The Promise That Love Will Last

What sense are we to make of the promise of love against the contingency of human life? I discuss two replies to this question: (1) the suggestion that marriage, based on the probable success of this kind of relationship, is a more or less worthwhile endeavour (cf. Moller and Landau), and (2) Martha Nussbaum's Aristotelian proposal that we only live life fully if we embrace aspects of life, such as loving relationships, that are vulnerable to fortune. I show that both responses, in different ways, depend on the presupposition that the sense of our promises to love is dependent on our ability to make predictions. The philosophers I discuss assume an epistemological standpoint from which we may attempt to judge whether it is in our general interest to love. I argue that embracing such a perspective by itself leads our attention away from the kind of personal and moral engagement in other people of which our promises to love are expressive. From the perspective of love, the attempt to calculate the risks and gains of loving itself appears as a moral failure to be present to the reality of other people.     

ON A PARADOX OF CHRISTIAN LOVE

The two love commands attributed to Jesus clearly show the basic feature of Christianity as a “religion of love.” However, it may be argued that there is conflict between these commands, so that the Christian idea of love confronts a deep paradox: on the one hand, it takes loving God as the ultimate foundation of loving one's neighbor and loving one's neighbor as the perfect manifestation of loving God. On the other hand, it gives supremacy to loving God over loving one's neighbor, with the result that, in cases of conflict, Christianity has to sacrifice loving one's neighbor to loving God and thus to negate the second great command by the first.     

大学生恋爱状态与外表拒绝敏感性：外表吸引力自我觉知的中介作用

主要探讨大学生恋爱状态（恋爱中或单身）、个体外表吸引力自我觉知与外表拒绝敏感性之间的关系。采用恋爱状态问卷、外表拒绝敏感性量表、拒绝敏感度量表、基于外表的社会比较以及吸引力自评等测量工具,以班级为单位向随机选取的北京、四川以及安徽等地多所高校大学生进行施测,有效被试549人。结果发现：（1）大学生恋爱状态、外表吸引力自我觉知和外表拒绝敏感性之间相关显著;（2）大学生恋爱状态能够显著正向预测外表吸引力自我觉知,也能显著负向预测外表拒绝敏感性;（3）外表吸引力自我觉知在恋爱状态与外表拒绝敏感性之间具有显著的完全中介作用（间接效应值为0.47）,恋爱状态通过提升个体主观评估的外表吸引力,从而降低外表拒绝敏感性。     

Taking the Love Pill: A Reply to Naar and Nyholm

In recent discussions about whether the use of a love pill to enhance love in our romantic relationships is desirable, one argument centres on the question whether this love pill would secure the final value we attribute to love. Sven Nyholm argues that it would not, because one thing we desire for its own sake is to be at the origin of the love others feel for us. In a reply, Hichem Naar argues against Nyholm that a love pill does not need to be incompatible with the final value we attribute to love and that a love pill can have a facilitating role in the creation and sustainment of loving attachment. I think Naar is right but does not address Nyholm's worry completely. I will argue that Naar and Nyholm are speaking of different ends for which the love pill is used as a means, and that whether the love pill would fail or not fail to secure the final value we attribute to love, depends on this particular end.     

Conflicted Love

Our stereotypes of maternity and paternity as manifest in the history of philosophy and psychoanalysis interfere with the ability to imagine loving relationships. The associations of maternity with antisocial nature and paternity with disembodied culture are inadequate to set up primary love relationships. Analyzing the conflicts in these associations, I reformulate the maternal body as social and lawful, and I reformulate the paternal function as embodied, which enables imagining our primary relationships as loving.     

DECEPTIVE LOVE: Kierkegaard on Mystification and Deceiving into the Truth

This article explains and assesses a particular method of loving others that is espoused by Søren Kierkegaard. In his later works, Kierkegaard advocates a kind of deceptive love whereby one mystifies or deceives another person for that other person's own good. The theological underpinning of this mode of love is found in the imitation of Christ. In other words, just as Jesus adopted an incognito, so also Christians should, at times, appear different or lowlier in order to help others by meeting them where they are. After explaining this form of love, I argue that there are considerable reasons not to follow Kierkegaard in his support of outright deception within personal relationships. I conclude with some brief reflections on whether the deceptive structure of Kierkegaard's own authorship is thereby condemned or whether it can be exonerated.     

Limitations to the capacity to love

This paper is a meditation on the potential and problems of establishing and maintaining loving and passionate relationships, drawn from a lifetime of struggling with these issues in the course of doing analysis. It describes interferences with the capacity for mature sexual love as reflecting various psychopathological conditions. These limitations include a variety of psychological restrictions determined most frequently by masochistic, narcissistic and paranoid personality features. Clinical case material illustrates both mature and disturbed capability for love relations.     

The “Loving Parent” analogy

A crucial part of William Rowe’s evidential argument from evil implies that God, like a loving parent, would ensure that every suffering person would be aware of his comforting presence. Rowe’s use of the “loving parent” analogy however fails to survive scrutiny as it implies that God maximally loves all persons. It is the argument of this paper that no one could maximally love every person; and whatever variation there is in the divine love undercuts the claim that every suffering person would be aware of the divine presence.     

SHOULD MARITAL RELATIONS BE NON‐HIERARCHICAL?

The paper explores an egalitarian norm widely accepted today, which I call the Marital Non‐Hierarchy Standard. According to this standard, marital relationships should be non‐hierarchical; neither partner may be more dominant than the other. The Marital Non‐Hierarchy Standard is exceptional: in almost all associations, including many financial, professional, educational and recreational ones, in almost all spheres of life, some hierarchies, within certain limits, are widely believed to be morally legitimate. I argue that in marital relations, too, some hierarchies should be accepted as morally legitimate. It might be argued that marital relations should be loving, and love requires that lovers will have the same degree of power. However, contemporary analyses of love show that love is consistent with (some) hierarchies. It might also be argued that justice requires that lovers will have equal power. However, theories of distributive justice such as Rawls's, Sen's, Dworkin's, and almost all others allow some marital hierarchies. Thus, both the love requirement and the justice requirement allow some hierarchical marital relationships and conflict with the Marital Non‐Hierarchy Standard. Until other justifications for this standard are presented, it is unclear why it should be endorsed.     

Love styles,relationship experience,and sensation seeking: A test of validity

The present study was designed to test the validity of a typology and measure of styles of loving by examining the relationships among love styles, romantic experience and sensation seeking. Male and female research participants completed the Hendrick's (1986) Attitudes toward Love Scale and a measure of sensation seeking and answered a variety of questions about their experiences with romantic relationships. Results provided some evidence of the validity of the measure and conceptualization of love styles. However, questions were also raised about the validity of some of the scales.     

Empirical tests of aspects of a theory of love as a story

We provide empirical tests of aspects of a theory of love as a story. According to this theory, people develop—as an interaction between their personality and their experiences—stories of what they believe loving relationships should be. Examples of such stories are addiction, mystery, police, and travel stories. They then seek out and find greatest satisfaction with partners whose stories correspond more closely with their own. The data from two studies indicate that the theory and instrument have some promise for understanding people's ways of conceptualizing love. In particular, couples involved in intimate relationships tend to share similar profiles of love stories; the more similar the stories of two members of a couple, the more likely they are to be satisfied with their relationship. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Why is loving a thief not the same as loving all men for the Mohists?

The purpose of this article is to explain the Mohists’ perceived inconsistences of the following three propositions in the Mojing since we attribute to them an unconditional love toward human beings: (A) A thief is a man. Killing a thief is not killing men. (B) A thief is a man. Loving a thief is not loving men. (C) Zang is a man. Loving Zang is loving men. The attribution of unconditional love toward human beings is not unusual to the Mohists when we render the Mohist idea of jian’ai as universal love. My interpretation first suggests that we can consistently interpret the Mohist ethical position as intentional utilitarianism. Second, I claim that Mohist universal love includes some generality, though it does not have to mean universality without exception. This Mohist generality will be explained through the generic use of nouns.     

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.     

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.     

Freud's three theories of love in the light of later developments

Evidence is presented that Freud developed three very different theories on love. These theories were not integrated into a coherent theory. In subsequent developments each theory had its own history. The paper discusses the history of the controversy on the genital character, the relation between love and gender identity, between love and narcissism, the hierarchical structure of the capacity to love, and the relation between love and object loss. The impact of some concepts such as symbiosis and the rapprochmente subphase on the understanding of conflicts in loving is raised. While at present differences in emphasis make it difficult to build a coherent psychoanalytic theory of love, it is productive to bring divergent views in touch with each other. A unified theory of love based on psychoanalytic observations is suggested.     

Love In-Between

In this paper, we introduce an enactive account of loving as participatory sense-making inspired by the “I love to you” of the feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray. Emancipating from the fusionist concept of romantic love, which understands love as unity, we conceptualise loving as an existential engagement in a dialectic of encounter, in continuous processes of becoming-in-relation. In these processes, desire acquires a certain prominence as the need to know (the other, the relation, oneself) more. We build on Irigaray’s account of love to present a phenomenology of loving interactions and then our enactive account. Finally, we draw some implications for ethics. These concern language, difference, vulnerability, desire, and self-transformation.

     

Perspectives on Long-Term Relationships

Summary

Loving relationships are developed with the expectation that they will continue. The threat of losing the love of one's mate is so great as to cause feelings of dread. The manner in which a couple characteristically cope with this fear will determine the longevity and quality of their relationship. The behavioral options at the prospect of such a loss are fourfold; viz., changing one's partner, changing oneself, living with the fear or divorcing. Long term, loving relationships can be sustained if each substitutes the illusion of who their partner is for the reality of the personhood of that mate.     

On the difficult case of loving life: Plato's Symposium and Nietzsche's eternal recurrence

A simple but significant historical fact has been overlooked in interpretations of Nietzsche's eternal recurrence. In making eternal recurrence the standard for the affirmation and love of life, Nietzsche accepts an understanding of love developed in Plato's Symposium: love means ‘wanting to possess the good forever’. I argue that Plato develops two distinct types of love, which remain in tension with one another. I then show that a corresponding tension arises in Nietzsche's work when we consider eternal recurrence as the love of life. By making love central in the phrase ‘love of life’, and by allowing Plato's thoughts on love to inform the love of life that Nietzsche expresses in the thought of eternal recurrence, I show that Nietzsche's dramatic presentations of the eternal recurrence do not present us with a test, but in revealing an incompatibility between loving something in life and loving life in its entirety, they present the tragic conflict in the task of life affirmation.