Are Lovers Ever One? Reconstructing the Union Theory of Love

Current analytical philosophies of romantic love tend to identify the essence of such love with one specific element, such as concern for the beloved person, valuing the beloved person or the union between the lovers. This paper will deal with different forms of the union theory of love which takes love to be the physical, psychic or ontological union of two persons. Prima facie, this theory might appear to be implausible because it has several contra-intuitive implications, and yet, I submit, it is more coherent and attractive than it seems to be. I shall distinguish three specific models and thereby offer a differentiated account of the union theory which has not previously been provided in the literature (1). I will claim that two of these models (the strong ontological model and the striving model) should be rejected (2). I shall then defend the third model (the moderate ontological model) against certain possible objections (3); but nevertheless, I shall conclude by showing how this model, too, faces further significant objections which ultimately expose the limits of the union theory of love (4). In conclusion, I will sketch the outlines of a non-reductive cluster theory of love.     

Against Unconditional Love

Abstract While unconditional love is frequently regarded as the best kind of romantic commitment, our commitments in general are not thought to be unconditional. In other contexts, we think conditional commitment (commitment which can in some sense be rendered intelligible by appeal to reasons) to be superior. This paper examines the peculiar status of unconditional love in the romantic context and argues that it is unwarranted; the best kind of romantic commitment should be viewed as conditional. The first part of the paper examines and criticises those arguments which attempt to defend conditional love by appeal to the idea that love is based upon the properties of the beloved. The second part of the paper examines Harry Frankfurt's narrowly subjective conception of unconditional love and highlights certain counterintuitive consequences of it. The final section of the paper argues that the best kind of love will prompt us to adopt two perspectives with regard to the beloved. While loving does involve the narrowly subjective perspective defended by Frankfurt, it also demands that we strive for a more objective perspective, which takes into consideration the reasons we might be able to offer to render our commitment intelligible to others.     

Subject-centred reasons and bestowal love

Speaking roughly, there are two competing accounts of the basis of love. First, the appraisal view: love is based in reasons derived from the valuable properties of the beloved. Second, the bestowal view: love is not based in reasons derived from the valuable properties of the beloved, but love is based in the lover, who then bestows value onto the beloved. While both models deserve due attention, the bestowal model is of present concern. Despite numerous virtues, the bestowal model faces trenchant objections. In this paper, I outline and defend a version of bestowal love, according to which bestowal love is based in the lover’s motivating reasons, and which preserves the virtues while overcoming the difficulties facing bestowal love.     

Reduced cognitive control in passionate lovers

Passionate love is associated with intense changes in emotion and attention which are thought to play an important role in the early stages of romantic relationship formation. Although passionate love usually involves enhanced, near-obsessive attention to the beloved, anecdotal evidence suggest that the lover’s concentration for daily tasks like study and work may actually be impaired, suggesting reduced cognitive control. Affect might also contribute to changes in cognitive control. We examined the link between passionate love and cognitive control in a sample of students who had recently become involved in a romantic relationship. Intensity of passionate love as measured by the Passionate Love Scale was shown to correlate with decreased individual efficiency in cognitive control as measured in Stroop and flanker task performance. There was no evidence that affective changes mediate this effect. This study provides the first empirical evidence that passionate love in the early stages of romantic relationship is characterized by impaired cognitive control.     

Predictors of how often and when people fall in love

A leading theory of romantic love is that it functions to make one feel committed to one's beloved, as well as to signal this commitment to the beloved (Frank, 1988). Because women tend to be skeptical of men's commitment, this view entails that men may have evolved to fall in love first, in order to show their commitment to women. Using a sample of online participants of a broad range of ages, this study tested this sex difference and several related individual difference hypotheses concerning the ease of falling in love. There was mixed evidence for sex differences: only some measures indicated that men are generally more love-prone than are women. We also found that men were more prone to falling in love if they tended to overestimate women's sexual interest and highly valued physical attractiveness in potential partners. Women were more prone to falling in love if they had a stronger sex drive. These results provide modest support for the existence of sex differences in falling in love, as well as initial evidence for links between several individual difference variables and the propensity to fall in love.     

Of lust and love: Beliefs about the role of sexual desire in romantic relationships

Little is known about the beliefs that men and women have about the role of sexual desire in romantic relationships, despite the interpersonal and individual significance of those beliefs. Three experiments conducted with students from a university in the midwestern United States examined both the perceived consequences of sexual desire for romantic relationships and beliefs about the association between sexual desire and romantic love. Men and women believed that dating partners who desire each other sexually are more likely to experience romantic love and other “positive” interpersonal events and less likely to experience “negative” events than partners who do not desire each other sexually, regardless of their level of sexual activity (Experiment 1). Similarly, partners who are romantically in love were viewed as more likely to desire each other than were partners who love or who like one another, and desire was perceived as equally likely to occur in loving and liking relationships; that is, sexual desire did not differentiate these two affective syndromes (Experiment 2). In couples with a mismatched sexual desire pattern, the high-desire partner was perceived as more likely than the sexually uninterested partner to be in love, satisfied, committed, happy, and jealous, whereas the low-desire partner was viewed as more likely to terminate the relationship and to be unfaithful (Experiment 3). These results suggest that sexual desire is viewed as an important feature of romantic love, and that its presence or absence in a dating relationship is believed to have implications for the emotional tenor and interpersonal dynamics of that relationship.     

Sich verlieben und die große Liebe

Although romantic love plays an important role for many people, empirical studies on romantic love have only been carried out recently. This article describes the results of a questionnaire on romantic love completed by 606 volunteers. The results show that nearly everyone has had the personal experience of falling in love at least once. According to the reports in the questionnaire, men and women do not differ with respect to the frequency and to the velocity with which they fall in love. Women, however, more often believe that their respective partner has fallen in love at a relatively early stage, whilst men believe that their respective partner has fallen in love only later. Both men and women exhibit distinct physical and emotional phenomena when they have fallen in love – women more pronouncedly than men. The quality of the relationship between men and women appears to be better if the partners have initially fallen in love with each other. From the point of view of couple therapy, the quality and quantity of being in love appear to be less important than the methods of coping with it, i.e. accepting that the initial romantic love period may not stay forever but must be replaced by another type of love, or accepting that a couple can also have a highly satisfactory relationship, although there was no initial period of romantic love.     

Love, sex roles, and psychological health

College students were administered a series of questionnaires designed to determine the association between psychological health, involvement in a romantic relationship, and the quality of love in a relationship. As predicted, subjects who had been involved in at least one love relationship scored significantly higher on a measure of self-actualization than individuals who had never been in love. In addition, it was found that level of self-actualization directly correlated with the degree of healthy love (Maslow's B-love) among individuals who had been involved in a romantic relationship. Among individuals who had terminated their relationship, those who demonstrated higher levels of self-actualization felt less resentment toward their ex-lover. Furthermore it was discovered that females show a higher level of B-love than males, but contrary to predictions the length of a romantic relationship did not influence B-love. It is concluded that the results of this study are essentially consistent with Maslow's theories about self-actualization, hierarchy of needs, and healthy love.     

Thinking love: Heidegger and Arendt

“Thinking Love: Heidegger and Arendt” explores the problematic nature of romantic love as it developed between Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, whom Heidegger later called “the passion of his life.” I suggest that three different ways of understanding love can be found at work in Heidegger and Arendt’s relationship, namely, the perfectionist, the unconditional, and the ontological models of love. Explaining these different ways of thinking romantic love, this paper shows how the distinctive problems of the perfectionist and unconditional models played out in Heidegger and Arendt’s relationship and how that relationship eventually gave rise to the third, ontological understanding of love. This ontological vision of love combines some of the strengths of the perfectionist and unconditional views while avoiding their worst problems, and so emerges as perhaps the most important philosophical lesson about romantic love to be drawn from studying the lifelong love affair between two of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers.     

Women and men in love: who really feels it and says it first?

A widely held belief exists that women are more romantic and tend to fall in love faster than men. Responses from 172 college students indicated that although both men and women believe that women will fall in love and say "I love you" first in a relationship, men reported falling in love earlier and expressing it earlier than women reported. Analyses also showed no sex differences in attitudinal responses to items about love and romance. These results indicate that women may not be the greater "fools for love" that society assumes and are consistent with the notion that a pragmatic and cautious view of love has adaptive significance for women.     

A Lover’s Shame

Shame is one of the more painful consequences of loving someone; my beloved’s doing something immoral can cause me to be ashamed of her. The guiding thought behind this paper is that explaining this phenomenon can tell us something about what it means to love. The phenomenon of beloved-induced shame has been largely neglected by philosophers working on shame, most of whom conceive of shame as being a reflexive attitude. Bennett Helm has recently suggested that in order to account for beloved-induced shame, we should deny the reflexivity of shame. After arguing that Helm’s account is inadequate, I proceed to develop an account of beloved-induced shame that rightly preserves its reflexivity. A familiar feature of love is that it involves an evaluative dependence; when I love someone, my well-being depends upon her life’s going well. I argue that loving someone also involves a persistent tendency to believe that her life is going well, in the sense that she is a good person, that she is not prone to wickedness. Lovers are inclined, more strongly than they otherwise would be, to give their beloveds the moral benefit of the doubt. These two features of loving—an evaluative dependence and a persistent tendency to believe in the beloved’s moral goodness—provide the conditions for a lover to experience shame when he discovers that his beloved has morally transgressed.     

Love,Value and Supervenience*

Abstract

People are prone to ascribe value to persons they love. However, the relation between love and value is far from straightforward. This is particularly evident given certain views on the nature of love. Setting out from the idea that what causes us to have an attitude towards an object need not be found in the intentional content of the attitude, this paper depicts love as an attitude that takes non‐fungible persons as intentional objects. Taking this view as a starting point, the paper shows why it is difficult to combine with certain views on value. The main challenge comes from the idea that value judgments are universalizable. This view squares badly with the thought that the people whom we love are irreplaceable. Introducing the idea that properties may have different functions in the intentional content of the attitude, this paper determines what precisely it is about love that makes it hard to combine with universalizability. Moreover, it suggests two ways of meeting this challenge.     

Grief's Rationality,Backward and Forward

Grief is our emotional response to the deaths of intimates, and so like many other emotional conditions, it can be appraised in terms of its rationality. A philosophical account of grief's rationality should satisfy a contingency constraint, wherein grief is neither intrinsically rational nor intrinsically irrational. Here I provide an account of grief and its rationality that satisfies this constraint, while also being faithful to the phenomenology of grief experience. I begin by arguing against the best known account of grief's rationality, Gustafson's strategic or forward‐looking account, according to which the practical rationality of grief depends on the internal coherence of the component attitudes that explain the behaviors caused by grief, and more exactly, on how these attitudes enable the individual to realize states of affairs that she desires. While I do not deny that episodes of grief can be appraised in terms of their strategic rationality, I deny that strategic rationality is the essential or fundamental basis on which grief's rationality should be appraised. In contrast, the heart of grief's rationality is backward‐looking. That is, what primarily makes an episode of grief rational qua grief is the fittingness of the attitudes individuals take toward the experience of a lost relationship, attitudes which in turn generate the desires and behaviors that constitute bereavement. Grief thus derives its essential rationality from the objects it responds to, not from the attitudes causally downstream from that response, and is necessarily irrational when the behaviors that constitute an individual's grieving are inappropriate to the object of that grief. So while the strategic rationality of an episode of grief contributes to whether it is on the whole rational, no episode of grief can be rational unless the actions that constitute grieving accurately gauge the change in a person's normative situation wrought by the loss of her relationship with the deceased.     

Let's get serious: communicating commitment in romantic relationships

Are men or women more likely to confess love first in romantic relationships? And how do men and women feel when their partners say "I love you"? An evolutionary-economics perspective contends that women and men incur different potential costs and gain different potential benefits from confessing love. Across 6 studies testing current and former romantic relationships, we found that although people think that women are the first to confess love and feel happier when they receive such confessions, it is actually men who confess love first and feel happier when receiving confessions. Consistent with predictions from our model, additional studies have shown that men's and women's reactions to love confessions differ in important ways depending on whether the couple has engaged in sexual activity. These studies have demonstrated that saying and hearing "I love you" has different meanings depending on who is doing the confessing and when the confession is being made. Beyond romantic relationships, an evolutionary-economics perspective suggests that displays of commitment in other types of relationships--and reactions to these displays--will be influenced by specific, functional biases.     

Love and Entitlement: Sartre and Beauvoir on the Nature of Jealousy

This paper argues that an essential and often overlooked feature of jealousy is the sense that one is entitled to the affirmation provided by the love relationship. By turning to Sartre's and Beauvoir's analyses of love and its distortions, I will show how the public nature of identity can inhibit the possibility of genuine love. Since we must depend on the freedom of others to show us who we are, the uncertainty this introduces into one's sense of self can trigger anxiety and pathological attempts to control those others upon whom one's self‐value depends. In jealousy one tries to possess the other person's freedom in the hopes that a constant positive evaluation can be thereby secured. The belief that one is entitled to the self‐perfection that such affirmation promises reveals both the important existential role that the beloved plays in the jealous person's psychic structure and the manner in which gender inequalities can promote such distortions of love.     

The complementarity of behavioral styles among female same‐gender romantic couples

This study extended previous research on complementarity through the examination of female same‐gender romantic dyads. One‐hundred and forty‐four women (72 couples) completed interpersonal circumplex ratings of their romantic partner and a relationship measure of love and harmony. Results indicated that high levels of relationship quality were reported by participants who were warm and submissive or who had partners who possessed these characteristics. Additionally, members of female same‐gender couples tended to complement each other in terms of dominance but not warmth. However, consistent with past research stressing the unique importance female same‐gender couples tend to prescribe to relationship equality, dyads that contained members who were equivalent in terms of dominance tended to experience high levels of relationship quality.     

Naïve realism without disjunctivism about experience

I argue that the possibility of non-perceptual experience need not compel a naïve realist to adopt a disjunctive conception of experience. Instead, they can maintain that the nature of perceptual and hallucinatory experience is the same, while still claiming that perceptual experience is presentational of the objects of perception. On such a view the difference between perceptual and non-perceptual experience will lie in the nature of the objects that are so presented. I will defend a view according to which in non-perceptual experience one is presented with mere universals, while in perceptual experience one is presented with the instantiation of a universal by a particular. This is to adopt disjunctivism about the objects of experience, about that which is apparently present in experience.     

An Exploratory Study of Individuals in Non-traditional,Alternative Relationships: How “Open” Are We?

An “open” relationship is a configuration in which there is a sexual agreement characterized by implicit or explicit rules for extra-dyadic sexual activities. The general population of those who identify as non-monogamous is largely understudied, as most research in this area focuses on homosexual males. There is also a stigma surrounding those who do not choose to engage in monogamous relationships. Research on open relationships is sparse, and there is a need to examine perceptions of those engaged in this configuration. Even more important is the need to understand the perceptions of those within this community, as gathering information from outsiders is largely biased. This exploratory study examined the perceptions of 122 individuals who have been in or were currently in an open relationship, with a majority indicating that the decision to enter this type of configuration was mutual (73 %). Results demonstrated permissive attitudes when it comes to behaviors that involve engaging with others, as most interactions are not considered cheating. There is also a focus on rules, which need to be followed. With a better understanding of why those in open relationships choose to conduct their love lives in such a manner, and their impressions of how to make their romantic arrangement successful, not only do we get a clearer picture of these relationships, but we promote tolerance for all those looking to experience love.     

Yan Hui's Death as a Threat to Confucius’ Expression of Virtue: A Further Look at the Master's Grief

A striking feature of Confucius’ grief at the death of his beloved disciple Yan Hui is its profound intensity, an intensity detectable nowhere else in the Analects. Like his disciples, the reader of the Analects may be puzzled by the depth of Confucius’ grief in this instance. In distinct accounts, Philip Ivanhoe and Amy Olberding bring some measure of intelligibility to the Master's grief. While partially plausible, I think their offerings on the matter fall short of being fully satisfying. Specifically, I argue that Olberding's proposal that Confucius loses certain developmental avenues after Hui's death should be augmented with the claim that the great depth of his grief largely follows from the importance of Confucius’ expression of virtue in the lives of his disciples. It was Yan Hui who best facilitated his Master's expression of virtue, and with Hui's passing, Confucius loses an avenue to a robust expression of virtue, a loss he laments deeply.