart and broke each other’s hearts.” Despite it all, Jackson anticipated: “We won’t be sad, we’ll be glad for all the life we’ve had.”

Do conflicting emotions characterize or define true love? In her 2012 song, True Love , pop artist Pink expresses the mixed emotions of her relationship: “Sometimes I hate every single stupid word you say ... At the same time, I wanna hug you.” In fact, Pink explains: “I really hate you so much, I think it must be true love,” because “nothing else can break my heart like true love ... And no one else can break my heart like you.” Despite hurt and heartbreak, Pink identifies her feelings as true love because “without you I’m incomplete.”

In his song, All of Me , dedicated to his fiancée, John Legend also admits to complex emotions: “You’re my downfall, you’re my muse. My worst distraction, my rhythm and blues.” But ultimately completeness is the core of his relationship: “You’re my end and my beginning. Even when I lose I’m winning, ‘cause I give you all of me and you give me all of you.” Do we know a love is true when we don’t feel complete without our lover?

Research suggests that people share a common image of what it means to be loved. Key characteristics of knowing someone loves you include: support without expectation of anything in return, compassion in difficult times, quality time together, being told you are loved, feeling special and appreciated, and being forgiven for something you did wrong. By contrast, people agree that we don’t feel loved when someone is possessive or tries to control us.

But what does it mean to love with a pure or true love? Research has documented a number of different types of love: eros or romantic, ludus or game-playing, storge or friendship , pragma or logical, mania or possessive, and agape or altruistic . Physical attraction and intimacy are central to eros, permissiveness and variety of partners characterize ludus, companionship and stability are the foundation of storge, and compatibility in social and personal characteristics is the core of pragma. Mania is obsessive, dependent, jealous and intensely emotional, whereas agape is altruistic, all-giving, and selfless with no expectation of love in return.

How we love others can vary for different relationships and in various situations. But does one style of loving represent what we envision as true love? While each style illustrates our yearning to find the right person who will satisfy our need to be loved, one—agape—reveals our capacity for what might come closest to pure love. Rather than being concerned with how a relationship benefits us, agape is focused on the best interests of the one we love. It is the love that puts the other first. Researchers identify this style as one in which a person tries to always help their lover through difficult times, sacrifice their own wishes to let their lover achieve theirs, endure all for the sake of their lover, and suffer in place of their lover.

This love is expressed in Freddy Fender’s hit recording of Before the Next Teardrop Falls : “If he brings you happiness , then I wish you all the best. It’s your happiness that matters most of all.” Beyond the emotional, the essence of this selfless love is behavioral commitment: “But if he ever breaks your heart, if the teardrops ever start, I’ll be there before the next teardrop falls.”

The benefits of agape have been highlighted by research. Selfless caring is associated with deep love, intimate communication, relationship satisfaction, loyalty and commitment. Couples in agape relationships are likely to deal more effectively with stress by supporting each other and by dealing with problems jointly, promoting their sense of “ we-ness .” Employing healthy coping strategies can deepen commitment and strengthen satisfaction with the relationship.

But are there costs to loving in such a selfless way? What are the psychological consequences of altruistic love? One would anticipate that the strong commitment and deep bond would mean great emotional pain if the relationship fails. As expected, research suggests that the end of such a rich committed relationship can result in feelings of profound loss and sadness. The more rewarding the love, the greater loss. Taking the risk of one day having to pay such a price is inherent in the essential nature of agape as all-giving and selfless.

Is it realistic to think that we can love in such an all-giving, non-demanding way? Research suggests that this style is rarely, if ever, fully actualized. It might well be the ideal we can hope for and strive toward. In searching for true love, we need to redirect our focus and energy from receiving to giving. Research shows that those who practice other-directed love are less likely to ever have to pay the hefty price. Perhaps there is such a thing as true love, and perhaps it can last.

Cooper, L. R., & Kurstin, G. (2012). True love [Recorded by Pink (Lily Rose Cooper)]. On The Truth About Love [CD]. New York, NY: RCA Records.

Galinha, I. C., Oishi, S., Pereira, C. R., Wirtz, D., & Esteves, F. (2014). Adult attachment, love styles, relationship experiences and subjective well-being: Cross-cultural and gender comparison between Americans, Portuguese, and Mozambicans. Social Indicators Research , 119 , 823-852.

Grande, A. (2015). True Love. On Christmas & Chill [Digital Release on iTunes]. Republic Records.

Hammock, G., & Richardson, D. S. (2011). Love attitudes and relationship experience. The Journal of Social Psychology , 151 , 608-624.

Heaven, P. C. L., Da Silva, T., Carey, C., & Holen, J. (2004). Loving styles: Relationships with personality and attachment styles. European Journal of Personality , 18 , 103-113.

Hendrick, C., & Hendrick, S. (1986). A theory and method of love. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 50 , 392-402.

Holly, B., & Petty, N. (1960). True love ways [Recorded by B. Holly]. On The Buddy Holly Story , Volume 2 [Vinyl]. New York, NY: Coral Records.

Jackson, A. (2003). Remember when. On Greatest Hits Volume II [CD]. New York, NY: Arista Records.

Keith, V., & Peters, B. (1974). Before the next teardrop falls [Recorded by F. Fender]. On Before the Next Teardrop Falls [Vinyl]. Nashville, TN: Dot Records.

Legend, J. (2013). All of me. On Love in the Future [CD]. New York, NY: GOOD Music.

O’Hara, J. (1986). Grandpa, tell me ‘bout the good ol’ days [Recorded by The Judds]. On Rockin’ with the Rhythm [CD]. New York, NY: RCA Records.

Oravecz, Z., Muth, C., & Vandekerckhove, J. (2016). Do people agree on what makes one feel loved? A cognitive psychometric approach to the consensus on felt love. PLOS ONE . DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0152803

Sharma, S., & Ahuja, K. K. (2014). Does love last forever? Understanding an elusive phenomenon among dating and married couples. Journal of Psychosocial Research , 9 , 153-162.

Vedes, A., Hilpert, P., Nussbeck, F. W., Randall, A. K., Bodenmann, G., & Lind, W. R. (2016). Love styles, coping, and relationship satisfaction: A dyadic approach. Personal Relationships , 23 , 84-97.

Krystine Batcho, Ph.D. , is a professor at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York.

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Why Some People Believe Love Is an Illusion

And Why It's Important to Know That It's Not

Tim Robberts/Stone/Getty

Some people believe that love is an illusion. It’s understandable if they were in a relationship that they thought was a long-lasting one based on true love, but the reality ended up not aligning with their perception. Or if they’ve witnessed friends and family members get hurt when it came to love, so they come to believe love does not exist.

This article explores why love seems like an illusion, why love can hurt, how this belief negatively impacts your mental health, how love is not an illusion, and the positive effects of love.

Why Love Seems Like an Illusion

When we watch romances unfold in the movies, people seem to know quickly they just met “the one” or they overcome obstacles in the span of an hour or two and live happily ever after. That is often an illusion.

At the beginning, we are excited about our new relationships. We believe we’re falling in love. Some of us get lovesick and lust for our new partner. Sometimes we are in the throes of infatuation.

Then, we may begin to struggle. We are figuring out our partner’s habits and learning their imperfections. We begin to argue and feel the effects of conflict and stress. We try to manage the line between being independent and spending time as a couple. We are at the same time learning about this person’s past relationships, current interests and what they want for their future.

As relationships progress, conflicts over politics, finances or values may arise. Frequently there are differences based on two different people’s cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. Then conflicts appear about how much sex each person desires.

Over time, one person may deal with the other’s betrayal and disappointment may set in. Or one person feels like their partner doesn’t appreciate them. Sadly, it is not uncommon for one member of the couple to feel lonely even while being in a relationship .

How This Belief Impacts Your Mental Health

Believing that romantic love isn’t real and that it’s a deception can be quite depressing. While it’s unsettling and upsetting to be let down when a relationship ends, that doesn’t mean love is an illusion.

With a closed or fixed mindset , you don’t expect things to change. Becoming bitter and believing that love is not real will lower your motivation in seeking and maintaining another romantic relationship. It can lead to your losing confidence and to a variety of feelings arising like:

• fear of rejection

Becoming pessimistic means you’ve adapted a negative outlook when it comes to the romance department. Pessimistic thinking can be unhealthy. Positive thinking, however, can help you live longer, become more resilient, improve your immunity, and decrease your risk for heart disease. If you are cynical and expecting the worst to happen in your newest relationship, know that you can actually reduce pessimism and learn how to have a positive outlook.

Instead of clinging to the idea that love is a negative illusion, for example, why not replace that idea with a positive illusion which can actually improve your relationship? A 2019 scientific study found that a positive illusion, namely perceiving your romantic partner and relationship in a positive light and having a positive bias, has great long-term effects.

The study showed that elevating this type of positive illusion resulted in higher relationship satisfaction, fewer doubts and less conflict within the relationship. Thus, it enhanced the longevity of these romantic relationships.

Here’s Why Love Is Not An Illusion

People require social interaction, friendship and community. While romantic love isn’t a necessity, if you look around you, you’ll find romantic love truly exists. It’s far from a fantasy. You’ll see couples who have been together for years and married couples who still love one another after celebrating 50 th year anniversaries.

Love and affection are essential for human development. People need to love and be loved. Oxytocin , often called the love hormone or cuddle hormone, is released when a mother bonds with her baby and in romantic relationships. It is connected to social bonding. Oxytocin is important for sexual arousal, recognition, trust and human connection.

If you believe romantic love is merely an illusion, then it’s important to find out more about real romantic love—a love that is healthy and long-lasting. Hallmarks of healthy romantic relationships include commitment, trust, intimacy and passion.

According to John Gottman , a leading psychologist on marital stability and relationship endurance, sound relationships are defined as having shared meaning, managed conflict, positive outlook, turns toward one another instead of away from one another, and a sense of shared fondness and admiration.

One study analyzed the protective factors in long-term marriages globally through a systematic review. Scientists wanted to learn more about what makes marriages stable and prevents dissolution. Findings showed that commitment acted to preserve the pillar of marriage in tough situations while intimacy helped a couple build identity and satisfaction.

By identifying specific aspects of marriages that contributed to their steadfastness, scientists hoped to better understand how to improve happiness in marriages and lower the rate for divorce.

The Positive Effects of Love

Love greatly influences our quality of life. It’s not only an emotional thing either.   Love impacts both our physical and mental health . Links have been found between love and lower levels of stress and depression. Our risk for heart disease and diabetes decreases and at the same time our longevity increases. Love increases our happiness, self-esteem and resilience. It also encourages healthy habits and lifestyle choices.

While you might have been hurt in past relationships, it’s important to recognize the benefits of love. Relationships and marriages aren’t for everyone. But it might not be too late to find a loving relationship if that’s what you want. Look for one that is marked by sharing, caring, respect, empathy , open communication, trust, and kindness.

Journal, meditate or talk with friends as you delve deeper into deciding for yourself whether love is illusory or real. If you’re still struggling about the issue, reach out to a trusted psychologist or mental health counselor.

Lee, L. O., James, P., Zevon, E. S., Kim, E. S., Trudel-Fitzgerald, C., Spiro, A. 3rd, et al. (2019). Optimism is associated with exceptional longevity in 2 epidemiologic cohorts of men and women .  Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA.  116, 18357–18362. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1900712116

Song H, Zhang Y, Zuo L, et al. Improving Relationships by Elevating Positive Illusion and the Underlying Psychological and Neural Mechanisms.  Front Hum Neurosci . 2019;12:526. Published 2019 Jan 11. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2018.00526

Karimi R, Bakhtiyari M, Masjedi Arani A. Protective factors of marital stability in long-term marriage globally: a systematic review .  Epidemiol Health . 2019;41:e2019023. doi:10.4178/epih.e2019023

By Barbara Field Barbara is a writer and speaker who is passionate about mental health, overall wellness, and women's issues.

Home — Essay Samples — Life — Love Story — Arguments Why There Isn’t a True Love

Arguments Why There Isn't a True Love

• Categories: Love Love Story Personal Statement

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Words: 825 |

Published: Aug 30, 2022

Words: 825 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

Works Cited:

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• Industrial Revolution. (n.d.). Study. https://study.com/academy/lesson/industrial-revolution-definition-facts-causes-effects.html
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• Lubove, R. A. (1965). The professional child: The trend toward economic exploitation of children. Atheneum.
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• United States Department of Labor. (n.d.). A history of child labor.

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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

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

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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.

May 1, 2010

The Illusion of Love

How do we fool thee? Let us count the ways that illusions play with our hearts and minds

By Stephen L. Macknik & Susana Martinez-Conde

On Valentine's Day, everywhere you look there are heart-shaped balloons, pink greeting cards and candy boxes filled with chocolate. But what is true love? Does it exist? Or is it simply a cognitive illusion, a trick of the mind?

Contrary to the anatomy referenced in all our favorite love songs, love (as with every other emotion we feel) is not rooted in the heart, but in the brain. (Unfortunately, Hallmark has no plans to mass-produce arrow-pierced chocolate brains in the near future.) By better understanding how the brain falls in love, we can learn about why the brain can get so obsessed with this powerful emotion. In fact, some scientists even see love as a kind of addiction. For instance, neuroscientist Thomas Insel and his colleagues at Emory University discovered that monogamous pair bonding has its basis in the same brain reward circuits that are responsible for addiction to drugs such as cocaine and heroin. Their study was conducted in the prairie vole, a small rodent that mates for life. But the conclusions are probably true for humans, too, which may explain why it is so hard to break up a long-term romantic relationship. Losing someone you love is like going through withdrawal.

In this article, we feature a number of visual illusions with a romantic motif. We hope that you and your special one will enjoy them. And remember, even if love is an illusion, that doesn't mean it's not meaningful and real (to our brains, anyway).

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POP! GOES MY HEART Nothing is more romantic than curling up in front of a fire with your loved one on Valentine's Day as you lovingly whisper “chromostereopsis.” Okay, maybe it's not as passionate as a sonnet—unless you are a vision scientist. Look at the red and blue hearts and examine their depth with respect to the background. Most people find that the red heart pops in front of the blue background, whereas the blue heart sinks beneath the red background.

This illusion comes about because the lenses in our eyes refract blue light more than red. This phenomenon is called chromatic aberration; another example of this effect is seeing a rainbow when you shine white light through a prism. When both eyes view the red and blue images simultaneously, the cornea and lens of the eyes refract different amounts of the colors. The brain deals with this sensory aberration by imagining depth—the red heart is in front of the blue background, and vice versa—even though none actually exists.

ILLUSIONS THAT MOVE THE HEART Your wandering eyes pull at your lover's heartstrings. In this illusion, the heart appears to move and even pulsate as you look around the image. When your eyes move, they shift the retinal images of the black-and-white edges in the pattern, activating the motion-sensitive neurons in your visual cortex. This neural activation leads to the perception of illusory motion. Notice that if you focus your gaze on a single point, the illusory motion slows or stops.

ILLUSORY NEON HEART Notice that the yellow fields inside the heart seem paler than the fields forming the contour of the heart, which appear to be a darker shade of yellow-orange. Right? Wrong. Actually all the yellow fields in the figure are identical. Any differences that you see are all in your mind. This effect is called neon color spreading, because it resembles the effect of the light spreading from a neon lamp. The neural underpinnings of this effect are not yet understood.

IS LOVE AN ILLUSION? Spanish essayist Miguel de Unamuno said, “Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion.” Is this view cynical or biologically based? Illusions are, by definition, mismatches between physical reality and perception. Love, as with all emotions, has no external physical reality: it may be driven by neural events, but it is nonetheless a purely subjective experience. So, too, is the wounded heart we have drawn here. Where the arrow enters and exits the heart, there is no heart whatsoever, only an imaginary edge defined by the arrow.

This effect is called an illusory contour. We perceive the shape of the heart only because our brains impose a shape on a very sparse field of data. Neuroscientist Rüdiger von der Heydt and his colleagues, then at University Hospital Zurich in Switzerland, have shown that illusory contours are processed in neurons within an area of the brain called V2, which is devoted to vision. The illusory heart even looks slightly whiter than the background, although it is actually the same shade. Much of our day-to-day experience is made up of analogous feats of filling in the blanks, as we take what we know about the world and use it to imagine what we do not know.

A MATCHED SET Is it a broken heart or two people kissing? Both, in the case of this two-piece Newman digital audio player. One for him and one for her.

LOVE AND AMOR Here we see that love and amor are two sides of the same ambiguous object. This sculpture is an ambigram—an artwork or typographical design that can be read from two different viewpoints. Judith Bagai, editor of The Enigma , the official journal of the National Puzzlers' League, coined the term by contracting the words “ambiguous” and “anagram” (many ambigrams feature the same word seen from different directions).

AMBIGUOUS EMBRACES Ambiguity is affected by our frame of mind. In the image on the left, Message of Love from the Dolphins, adult observers see two nude lovers embracing, whereas young children see only dolphins. If you still can't see the dolphins (we promise you they are there), look for more than two. In the image on the right, a Valentine's Day rose predicts the outcome of the evening's festivities.

HIDDEN ROMANCE Ambiguity and camouflage both make it difficult to understand what you are seeing. In this painting by Jim Warren, Seven Hearts , the hearts are hidden in the romantic scenery (upper left). Warren also painted Romantic Day (upper right) and Last Embrace (left).

FOR COFFEE AND TEA LOVERS Yuan yang is a typical Hong Kong beverage mix of tea and coffee and also a symbol of marriage and love. Sculptor Tsang Cheung-shing has united both concepts in a beautiful ceramic work, in which tea and coffee poured from two stylish cups meet in a kiss.

THE SHADOW OF LOVE Almost any object can cast a heart-shaped shadow. For example, love can be seen through rose-colored glasses (left) or writ large (right).

LOVE IS ALL AROUND Romance is not just for humans and prairie voles. Elephants and other animals also embrace the concept.

"True Love Never Dies" And Other Lies We Believe About Love

We have all heard the popular phrase, "True love can't die." No matter how many times it is said, death, divorce, and breakups split even the best couples all the time. Just because someone has their one true love for a while, people change, things happen, and there is no guarantee those feelings will last. For hundreds of years, many have tried to come up with an explanation for love, but they often miss the mark. Here are a few more lies we believe about it and why you should not fall for them.

Love at first sight

"Love at first sight" is a popular concept in fairy tales and movies. It happens when two people, who have never met, suddenly catch each other's eye from across the room and instantly know they have found their match. While many people will claim they knew they would marry their significant other long before their relationship began, that sudden spark does not happen for everyone.

There are countless stories of two people growing to love one another over time and those who felt something intensely at first eventually parting ways. The moral of the story is, do not shrug off someone just because you do not feel drawn to them immediately, and do not believe you will stay with someone no matter what just because of your initial feelings.

Your soulmate is out there

The idea of a soulmate is promising. The guarantee that somewhere out there is your perfect match, one person who will uniquely understand you as no one else will, gives us hope when we ask, "Does true love exist?"

Are soulmates real? While soulmates do exist, it does not mean that there is just one out there for you. In fact, a soulmate is anyone you connect with deeply, whether it is a romantic partner, friend, or family member. Do not get caught up in the idea that you must search for the one you are meant to be with. Soulmates come along more often than you think.

Love means never having to say, "I am sorry"

Whoever spread this idea about love had it all wrong. One of the most important things about love is mutual respect. This includes apologizing when someone gets hurt. People make mistakes, and you can guarantee any couple who has ever truly been in love is no exception. Whether you intend to hurt your partner's feelings or not, it is going to happen. When it does, part of repairing the damage is saying sorry or fixing what went wrong.

This is one of the most dangerous lies about love out there. Love should never hurt, whether that be physical, emotional, or mental. While love is challenging, and painful experiences do happen in relationships, if your partner is constantly hurting you in some way, that is a major red flag of abuse.

If you or a loved one is experiencing abuse, contact the Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). Support is available 24/7.

A partner who does hurt you may apologize. But, if they do not attempt to fix their behavior or repeat their hurtful tendencies time and time again, you need to leave. You might feel like you are letting them down or giving up on them, but your safety and health are the priority.

Love conquers all

We are often taught the fantasy that if people loved one another more, all the world’s problems would be fixed. Unfortunately, love is not always the answer to life's tests. In fact, even couples who deeply love one another often require more.

Relationship counseling is a popular tool to help couples who need more than love to fix their problems, and it saves many failing partnerships. However, in some cases, two people who are still in love do choose to part ways. Not every relationship survives or even works well simply because two people feel a certain way about each other. 

Love is all you need

Knowing that food, water, and shelter are our basic needs, this lie is obvious. Despite this, love is important for your overall well-being, just not in the traditional sense. Self-love is far more important for your mental health and is much more long-lasting than relying on a romantic partner to fulfill you.

Loving yourself is a concept we hear about often, but very few people go out of their way to do it. There are lots of ways to practice self-love. Eating healthy, exercising, meditating, and positive self-talk are just a few. If you love yourself, you will treat yourself with kindness, embrace yourself, and have gratitude for yourself. You will let go of past hurt, guilt, and insecurities too. Growing your sense of self-love will keep you happier and more confident than relying on someone else would.

Time heals all wounds

Time can indeed help heartbreak, but you might need much more. Self-love, self-care, and some one-on-one time with a licensed mental health professional prove effective at helping people overcome painful situations in their lives. In fact, suffering silently with health conditions like anxiety and depression for long periods can result in feelings worsening. While it is nice to think that our problems with love will disappear in time, this rarely is the case if there are no other tools to help.

All is fair in love (and war)

The idea that "All is fair in love and war" implies that when two people are in love, anything goes. This is not the case. Respecting a partner's boundaries is key to any healthy relationship. Just because that person is romantically involved with you, it does not give you a right to talk to them, treat them, or touch them in any way you want (or for you to be talked to, treated, or touched in ways that make you uncomfortable). When in doubt, talk about what is okay and not okay in your relationship to avoid hurt feelings.

Love will find a way

Sometimes we get put in difficult situations in our relationships. For example, when a job change puts two people on different sides of the country. While some relationships can weather just about anything, others need certain conditions to thrive. It is silly to believe that just because two people love each other, they can put aside all their other feelings or obligations. Sometimes, love must be sacrificed for a bigger or more urgent cause, whether we like it or not.

Why it is important not to believe the lies

Although these clichés about  love and lies work for poetry, they do not bode well for real-life advice. This is because they lead us to believe a lot of false ideas about love. Here are just a few of the ideas they spread and why they matter:

They do not tell us about real love

Real love looks different for every couple, and it is a concept that is not easy to write in words. Trying to define love with a lie creates a false idea of what love is or what it could be. The only person who can define what love is for you is you. And your heart will be a better judge than a quote that sounds good or any  symbols of love that quite frankly changes for everybody.

They trick people into unhealthy relationships

Ideas like "Love hurts" and "All is fair in love (and war)" set the stage for the idea that relationships are supposed to be hectic. They minimize the importance of the boundaries, respect, and safety that should be found in all partnerships. Chaotic love is great for dramatic storylines but quickly turns unhealthy in reality. Never settle for a love that needs turbulence to survive.

They lead to heartache

If you start to believe love means never having to say "I'm sorry" or that time heals all wounds, it downplays the importance of real feelings. If someone you love has hurt you, you do not have to ignore those feelings simply because you have been led to believe that is what happens in a relationship. Some love issues need an apology or someone to go out of their way to right their wrongs. Others might need the help of a therapist. Part of  true love is respecting one another, especially emotionally.

They create more lies

Not finding your "soulmate" or not feeling those intense feelings of love, at first sight can often make someone feel like they are doing something wrong when it comes to love. If you have a very rigid idea of what love is supposed to be and you are not finding that, it is easy to get stuck in the thought that you are meant to be alone. This, of course, is not the case. You might have to change your definition of what love is.

Does love exist? Of course, it does, but it is much different from what the lies tell us. These popular (but false) beliefs that have spread over time change and limit actual love. Before you fall into the trap of thinking love is supposed to feel or look a certain way, look in your heart and find the real answer.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

Is it true that true love never dies?

“Love is a symbol of infinity,” “Love is the bridge to everything,” and “True love never dies” are popular quotes about love that suggest true love never dies. Unfortunately, it is technically not true that true love never dies in a romantic love relationship. This is because death, divorce, and breakups are essentially the death of love, silencing the myth that “true love never dies.” True love eventually dies in some form or another. When we lose someone we love, true love, dies. Love dies, and the spirit remains. True love that never dies is one of the many myths and lies about the love we must learn to ignore.

Does love ever die?

Yes, true love can die in various ways, and “True love never dies” is somewhat of a myth often seen in love quotes. When we lose someone we love, true love, dies. Love dies, and the spirit remains. True love also can die when we grow apart from a partner in a romantic love relationship. Romantic love quotes regarding those who live with the love they lost are used to assuage people’s feelings regarding love, including the myth that “True love never dies.”

Does true love exist?

Yes,  science shows  true love is not only possible but can last the duration of one’s life. “Love is a symbol of infinity” and “Love is the bridge to everything” are popular romantic love quotes that emphasize love that never dies. There are psychological elements to true love that influence the longevity of love. What is the meaning of ‘first love never dies’?

The meaning of first love never dies relates to the first person you fell in love with and your first experience with love, which is an experience one never forgets, hence the saying, “First love never dies.” We live with the love feelings we had the first time we fell in love with someone. Does First Love Die?

There is  some truth  to the saying “First love never dies,” as people remember clearly the first person they loved and the pain and hurt caused by the breakup. While people move on from their love, they tend to remember their first love and any true love encountered in their lifetime. However, feelings tend to fade with time and healing, and “First love never dies” is somewhat of a myth beyond remembering those feelings we had for someone we loved for the first time in our lives. What are the signs of true love?

Signs of true love include:

• You often say “we” instead of “I”—true love means seeing everything in life as a team with your partner and not just your individual self
• Making sacrifices for the other person
• You love looking at your partner’s face
• Learning to be a little dependent on your significant other
• Knowing you have some differences, but your core values are the same
• Being physically attracted to your partner

How do you know if a breakup is final?

Some ways you can tell if a breakup is a final include:

• The breakup doesn’t hurt that much
• You don’t miss the love they left behind
• There’s physical distance
• Your friends don’t like your ex very much
• There’s someone new in the picture
• You have strong impulse control
• You have boundaries
• You tolerate negative emotions well

How do you stop loving someone you can’t have?

With love, we must learn we can’t always have what we want. Here are some ways you can stop loving someone you can’t have:

• Engage in hobbies to keep you occupied
• Date other people
• Have a support system
• Limit contact with them
• Journal your feelings

How do you know when love dies?

How does one know that it's true love can romantic love exist for life does true love really happen only once in your life, why does true love fade sometimes.

• What To Do When The Love Is Gone
• Is There A Thin Line Between Love And Hate?

Real love does not exist

You may have heard the phrase in fairy tales or romantic movies, “And they lived happily ever after.” Let me tell you one thing: Real Love Does Not Exist.

There was once a girl called Amanda. She was beautiful, intelligent, shy but very cheerful. And, she was voluptuous. The only problem was, she was head over heels in love with a guy called Xolani, who was also known as “X”. He went to the same school as Amanda. Xolani was the most popular guy at school for his looks, his love of sport and for his love of the girls.

Amanda never told anyone how she felt about Xolani and she never cared about what other students had to say about him. They would say things like, “You know Xolani – he’s got the looks and all that but, hey, he’s a troublemaker and a heartbreaker.”

She would just giggle at this and shake the words from her head. In fact, it just made her love for Xolani grow stronger and stronger.

Xolani never noticed Amanda, no matter how hard she tried to express herself to him, until one day…

As they were busy rotating between classes, they bumped into one another. Amanda dropped her books and Xolani helped to pick them up. As they were both picking up the books – only one was left on the floor and they both stooped to pick it up simultaneously. Neither let go of the book. They gazed into each other’s eye and there was a chemistry between them that neither could explain. Eventually Xolani let go of the book and they parted ways.

Amanda never stopped thinking about what had happened. She was determined to tell Xolani how she felt. Once again, the problem was that she didn’t know where to start because she had never spoken to him before. She was also scared – it was rare for a girl to declare her love for a boy.

On the other hand, Xolani never stopped talking to all his friends about this girl he had met. He then decided to tell the girl – little and lovely Amanda – how he felt. She accepted Xolani as her boyfriend.

After a while, Xolani started nagging Amanda to have sex with him. But she wasn’t comfortable with this. But, as she was scared of losing him – she was so besotted with this guy – she finally agreed.

But, after they had sex, Xolani told Amanda get dressed and go away. Once she’d left, she realised that he hadn’t said “I love you”…

It turns out that Xolani was never interested in Amanda. He only wanted to sleep with her and then to be rid of her. Amanda was devastated and she gave up on her life.

All in all, real love does not exist.

Tell us what you think: Do you think real love exists?

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Can philosophy say that "love" doesn't exist? [closed]

There must be much for a philosopher to say about such a vivid manifold phenomenon as "love"

There are said to be different forms of love: agape (universal love), philautia (self-love), storge (familial love), philia (platonic love), eros (romantic love) and their respective verb forms. On occasion, some are interchangeable, but they are not seen as strong synonyms

The image of love is an ascent motivated by a hierarchy of increasing value for the lover or their beloved. The more erotic the love, the more valuable it is. Two people may say they are "just friends." They may be grossed out by the thought of themselves as "more than just friends." That's because philia does not transcend the "ick" of commitment or intimacy. It's eros that transcends the "ick." It accepts everything about the other, even the "icky" parts of their body. Its unions tend to be wholly faithful or maintained loyally and eagerly

Despite the hierarchy, love, in all shapes or forms, is the joy and sorrow we experience with others or ourselves

Or is it? What if love doesn't exist? Or what if there are no different forms of love? Is there any philosopher that does not believe in the existence of love?

• 6 "I hate to break it to you, but what people calls 'love' is just a chemical reaction that compels animals to breed. It hits hard, Morty, then it slowly fades, leaving you stranded in a failing marriage. I did it. Your parents are gonna do it. Break the cycle, Morty. Rise above. Focus on science." ;) –  CriglCragl Commented May 15, 2023 at 13:18
• 1 'The Prairie Vole Model of Pair-Bonding and Its Sensitivity to Addictive Substances' frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02477 –  CriglCragl Commented May 15, 2023 at 13:40
• 4 "philosophy" can say anything it wants. –  niels nielsen Commented May 15, 2023 at 15:32
• 3 Your "different types of love" are about 3000 years out of date my friend. –  Daron Commented May 15, 2023 at 16:34
• 3 I have no idea what it even means to say that love "exists" or "does not exist". –  Christian Hennig Commented May 15, 2023 at 22:53

6 Answers 6

Well, one might say 'Love is just a word' (YT) .

However, deepities aside, to take an analytical and linguistic approach to answering the question, the term 'love' is polysemous . It has multiple meanings in different contexts, and some of the meanings are themselves contested. This situation of a numerous and contestable polysemy might qualify the term as an essentially contested concept :

The term essentially contested concepts gives a name to a problematic situation that many people recognize: that in certain kinds of talk there is a variety of meanings employed for key terms in an argument, and there is a feeling that dogmatism ("My answer is right and all others are wrong"), skepticism ("All answers are equally true (or false); everyone has a right to his own truth"), and eclecticism ("Each meaning gives a partial view so the more meanings the better") are none of them the appropriate attitude towards that variety of meanings.

Now, does disputations and polysemy mean that something doesn't exist? Well that depends on the nature of existence, which itself an essentially contested concept with thinkers like Meinong, Carnap, Quine, and others advocating certain positions about the nature of existence itself. This is a central question in ontology . Now, according to a nominalist (SEP) love doesn't exist, at least in the physical sense, and is a fiction of sort to describe a certain human experience. But, to other philosophers who have no problem declaring mental phenomena existents, then yes, it does exist, and therefore can be the subject of an SEP article, like this one: love (SEP) .

Philosophy is itself a mode of love or desire — a “love of wisdom” or desire for truth. Therefore love is a key but complicated problematic which ought to be differentiated from other concepts sharply. Love is nevertheless at once haecceity, fugitivity, fugacity; so that it must be sought in the specifics of individuals and situations, since it is a valence or connection that does not pre-exist what it connects. Love is itself manifold — a combination of care, trust, understanding, respect, knowledge…

Love confuses and completes philosophy at once, as politics and psychoanalysis. In Spinoza for instance we find a sublimation of love, as an endless passage between perfections, which characterizes reality itself. So we have the desire for life rather than a normative attachment complex. In Freud we discover our loves have a life of their own, within and beneath us; continuing indefinitely beyond the limits of our conscious knowledge and understanding, leaking through our relationship to signs, expressing itself in our very form of life as a symptom. What Nietzsche called fate demands our love, the very reality of our reoccurrence in a tragic play, which itself must be seen as comic, from a sufficiently remote perspective… In Lacan, we are reminded that nothing is as embarrassing for capital as castration: in the mind of the businessperson who knows the value of everything, the love of a human being is nothing, a zero.

• 1 "Your children are not your children They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself" -Kahlil Gibran. Every businessperson knows, sex sells.. –  CriglCragl Commented May 15, 2023 at 14:43
• 1 I think that the main way people are 'confused' about love is that they are viewing it acquisitively, selfishly, about receiving something. Love is outward pointing, like light streaming from a lamp. It doesn't want anything. –  Scott Rowe Commented May 16, 2023 at 10:28

It is not that complicated. One definition that I find useful is: " To Will The Good Of Another. " This doesn't depend on anything except the ordinary meaning of the words. Anyone can Will , and they can define Good for themselves.

• i agree with this. –  user65994 Commented May 16, 2023 at 0:51

Everything is a frame for how we love others, love thought broadly enough. When this is turned inside out, it can become grotesque.

That doesn't mean we don't love anymore, though maybe we don't in the manner we wanted or even anticipated; such are grotesque things.

http://groteskology.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-grotesques-of-luttrell-psalter.html

If you want to do it the old fashioned way...

Put another way, it sounds like you aren't in love anymore. Best to leave them, and use your last piece of love to do that.

• 1 Looking at anything too long or too hard can change it. If you say the word 'house' to yourself over and over, it becomes completely unrecognizable. But questioning the validity of love is unlikely to improve anything. –  Scott Rowe Commented May 16, 2023 at 10:21
• 1 yeah ai agree @ScottRowe cheers! –  user65994 Commented May 16, 2023 at 10:36
• 1 @ScottRowe people who overuse the word tend not to know what it means for who they are talking about or to. i guess that's one of the sad things about it haha –  user65994 Commented May 17, 2023 at 20:50

The forms of love you list are can be described as passive forms of attraction. In all cases, the subject is passively dependent on the feeling (eg. I love her and I don't know what to do! or I can't love my neighbor! ).

The most representative philosophical approach is debatably Erich Fromm's (cf. The Art of Loving ), which is the opposite to attraction as a passive set of emotions.

Fromm clearly describes true love as a proactive act, rather than a passive emotion. For him, love is acting towards a goal, which implies effort, commitment, and personal development. For example: erotic love, more than a passive attraction (e.g. Uther asking Merlin to make a spell so he can possess Igraine) implies the proactive active, responsible and conscious choice of reaching an intimate union, providing satisfaction and spiritual fulfillment, instead of just obtaining sexual pleasure.

Regarding the "existence of love", feelings or intentions are rational concepts, they cannot be proven nor denied, except metaphysically. If you have experienced some form of love, it just exists for you.

• Ironically, my exposure to the story you referred to comes from a movie made long ago, by Penthouse Pictures. (the famous film Excalibur ) –  Scott Rowe Commented May 17, 2023 at 22:51

When you don't know what love means. Only true Catholics understand what Agape is (John 3:16)! And only true Catholics understand what love within a marriage is like.

• DWAI, i'll leave her :-) –  user65994 Commented May 16, 2023 at 9:34
• 3 This is just the epitome of thinking you're better than everyone else... Also, you quoted a claim from the Bible to support your case, which (a) is just an unsupported claim - anyone can claim anything, this doesn't mean anything until you provide the evidence to back it up, and (b) it mentions God and "the world"; "true Catholics" are never mentioned. And you didn't even bother to try to support your claim about marriage. –  NotThatGuy Commented May 16, 2023 at 11:35
• As it’s currently written, your answer is unclear. Please edit to add additional details that will help others understand how this addresses the question asked. You can find more information on how to write good answers in the help center . –  Community Bot Commented May 16, 2023 at 18:38

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged emotions love sexuality .

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Leo Tolstoy on Love and Its Paradoxical Demands

By maria popova.

Leo Tolstoy (September 9, 1828–November 10, 1910) began tussling with the grandest questions of existence from an early age. As a young man, he struggled through his search for himself , learned the hard way about the moral weight of immoral motives , and confronted the meaning of human existence . By late middle age, his work had gained him worldwide literary acclaim, but had also managed to antagonize both church and state at home — the Russian government found his social, political, and moral views so worrisome that they censored him heavily and threatened imprisonment, while the Orthodox Church was so offended by his spiritual writings that they eventually excommunicated him.

What his homeland withheld the world gave and gave heartily — especially England, where a small but spirited Tolstoy fan base had mushroomed. The author’s devoted secretary and supporter, Vladimir Chertkov, who had landed in London in 1897 after being exiled from Russia, invested his resources and his enthusiasm for Tolstoy’s writing in the Free Age Press — a visionary publishing outfit he founded in Dorset, as spiritually and morally idealistic as Tolstoy himself, dedicated to promoting “reason, justice, and love” and “spreading the deepest convictions of the noblest spirits of every age and race.” The Free Age Press operated from the belief that life has an essential spiritual dimension and that “man’s true aim and happiness consists in unity in reason and love in place of the present insane and unhappy struggle which is bringing and can bring real good to no one.”

The Free Age Press was also a pioneering model for a culture built on sharing rather than ownership and on the understanding that sharing itself is what gives rise to culture. Their original mission statement read:

We earnestly trust that all who sympathize will continue to assist us in circulating these books. No private person has benefited or will benefit financially by the existence of The Free Age Press; the books are issued free of copyright, so that anyone may reprint them who wishes; and any profits made (necessarily small) will go to assist the same work in the Russian language. For the hundreds of kindly letters received from all parts of the world, and the practical help in publicity which has enabled us to circulate upwards of 200,000 booklets and 250,000 leaflets since July 1900, we are very grateful, and tender our hearty thanks.

The press began publishing Tolstoy’s spiritual and moral writings — works bowdlerized or entirely unpublished in Russia in his lifetime — standing as a powerful testament to Neil Gaiman’s assertion that “repressing ideas spreads ideas.” Among the most widely circulated of these works was Tolstoy’s On Life * ( public library ), originally written as Tolstoy approached his sixtieth birthday in 1888.

In one of the most poignant chapters of the book, Tolstoy examines our gravest misconceptions about love — what he bemoans as “the confused knowledge of men that in love there is the remedy for all the miseries of life,” which stems from our insufficient curiosity about the true meaning of our lives. At the center of his argument is a conceptual parallel to the ethos of the Free Age Press — the insight that sharing only increases the sum total of goodness; that the ownership-based impulse to withhold diminishes it; that love, in its grandest sense, is never a zero-sum game wherein the love we extend to one being is at the expense of another.

Every man knows that in the feeling of love there is something special, capable of solving all the contradictions of life and of giving to man that complete welfare, the striving after which constitutes his life. “But it is a feeling that comes but rarely, lasts only a little while, and is followed by still worse sufferings,” say the men who do not understand life. To these men love appears not as the sole and legitimate manifestation of life, as the reasonable consciousness conceives it to be, but only as one of the thousand different eventualities of life; as one of the thousand varied phases through which man passes during his existence. […] For such people love does not answer to the idea which we involuntarily attach to the word. It is not a beneficent activity which gives welfare to those who love and for those who are loved.

Our self-harming delusions about the nature of love, Tolstoy argues, spring from our over-reliance on reason, which is invariably an imperfect faculty and can be led astray by our misbeliefs. (His compatriot Dostoyevsky had addressed this in a beautiful letter to his brother half a century earlier.) Tolstoy writes:

The activity of love offers such difficulties that its manifestations become not only painful, but often impossible. “One should not reason about love” — those men usually say who do not understand life — “but abandon oneself to the immediate feeling of preference and partiality which one experiences for men: that is the true love.” They are right in saying that one should not reason about love, and that all reasoning about love destroys it. But the point is, that only those people need not reason about love who have already used their reason to understand life and who have renounced the welfare of the individual existence; but those who have not understood life and who exist for the welfare of the animal individuality, cannot help reasoning about it. They must reason to be enabled to give themselves up to this feeling which they call love. Every manifestation of this feeling is impossible for them, without reasoning, and without solving unsolvable questions.

Tolstoy turns to the central paradox of reconciling our inherent solipsism with the ethos of universal love. (Twenty years later, he would explore these issues in his little-known correspondence with Gandhi , with whom Tolstoy shared a profound spiritual kinship.) He writes:

In reality every man prefers his own child, his wife, his friends, his country, to the children, wives, friends, and country of others, and he calls this feeling love. To love means in general to do good. It is thus that we all understand love, and we do not know how to comprehend it in any other way. Thus, when I love my child, my wife, my country, I mean that I desire the welfare of my child, wife, and country more than that of other children, women, and countries. It never happens, and can never happen, that I love my child, wife, or country only. Every man loves at the same time his child, wife, country, and men in general. Nevertheless the conditions of the welfare which he desires for the different beings loved, in virtue of his love, are so intimately connected, that every activity of love for one of the beings loved not only hinders his activity for the others but is detrimental to them.

In a passage that calls to mind Hannah Arendt on the humanizing value of unanswerable questions , Tolstoy considers the inquiries that result from this paradox:

In the name of which love should I act and how should I act? In the name of which love should I sacrifice another love? Whom shall I love the most and to whom do the most good — to my wife, or to my children — to my wife and children, or to my friends? How shall I serve a beloved country without doing injury to the love for my wife, children, and friends? Finally, how shall I solve the problem of knowing in what measure I can sacrifice my individuality, which is necessary to the service of others? To what extent can I occupy myself with my own affairs and yet be able to serve those I love? All these questions seem very simple to people who have not tried to explain this feeling they call love — but, far from being simple, they are quite unsolvable.

Out of these unanswerable questions, he suggests, arises an awareness and, finally, an acceptance of the multiplicity and variousness of love. This, in turn, furnishes the understanding of love’s essential nature not as a hypothetical conceit but as an active state of being — or, to borrow the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hahn’s term, “interbeing” with others — necessarily grounded in the present moment:

The demands of love are so many, and they are all so closely interwoven, that the satisfaction of the demands of some deprives man of the possibility of satisfying others. But if I admit that I cannot clothe a child benumbed with cold, on the pretence that my children will one day need the clothes asked of me, I can also resist other demands of love in the name of my future children. […] If a man decides that it is better for him to resist the demands of a present feeble love, in the name of another, of a future manifestation, he deceives either himself or other people, and loves no one but himself. Future love does not exist. Love is a present activity only. The man who does not manifest love in the present has not love.

On Life is a spirit-rousing read in its totality. Complement it with Tolstoy on personal growth , human nature , how to find meaning when life seems meaningless , what separates good art from bad , and his reading list of essential books for every stage of life , then revisit the great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm on what is keeping us from mastering the art of loving and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s timeless experiment in love .

* Curiously, the 2009 digital edition of On Life by an English publisher called White Crow Books bears this affront to the spirit and explicit anti-copyright ethos of the Free Age Press: “All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction, in any manner, is prohibited.”

— Published September 9, 2016 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/09/09/leo-tolstoy-on-love/ —

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The Top 40 Reasons Love Does Not Exist

Many people don’t believe in love and believe that love doesn’t exist.

Prior to attending our Awakening to True Love Workshop , here are the top 40 reasons love does not exist:

1. If you fall in love with someone it is only based on your perception of that person at the time. It is unrealistic to think they could be like that in real life. When you find out, the love you had fades away.

2. Love is lust’s wanting to own and control someone else for regular source of sex supply.

3. Being in love is the same chemical reaction in humans as eating a volume of chocolate.

4. Love is a repackaging of a system that justifies manipulation and control to get what you want from someone else.

5. Love victimizes the person in a relationship that is weaker.

6. Love is an excuse used to encourage someone to play the martyr in the name of love.

7. People are selfish, so they use love to get what they need.

8. People who are in long-term relationships only survive because one of them gives up and gives in to make it last.

9. Love brings nothing but pain and disappointment.

10. Love can bring happiness but only for a while, then it fades and disappears altogether.

11. If you deeply love someone else, they will disrespect you and always be looking for someone else to make them feel good, no matter how hard you try.

12. If people could commit and keep their word, love could be possible, because they cannot, it is not.

13. My parents said they loved each other, got married, had us, were never happy and are divorced. There is no such thing as love.

14. Scientists have proven there is no such thing as love. It is a chemical reaction in the brain associated with the hormone called Oxytocin.

15. Since there is no concrete definition of love, what it is, what it means, two different people could not plausibly share the so called, “love.”

16. The feeling of love may last for a moment, but not for long, then it’s time to move on to the next one.

17. Long-lasting love isn’t anything more than a fairy tale told by fantasizing mothers to their daughters.

18. One’s ability to love changes with their moods, so there is no such thing as true love. You love when you feel good, not so much when you’re not feeling good.

19. Love requires trust. Since you cannot ever really trust anyone else, you can’t have love.

20. Look at the rate of divorce, it tells you love is not real.

21. People who are married for a long time fake it to make it.

22. I won’t ever love somebody, because I am honest. No one can love an honest person. If you want love, you must be a liar.

23. Back in the day they came up with the idea of love an marriage as a way to survive on the farm. Now, we know better.

24. If anyone could have loved me, I would believe. Since no one could do it, I don’t believe in it.

25. I believe I can love someone but cannot believe anyone can love me, like I can love them, so there is no love it if it is one-sided.

26. If you fall in love with someone, get ready to have your heart broken, lose everything and never believe in love again.

27. Being in love with someone is foolish and dangerous. Only an idiot would fall in love, and I’ve been an idiot more than once. Not doing it again.

28. Love is an outdated dream, that cannot be realized in modern times.

29. Men do not have a capacity or capability to love, so cross-sexual love is not possible.

30. The idea of love is inside your head and cannot be realized in real life. Love is an illusion.

31. You can love everyone, or no one, but you will never find “the one” you can love forever. That is ridiculous.

32. Love is not love, it is an addiction. You can’t help looking for love because you’re addicted to it, and you will never find enough of it to satisfy once an for all.

33. People fall in love with things that fade with the time and end up being in love with what doesn’t exist (or may have existed earlier).

34. If you’re saving your love for the perfect person, forget it no one is perfect.

35. Why does everyone even talk about love? It’s just a word you say, when you want to get laid.

36. Love implies commitment. No one can commit to anything in our disposable society today.

37. In humans, love is polyamorous. To expect monogamy from a species designed to enjoy multiple partners is just wrong.

38. True love is really only lust that morphs into friendship and may be survivable in the long run, if you’re willing to lower your expectations.

39. Love is a government imposed scam to create more taxpayers and consumers.

40. There is no such thing as love. If true love were possible, you wouldn’t be asking me that question, would you?

Why do you think love doesn’t exist?

See you at the Soulmate Wizardry event.

49 thoughts on “The Top 40 Reasons Love Does Not Exist”

29 is the usual anti male drivel always spewed out from the mouths of women…it goes both ways…women cannot love either as love does not exist in reality it is a big commercial lie to perpetuate vast profits. Cherish..care for someone if you like and be with them for ever like some other species do…but like most apes…we live to mate…survival of the fittest..not line the pockets of commercial con artists who use the word cynically. Read Sperm Wars by Robin Baker. Only one can and should be loved..GOD THE POWER.

Thanks! It’s a kind of misunderstanding!

Indeed couldn’t agree more

I would kindly disagree. How can you ever love anything outside of you, if you don’t try and love yourself first? Love is really just about wanting the best for something. To see that something for what it really is, not for all of the illusions we wrap up around it. If we can’t strive to do something so simple for ourselves, I am not sure we would ever know how to truly extend outside of our own being. We all have a huge blindspot when it comes to ourselves, just like we do in our physical eye. Our mind is always trying to fill it in just like it does physically. But those who love us can have a different perspective. They can see around that spot we can’t see around ourselves.

Just my two cents..

loving yourself means absolutely squat… doesnt matter how much you do, you still wont find true love…

IS THIS A GROUP OF IDIOTS! THIS IS ALL I THINK AND WHAT HAPPENED TO ME (replace i and me to the page writers name) HALF OF THIS SHIT IS FALSE

And you are not a correct man. How can you say that dear?

I do love myself, but that doesn’t mean I’m a lovable person. A wise women once told me, love is just lust in disguise

I completely agree with this.

Songs of experience.

Yah! Absolutely correct!! LOVE IS JUST AN ILLUSION!.

agree ! true love only gained when we die! death is a true answer ! we get powerful when we die !

can i die now why the fuck do i still live

You live to achieve your own life goals. I’m only starting to realize that now. I was stupid to let myself fall in love with someone.

Ya I realized it now…need to love myself there is no such thing as love we come alone go alone…do something that makes us best so when we die we die in peace.

Yes, i agree, there is no true love etc just peoples come together for accomplish some selfish purpose, if purpose accomplish their love vanish.so we see more than90 per love marriages finally ended in divorce.10 per continue because they make compromise,

I want to die too.

Once you know that love is not real and death is not to feared you can truly live. Celebrate, be, and do to fullness of your being.

I wanna die too pal. Your not alone

Thank you for this article. I think you’re a genius. It makes sense to me. If love does exist, it’s probably quite rare. I agree with numbers 8 and 21 because I’ve become aware of marriages like that. It’s not because anyone admitted it, but because I’ve noticed it by chance and was surprised. It’s better to be practical and realistic regarding relationships to avoid disappointments and not assume it’s real, special or guaranteed. I feel better after reading this article because it’s opened my eyes.

It’s an illusion on planet earth. In heaven in exists except for the thousands of angels who gave it up and got kicked out for ruining love. Then they came to earth and ruined us. When the earth is restored it will exist again because those who believe in love will live in it and have it in their hearts. But it doesn’t exist anymore in this God-forsaken hole. Satan ruined it with his sick devices like television which destroyed unity and corrupted people’s minds.

kosher monotheism doesn’t make any sense either

Agreed. It’s just a word used to sell things.

Great article!!! I do appreciate this. Always hated the optimists :))

Wow, someone’s hurt. Jesus.

Lolol.. okay.. this comment made my day

Oh shut the fuck up! Nobody’s hurt, idiot! This Artical is genius And U are Not!

Look, if love was real why woould you abandon them? Love is appearantly a feeling where you want to be with them forever. Someone can say they’re in love but then they cut the person they “love” off. It’s a very empty word with no meaning other than strong sexual attraction. Or emotional. Its simply just yet another empty ohrase people use to make others happy. Its manipulative and it doesn’t matter how many times one says it, in the end theyre just going to move on to the next person to be with. People claim I’m a pessimist about it, bit honestly thisnis just realistic facts no one likes to think about because they cannot deny it. I’m sorry, but try and prove me wrong.

If someone does that to you, it isn’t love :l

So wrong. Our creator Yahuah actually is pure love. You are just evil.

HELLO DEAR, SORRY TO SAY! But, You are misunderstanding. They are not wrong. Actually Love doesn’t exist in this world. The love which you truly received is from heaven not Here! That’s why it’s say only pure Heart see God!

I agree that God is love. And it exists in the world, but not in its purest form. What does exist comes from God. Only he can exercise true love because he is LOVE.

I came to this page because I am feeling the pain so brutally and the illusion. But yes.. I guess that this frustration is supposed to lead us to the fact that there is One who does love.. Yhwh.. our God.. oh my goodness.. there would be no other reason to live but this.. and yes.. goals.. learning to love is the ultimate goal.. but it does seem so true that the more honest we get.. people absolutely hate to love honest people.. real people.. emotional people.. caring people.. this world has become cold and cruel.. “Because of the increase of lawlessness.. the love of most will grow cold.. but those who endure to the end will be saved!” Before you want to die.. find yourself a 24/7 house of prayer.. international house of prayer.. any house of prayer for that matter.. you might find a few awesome people trying to love honestly.. very good choice for a gathering place.. still messed up people.. just trying people.. a few are still trying.. I know that it is hard to believe.. just very badly wired brains these days.. only the bravest souls to seek their God to unwind it :).

I “love” this!

TOTALLY AGREE Especially the addiction aspect. With “love” you loose your identity, burn holes in your wallet, you are in a constant obsessive thinking space. And you push your old friends away. Just like drug addiction It makes a lot to sense. And every old married couple act more like they hate each other but feel that it’s too late to divisive haha. It’s sad really. I pity people who believe in “love”

True love is a big scam

We, adult human beings, MOSTLY need sex. The moment something is wrong in the sex department, GOODBYE Honey!!! And the person doesn’t matter anymore!!! Very sad but VERY TRUE!!!

I agree. I hate how Disney/ fairytale have controlled women to think true love exist when in reality it doesn’t exist. Love is only powerful because we give power to it by constantly saying it and thinking it. Yes you can love your children but the whole “the one” no… it’s just an illusion people tell themselves to be comfortable.

Love or the occurences some people associate with it at least exist in theory/fantasy. The practical part seems to fail completely.

However after reading the comments, as a rational thinker i come to the assumption, that honest and rational people have the highest chance to have a good friend- or relationsship, as long as they stay honest and rational. Don’t confuse this with “love”.

I also don’t care much about my life, as it will end anyways, but maybe some people commenting here should contact each other or make a WhatsApp group, because people, who consider life rationally, start and proceed on a complete other basis regarding friend- and relationsship. I think, that most of you just need a similar minded character to find more pleasure in social interactions, because most sheep out there are following the common illusions including the so called love to fail over and over again. If you left this illusional “desert”, your mind is “back” to reality, hence you just need an exchange of “information”, that is capable of being “real”, especially the understanding that we are responsible for our “hapiness” ourselves.

Just ironic, how similar thinking people drop the same thoughts here without even thinking about to proceed exchanging more thoughts. Unthinkable a “few” years ago and now just equivalently ignored like the person from number 11 in the article, that is uninteresting, because of the permanent availability…

Love exist… actually true love exists but it comes with it’s own seeds like trust, patience, honesty well even though rust is their after sexs men their is that one woman you feel like, and now that’s love you like and love her at heart

Wow I actually enjoyed reading about this page and comments people are making.. am in a dilemma here it does not make sense indeed if someone claim to love a person and think cant exist without that person. The next thing they leave that one person who meant the whole world to them. But then the thought of being alone at the end because of not believing in love is also scary.

I couldn’t disagree with this article more, but I respect your opinions and what you feel.

The cigar theorem: “a woman is just a woman but a good cigar is a smoke” thus I love a good cigar thus love exists. QED

Lust is a biological thing Love is an emotional thing, Humans are emotional beings; we love to “love” others ( not necessarily romantic) When it comes to love that based on romantic relationship or what we generally call love relationship, we consider it something different.. when it’s not, you cannot love someone if u think u and ur partner are sex objects to each other, if u have enough respect & faith in someone and ur person does the same to u, love is possible there.Unfortunately most relationship & marriage have no proper bondings what builds upon respect… It’s difficult to respect someone with whom u r having sex for most people, for others the need & ego come firsr in every aspect of their life, for few it’s impossible to control the sexual urge with multiple person, on the other hand few couple have zero similarly still try to be together or act they’re happy …thus love is gone from this planet long time ago..it makes me sad

I believe love does exist and doesn’t at the same time. It seems like all of you have been hurt, especially the person who wrote this. Throughout life you can’t help to think about finding “the one”, but that does not make you a fool because everyone has this dream but that dream does not make you delusional. What you all need is self love and that my friend is real, trust in the process for time heals all and that exists.

Facts. It’s nothing more than a feeling of possession. We operate better when we don’t have feelings for one another. Our “love” is rarely mutual. Ppl also forget that a person that can make you feel absolutely INCREDIBLE has the power to make you feel absolutely MISERABLE! So screw all of the love stuff because it’s nothing but emotional codependency and with CONDITIONS. Usually it’s only within the conditions that you restrict love to them and a few others, whereas when you’re single, you’re not concerned with love and nobody has emotional control over you.

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• Human Relationships

Does Unconditional Love Really Exist?

By Emily Anthes

For the last three years, scientists in South Africa have been trying to unravel a grim marine mystery: What was happening to the Cape fur seals?

The boisterous marine mammals, which are common along the nation’s shores, began washing up dead in enormous numbers. Pregnant females delivered dead premature pups. And some seals began displaying unusually aggressive behavior, attacking humans, dogs and each other.

Some scientists suspected that a neurotoxin produced by algae might be to blame. In recent weeks, however, another specter has come into focus: rabies.

So far, 17 seals have tested positive for the virus , said Tess Gridley, a founding director of Sea Search Research and Conservation, who has been investigating the seal deaths. The cases, which date back to at least August 2022 and span hundreds of miles of coastline, may be the first sustained rabies outbreak ever documented in marine mammals.

“What I’m doing here is sitting here and putting together all the reports of aggressive interactions between seals and dogs and seals and people in the past few years,” Dr. Gridley said. “And it’s telling quite a scary story .”

Rabies, which is nearly always fatal once symptoms occur, spreads through the saliva of infected animals . So far, no human cases have been reported, but, according to Dr. Gridley’s tally, at least 72 people in South Africa have been bitten or scratched by Cape fur seals since 2021; eight have been bitten by seals since confirmed to have rabies.

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4 takeaways from President Biden’s Oval Office address

Domenico Montanaro

President Biden speaks during an address to the nation about his decision to not seek reelection in the Oval Office at the White House on Wednesday. Evan Vucci/Pool/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

For the latest on race for president, head to NPR's Election 2024 page.

It’s not often that a politician takes a step back.

They are often their own biggest champions. But in rare cases, when the writing is on the wall, because of age, health — or politics, they do.

In an address to the nation from the Oval Office Wednesday night, President Biden said he will serve out his term as president, noting there are still things he wants to accomplish. But he explained that he is not seeking reelection, in part, because he wants to “pass the torch to a new generation.”

Here are four takeaways from what Biden had to say:

1. Biden tried to send the message that no one person is bigger than the country — and that what America stands for is at stake.

“Nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy,” Biden said. “That includes personal ambition.”

It was a remarkable statement for Biden, 81, who has held public office for more than half a century and ran for president multiple times — unsuccessfully until Donald Trump came along — and was ushered into office at 78 years old, the oldest person ever to be elected president.

Biden's brand was overcoming obstacles. But this one, he couldn't beat

Biden invoked past presidents — Abraham Lincoln, he said, urged Americans to “reject malice;” Franklin Delano Roosevelt implored the country to “reject fear.” He cited George Washington, who, by stepping aside after two terms despite his popularity, “showed us presidents are not kings.”

“I revere this office,” Biden said, “but I love my country more. It's been the honor of my life to serve as your president, but in the defense of democracy, which is at stake, I think it's more important than any title.”

In other words, Vice President Harris gives those who see former President Trump as an existential threat to that democracy the best chance to win because of Biden’s diminished capabilities to prosecute the case against him.

It's a case that Biden sees as necessary for someone to make effectively, considering Trump's unwillingness to accept the results of the 2020 election and his refusal to agree to accept the results of the upcoming election.

6 political takeaways from Biden's decision to step aside

In Washington’s farewell address on Sept. 19, 1796, he also warned that “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

“The great thing about America is,” Biden said, “here, kings and dictators do not rule; the people do.”

Biden and others see that foundational American principle as lost on someone like Trump, who, when he visited Mount Vernon, Washington’s estate in Virginia, in 2019 with French President Emmanuel Macron, said of the nation’s first president, per Politico :

“If he was smart, he would’ve put his name on it. You’ve got to put your name on stuff or no one remembers you.”

2. Biden desperately wants to be seen as a uniter, but that’s been a struggle for him as president — and maybe one of his biggest personal disappointments.

President Joe Biden pauses before he addresses the nation from the Oval Office of the White House in Washington on Wednesday about his decision to drop his Democratic presidential reelection bid. Evan Vucci/Pool/via AP hide caption

The president cited the need for unity among Americans multiple times:

“America is going to have to choose between moving forward or backward, between hope and hate, between unity and division.” “In this moment, we can see those we disagree with not as enemies, but as fellow Americans.” “The sacred cause of this country is larger than any one of us, and those of us who cherish that cause … a cause of American democracy itself, [we] must unite to protect it.” “So I've decided the best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation. That's the best way to unite our nation.” “Let's act together, preserve our democracy.”

The idea of uniting the country is something Biden ran on in 2020. But it hasn’t worked out that way. He’s been sharply criticized by the right and views of him — in this hyperpolarized environment where people get their information largely from sources that reinforce their previously held beliefs — are as partisan as any president before him, including Trump.

Just 43% said they had a favorable view of Biden, according to an NPR/PBS News/Marist poll taken before the debate between him and Trump. That included just 38% of independents and only 10% of Republicans.

3. This is the start of a review of Biden’s legacy — and that views of it may take a long time to set in.

Biden defended his legacy and laid out what he believes he’s accomplished and what he still hopes to do.

“I believe my record as president, my leadership in the world, my vision for America's future, all merited a second term,” he said, “but nothing, nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy. That includes personal ambition.”

Poll: Presidential race hits a reset with Harris vs. Trump

The latest NPR poll , taken this week after Biden said he would not continue to run for reelection, tested what people think of his presidency. It showed most, right now, are unimpressed.

Despite the record of legislative accomplishments Biden cited, only slightly more than a quarter of respondents said he would be remembered as an above average president or one of the best presidents in U.S. history. Half said he would be remembered as below average or one of the worst.

Those views can change with time, especially when a president is no longer in the political arena. President Obama’s favorability, for example, has improved since leaving office and views of his signature legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act, have hit record highs.

A 2022 survey of historians found Biden rated as the 19th best president of the 46 that have served. Trump was in the bottom five at No. 43. But, at this point, Americans overall, feel differently.

4. After seeing Harris for a few days, the contrast with Biden is clear.

Vice President Harris speaks to supporters during a campaign rally at West Allis Central High School on Tuesday in West Allis, Wis. Jim Vondruska/Getty Images hide caption

Biden could have made the determination years ago, after saying he would be a “transitional” president during the 2020 election, that he would not run for reelection.

But the realities of his personal limitations after his dismal debate performance last month, and how his political support had cratered in swing states led to this moment.

Biden had a problem with young voters. Can Harris overcome it?

Trump tries out attack lines on Kamala Harris as her campaign heats up

For years now, Democrats have been holding their breath with every public appearance he made. They crossed their fingers that he would acquit himself at least decently well, but they knew one bad speech, interview or… debate… could sink his — and their party’s — chances to hold onto the White House.

After watching Harris' first couple of days of campaigning, from her first speech before staffers to her first official campaign rally in Wisconsin, Democrats have been breathing a bit easier.

She has spoken clearly and coherently, and there has been energy from the grassroots. Whether that lasts or if it resonates with swing voters is still to be decided.

Biden didn’t explicitly lay out Wednesday night why he stepped aside, but watching what was an, at times, halting address, the contrast was like night and day.

It was very much a moment in history with a president, who appeared in many ways, to be delivering something of his own farewell. He was recognizing he cannot be as effective a campaigner as he would have liked, so he is taking a step back from the public eye, handing over the reins of the campaign to his vice president for the next 103 critical days in American democracy.

• Election 2024