is true love fantasy or destiny essay

The Concept of True Love Definition Essay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Faulkner, William. “Rose for Emily”.

Dahl, Roald. “Bitch”- Switch bitch”.

Joyce, James.”Araby”.

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

Millay, Edna.“Love Is Not All”

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2019, November 2). The Concept of True Love. https://ivypanda.com/essays/true-love/

"The Concept of True Love." IvyPanda , 2 Nov. 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/true-love/.

IvyPanda . (2019) 'The Concept of True Love'. 2 November.

IvyPanda . 2019. "The Concept of True Love." November 2, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/true-love/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Concept of True Love." November 2, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/true-love/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Concept of True Love." November 2, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/true-love/.

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• “The Lesson” and “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
• “Out, Out” by Robert Frost

Does Love Really Exist, or Is It Only a Fantasy?

Ashley Rose

Every human heart longs to find love, to live in love, and to die having felt loved. As much as we may denigrate love or deny its existence, we always seem to dream about that place where we can find it.

Man cannot live without believing in love, and our constant search for it has led us to seek evidence of its existence and to ask others to give us irrefutable evidence of its reality. Love not an illusion, nor a fleeting intestinal emotion that time knows how to finish. But unfortunately, we often search in others that which we should be nourishing within ourselves.

That’s the first big mistake: looking for love in others but not inside oneself or in one’s own conviction. We believe that it is up to others to convince us that this is not a fantasy, and only when they make this tangible do we come to the conclusion that we are not just living in some wonderful fairy tale. We often deny a very simple truth: love exists in everyone who believes in it, because that in itself a sign of its presence. Formation, guidance, and the onset of emotional maturity are needed in order to turn an exaltation of the senses and emotions into a conscious decision to seek the good of another – a decision which nothing or nobody can change in one’s heart. When you truly love, and when that love is the product of conviction, there is no human power that can make us regress into seeking only what we want for ourselves. In that sense, love cannot be conditional (“If you’ll love me, I’ll love you” or “I’ll treat you as you treat me”). Regardless of the sorrow that exists to some extent within each person, when true love blossoms, it is able to remain in spite of adversity; he who loves does not allow external factors to affect the quality of that which he offers.

But what of those who, in their desire to test the power of a love given to them, demand “evidence” of it? A few points:

2. Any requested “test” of love is nothing more than a veiled form of manipulation.

3. “If you give a mouse a cookie, he’s going to ask for a glass of milk.” There will always be more and more demands for shows of love. It’s never enough.

4. When the requested test is sexual in nature, women should remember that ease of her response comes at the expense of becoming an “easy girl.” The same “test of love” becomes a test of your integrity.

5. Even within the context of true love, one can say “yes or no” and not feel obliged to acquiesce to immoral or unreasonable demands. In this, sincerity and a desire for the good of the other is what counts.

To love is the vocation of every human being, and it is for love that we are created; it is our beginning, our middle, and our end, but because of that endless desire to experience love, we can fall into the trap of believing that anything is valid in order to attain it, including trampling on others. One does not build a life on the ashes of another. Whoever denies others the right to love denies himself, for love does not exist in a vacuum.

It is essential to understand that love consists of the mutual buildup of one person to another, and each becomes a means to reach the purpose of their existence (the other half is not mine; I am a medium for him). It is no longer just about not doing to others what we would not want them to do to us, but rather, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” In order to exist, love must go beyond pure sentiment and emotion; it must rise above the challenges and upsets we face each day.

Only love can give orientation to our lives, spare us from a sterile existence, fulfill our inmost being, and eternalize us in time. Whoever wishes to be must love, for he who loves becomes a reflection of God.

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The Ordinary Concept of True Love

Brian D. Earp, Senior Research Fellow in Moral Psychology, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford

Daniel Do studied cognitive science and philosophy at Yale University and is the co-founder of Cortex Education.

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

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

1. Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.1. Three Hypotheses

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

1.1.1. Hypothesis 1: Prototypicality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.1.2. Hypothesis 2: Goodness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.1.3. Hypothesis 3: Realness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Experimental Studies

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

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

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

2.1. Study 1

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

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

2.1.1. Method

Open science..

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

Participants.

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

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

In the main section of the survey, participants read about a hypothetical relationship between Mario and Jasmine. Each participant was presented with one of sixteen conditions, which varied along four dimensions—intimacy, passion, commitment, and realness. See Table 1 .

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

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

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

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

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

2.1.2. Results

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

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

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

The effect sizes for each factor on judgments of prototypicality and true love are depicted in Figure 1 . The panel on the left shows the degree to which each factor impacted people’s judgments about prototypical love; the panel on the right shows the degree to which each factor impacted judgments about true love.

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

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

2.1.3. Discussion

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

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

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

2.2. Study 2

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

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

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

2.2.1. Method

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2.2.2. Results

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

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

Figure 2 shows the results for all three variables. Looking at this figure, one can get a more qualitative sense of the patterns in people’s judgments. For example, consider the puppy love vignette. In that vignette, almost all participants thought that the relationship was a very good one (i.e., the vast majority of points are toward the right-hand side on the x-axis). However, even among these participants, there was considerable disagreement about whether the couple had true love (as seen in the large amount of spread on the y-axis). Judgments of these cases were then predicted by realness (shown in the color of each point). That is, even among participants who agreed that the relationship was a good one, those who thought the couple were experiencing something real tended to say that they had true love, while those who thought that they were not experiencing something real tended to say that they did not have true love.

Scatterplot showing results from Study 2. X-axis shows goodness. Y-axis shows true love. Color shows realness.

2.2.3. Discussion

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

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

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

3. General Discussion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3.1. Differences and Disagreements

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

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

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

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

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

3.1.1. Disagreement about Fulfilling Criteria

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

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

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

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

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

3.1.2. Disagreement about the Criteria Themselves

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

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

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

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

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

4. Conclusion

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

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

5. Appendix (Study 2 Vignettes)

5.1. puppy love.

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

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

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

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

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

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

5.3. Age Gap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lasting connection and intimacy take work

Julia Childs Heyl is a clinical social worker who focuses on mental health disparities, the healing of generational trauma, and depth psychotherapy.

Maskot / Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

Take the Love Quiz

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

Characteristics of True Love

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

Lauren Consul, LMFT

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

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

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

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

How does true love feel?

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

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

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

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

How do I find it?

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

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

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

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

Maintaining True Love

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

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

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

Francesca Maximé, somatic psychotherapist

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

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

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

Keep in Mind

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

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

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

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

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

Stop Waiting for Your Soul Mate

Love isn’t destiny. That’s what makes it so sweet.

“ How to Build a Life ” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.

D o you believe in true love? Probably so: 94 percent of Americans say they do, according to one 2019 survey by the data-collection company Statista. I am one of them, after 30 years of marriage to my true love.

True love isn’t too controversial, I think. But a large portion of Americans also hold some even more romantic—and less realistic—beliefs about love. According to a 2017 survey run by the dating site Elite Singles, 61 percent of women and 72 percent of men believe in love at first sight. Back in 2011, a Marist poll asked , “Do you believe in the idea of soul mates, that is two people who are destined to be together?” To this question, 74 percent of men and 71 percent of women answered “yes.”

Read: Would a soul mate fix your anxiety right now?

To many of those who believe in them, these widespread, almost magical notions of romance might be the essence of true love . Others might say that a more earthbound approach to romance is better—that true love over the long haul is a combination of good luck, free will, and hard work. The evidence shows that the latter group is correct. What’s more, engaging in fanciful ideas about romantic love can make it harder to find and keep.

Want to stay current with Arthur's writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.

M any studies have shown that popular culture and media tend to portray love and romance unrealistically, leaning disproportionately on love at first sight and living happily ever after. Research on Disney’s animated movies, for example, shows that the majority of them rely on exactly these themes. These films may, in turn, influence children’s and young adults’ views about romance. A 2002 study on 285 unmarried undergraduate students (both women and men) found a strong correlation between the time they spent watching television programs related to love and romance and how much they expressed idealistic expectations about marriage. A 2016 study found that tween girls who had recently watched a movie depicting a love story were more likely to “endorse idealistic romantic beliefs” than those who had watched a non-romantic movie.

Read: How rom-coms undermine women

Despite its popularity in stories and movies, love at first sight has little to do with reality. Researchers have found that what people describe as “love at first sight” has no connection to the real hallmarks of true love, including passion, intimacy, and commitment. Rather, “love at first sight” is either a phrase people use about the past to romanticize their meeting (notwithstanding the way it actually happened) or one that they use to describe exceptionally strong physical attraction.

Even though it’s a fantasy, believing in love at first sight is relatively harmless for couples. That’s because it’s a retrospective narrative, not one that sets expectations about the current relationship or the future. Other idealistic but unrealistic beliefs can do a lot of damage. Take the idea of romantic destiny, or “soul mates”—the belief that two people are deliberately brought together by unseen forces. Research on hundreds of college students has shown that such expectations are correlated with dysfunctional patterns in relationships, such as the assumption that partners will understand and predict each other’s wishes and desires with little effort or communication because they’re a cosmically perfect match. In other words, a belief in destiny leads to a belief in mind reading.

Read: The (re-)invention of the soul mate

This wreaks havoc on relationships. For one, it hinders forgiveness after a fight (“You should know what bothers me without me having to tell you!”), which in turn increases distress and escalates the severity of conflicts. Researchers have also found that people who believe in destiny are more likely to end a relationship via “ ghosting ,” in which one partner abruptly cuts off contact, leaving the ghosted partner to suffer a breakup with no explanation. Perhaps people in search of their soul mate feel less of a sense of responsibility to the other person if that particular relationship simply wasn’t meant to be.

The opposite of “destiny beliefs” is a conviction of free will—the view that partners decide whether they should be together, and thus, that they are responsible for the relationship’s success. Lest that sound a bit unromantic, researchers have found clear evidence that when the belief in free will increases, so do one’s feelings of passionate love in a relationship.

From the March 2008 issue: The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough

Fundamentally, destiny beliefs in romance commit the “arrival fallacy ”: the belief that once a certain circumstance is attained, all will be permanently well. Believing in soul mates is functionally the same as believing that if you get a certain job, achieve financial independence, or move to a sunny place, you will have true and lasting satisfaction. Nothing is more human than this belief, which keeps us hopeful in spite of our negative experiences. But it is a recipe for unhappiness. We cannot attain permanent satisfaction—at least, not in this mortal coil—and waiting for it will leave us disappointed over and over again.

I f you’re searching for the right relationship, you can avoid the pitfalls of destiny beliefs in three ways. First, remember that Hollywood doesn’t have your love interests at heart. When you indulge in a romantic comedy, consider its source. According to the U.K.-based Marriage Foundation, “A-list” screen stars have a divorce rate of 52 percent within the first 16 years of their first or subsequent marriages, more than 10 points higher than the rate after the same length of time among even the divorciest cohort of Americans, who wed for the first time in the 1970s; more than 20 points higher than Americans who wed for the first time in the 1960s; and 21 points higher than the U.K. average. Not even the creators of the movie can achieve the standard they are promoting. Enjoy the occasional rom-com as entertainment if you must, but do so in the way you do science fiction, because it is about as realistic.

Second, work deliberately to make sure that your romance grows beyond the white-hot flame that characterizes new love. Maintaining passionate love forever after is not only an unrealistic goal, but one that wouldn’t make you happy even if it were possible. On the contrary, the most joyful, enduring romances are those that are able to evolve from passionate to companionate love—which still has plenty of passion, but is fundamentally based in deep friendship. To increase the odds of success, as your romance progresses, don’t ask yourself, “Is our passion as high as it was?” but rather, “Is our friendship deepening?”

Read: The kind of love that makes people happiest

Finally, ask any potential partners about their destiny beliefs right from the start. Someone who says he is looking for his “soul mate” or who confesses to believing in love at first sight might seem wonderfully romantic at the outset, but a few weeks or months down the line, he’ll be disproportionately likely to be unable to forgive you for not reading his mind, or to suddenly become unreachable by voice, text, DM, or email. Looking for a realist is a better bet.

E nduring love is not some kind of cosmic switch, turned on once and for all by mysterious forces. Rather, it is a dial that we can turn up over time by the commitments we choose to make and keep to one another. Romantic love is very much like any other important pursuit: Success comes from our ongoing effort; satisfaction from a job well done.

Read: The first lesson of Marriage 101

“Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,” Shakespeare wrote in his 116th sonnet, “But bears it out even to the edge of doom.” True love goes on and on, along sometimes bumpy roads. Challenges and low points are not evidence that partners are not meant to be together; rather, they are inevitable, and opportunities for growth. Long-term romance is such a sweet adventure precisely because it is not destiny.

Synthesis and Argument Writing: Is True Love Fantasy or Destiny?

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Description

Every English teacher needs new ways to teach argument, rhetoric, and analytical writing. The Inquiry-Based Synthesis Essay is here to save the day!

This argument essay is designed to help you out in a quick fix OR to teach in-depth rhetorical analysis. The essay can be scaffolded up or down, from highly difficult and challenging to ELL and SpEd friendly. In a nutshell: The essay question asks students to develop an argument about the question: is true love fantasy or destiny? Their job is to read the sources (articles, videos, etc.) provided, annotate them, look for evidence that supports each side, choose a side, and then finally compose an essay arguing to answer the question.

It's also a great addition to any curriculum you have for any of the following novels:

The Great Gatsby, Romeo and Juliet, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Anna Karenina, A Room with a View, The Phantom of the Opera, The Princess Bride, The Scarlet Letter and more!

Here's what you're getting:

೦ An easy to read Teacher Lesson Plan with an overview of the assignment and a daily implementation plan

೦ A single-page essay prompt sheet for students to use to break down the question and do initial brainstorming. Here is a preview of the prompt:

Love has been the subject of storytellers from Dr. Seuss to Shakespeare. It’s across every channel on TV, in almost every book you’ve read in high school, and it haunts the high school hallways with question marks every single day. When it comes down to it, we must come to terms with the idea of “true love”. You have been given a mission: read, analyze, and annotate the readings, then, based on all of the evidence you’ve accumulated and observed, make a decision and answer the question below:

According to the articles and readings provided,

is the idea of “true love” simply a fantasy, or something we are destined to find?

೦ A list of TEN specially curated sources for this particular question. Explore articles, videos, Ted Talks, infographics and more that all offer rich perspectives in answering the question "Is true love fantasy or destiny?" Each source is screened, hand-picked, and valuable for class discussion, homework assignments, and even small group work.

೦ An "evidence tracker" graphic organizer for students to use while reading and examining sources. Students keep track of evidence and which side of the argument is getting stronger as they read deeper and deeper into the ten different sources.

೦ TWO different essay outline options including clear directions and definitions for each part of a strong body paragraph. This product uses common core language (claim, subclaim, evidence, etc.)

೦ ALL sources are provided to you, the teacher, in Google Docs format. This means that you are free to edit, change, and customize each and every handout to meet your own personal teaching style. Also, you can assign this easily on Google Classroom OR simply print the handouts as-is.

Questions? Feel free to ask in the Q&A section!

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Dystopia Common Core Bell Ringers: Your First Five Minutes Done!

Shakespeare Bell Ringers - Your First Five Minutes Done!

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Book Review Essay: “Real Love: Essays on Psychoanalysis, Religion, Society” by Duane Rousselle

Review of  Real Love: Essays on Psychoanalysis, Religion, Society  by Duane Rousselle, Atropos Press, 2021 154 pp. 

I’ve always thought My Bloody Valentine’s (1991)  Loveless  was a strange album. There is something about the disjunction between the Word ‘Love’ on the album cover and the discordant rhythms of the chiming guitars that saturate it. For myself, that saturation speaks of a conception of love as a perpetual presence of failure and loss. However, this is not a pure absence—as if love is merely not ‘there.’ No, it is more about how love – in any relationship – constructs its very fiction from the repression of a necessary failure. Moreover, what we experience as love is the very phantasmatic distortion itself. As we know, psychoanalysis teaches us that discovering this imaginary distortion is repulsive in most instances. When confronted with our fantasy, we are rightly disgusted. However, what  Loveless  did (in my view) was invite us – through its sheer beauty – to explore distortion as love: to examine how we positivise loss in creating fictions for relationships.

To be sure, it’s a cliché to talk about love being at the centre of academic exploration as a type of noble ideal we have lost and thus need to recover. Certainly, many theoretical excursions note how Plato placed love at the centre of philosophical exposition. And yes, there is certainly a need to return to love as a valid topic of exploration. Jean Luc Marion’s (2008) phenomenological commentary on the erotic phenomenon comes to mind, as does the early work of Anders Nygren (1953). Still, we need to ask if our recovery method changes the object we seek.

Duane Rousselle’s work makes a welcome return, avoiding the cloying, overly optimistic pop psychological expositions that we see hawked at Waterstones in the mind-body-spirit section,[1] which sees love in prosaic teleological utilitarian terms: Love as synonymous with meaning and happiness (Rich, 2016). He avoids such clichés precisely by problematising the proposed methodology for exploring love from the outset. He does not set out to give a systematic account of what love is philosophically or empirically. To do so would lock us in the distortion precisely by trying to clarify its density. Rather, he explores love as a symptom that appears in a diversity of ‘social bonds’ that are necessarily incomplete. He thus provides a set of snapshots to help us start thinking about love again. Snapshots precluding trite theories that conflate it with a flattened hope or a truncated passive determinative ontology. What Rousselle aims at in these explorations is a recovery of love as an interruptive moment. This interruption is associated with Being’s incompleteness and thus a site of potentiality. It is important to note that Rousselle is a trained Lacanian psychoanalyst and sociologist from the outset. These conceptual tools are drawn on thoroughly throughout.

The first chapter is an exposition of the necessity of belief in love. He explains that love occludes reason and that any writing about it has to start from  a posteriori  rationalisation that stretches out from impossibility. This formula of impossibility as love stems from the Lacanian dictum that a woman is a symptom (of man), (Lacan, 1974, p. 29) and the non-sexual rapport from Seminar XX (Lacan, 1999, p. 6). He gives an exposition of Genesis to expound on this point. It is – in essence – transportation of the one-all-alone in the singularity of the body toward the Other as the basis for the social bond in all its fragility. Throughout this chapter, Rousselle shows the character of the rest of the book; he explores the valences of love in theological reflection, societal observation, and the unconscious. What is most important – for me, as someone who studies theology, psychoanalysis, and mystical theology – Is that his theological exploration avoids the traps of Christian theology by moving beyond Badiouan overly Pauline formulations of Love (Badiou, 2003, 2012). He shows that an Islamic/psychoanalytic exposition on love here is just as necessary, if not more so.

Chapter two demonstrates how the logic of lack operates within the symbolic networks of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Broadly speaking, he shows how Judaism operates with belief as a neurotic instance that gives a place for doubt as repression within the same language game of Judaism itself. In Christianity, he shows that it operates via the logic of disavowal and perversion. So, whereas the space inherent in the symbolic allows a believer to doubt within Judaism, the doubt is thrust upon God himself in Christianity. God himself is an absence, and the perverse work of the Christian is about recreating this loss of loss (as affective castrative logic), which we see in the logic of apophatic theology. Finally, he gives an exposition of Islam, where it operates via the logic of foreclosure. Here there is a relationship to absence that involves the lack of the network to inscribe absence itself. Hence, faith itself – and thus love – has a relationship to certainty that simply does not cohere with the Judaic and Christian iterations. The most salient point in this chapter is how love and its constitutive lack operate. Rousselle speaks about loving from lack (what he calls the place of a non-haver) and a love that positivises lack as an object protecting the subject from the trauma of love. He ends the chapter by articulating the courage that if the choice is between love-in-certainty—as opposed to old Christological loving in doubt—and not loving at all, we should have the courage to do the former.

In chapter three, there is an exposition on love concerning communication and contemporary sociological theory. Rousselle speaks about the sociological theory of code concerning society and its ability to link with the other. Specifically, he gives an account of how love is not just a transient object within the multiplicity of codes constitutive of society. No, he shows that love is the primordial void upon which decisional structures are thus instantiated. He ends the chapter by suggesting that a return to love is based on certainty as the ground of communication. I found this a somewhat difficult and nuanced chapter, as it gives a sociological grounding to a concept that can become mired in philosophical positioning. Indeed, what is love if we do not have a contextual framing in which its operation flows?

Chapter four opens by positing how modern capitalism destroys the subjective experience of love as excess. Rousselle demonstrates how the contemporary subject steps into love as a type of commodified contractual experience. Remaining consistent with the aforementioned trauma of love as a type of wound that appears as the grounding of communication, he states that the Lacanian notion of the laughing saint shows what it means to navigate love in the modern world. At this point, he gives a wonderful exposition of the film Joker (Philips, 2019) building on Daniel Tutt’s recent arguments (Tutt, 2019). This subject creates a name for himself out of the certainty of delusion and navigating between experiences of love that can either force him into capitalist discourse – as the mere navigation of contractual objects – or an overwhelming boundless love as sinthomatic potentiality. In short, Rousselle is giving an exposition on the functionality of the sinthome as the minimal coordinates via which the social bond can maintain itself. Real love is not about hoping for a future to passively arrive at us but about creating possibility by actively destroying our given world limitations. Falling into love can look nihilistic – most things that descend look nihilistic; all falling looks negative – but in such a falling, a new kind of determination of the Real appears, for which we have to take responsibility. This is a determination that involves the creation of a new name. And new names always involve new worlds.

The fifth chapter is basically a summary of the argument mentioned above. This is a short but dense book, with chapter 3 being the most challenging. There are some parts of the work that feel a little disjointed. However, this in and of itself is completely overshadowed by the sheer originality of the work and its ability to engage in the late Lacan – concepts that are used only within the practicality of the clinic at the moment – and utilise them in a modern sociological context. Indeed, we see that in much modern social and philosophical theory, the Lacanian heuristic devices most utilised are those found up to – but no further than – Seminar XX.

Rousselle is doing important work here and is venturing into a difficult landscape whereby talking of sinthomes, singularities, the ones-all-alone, and the lathouse means that he will ultimately create a new symbolic we need to navigate. Rousselle does this elegantly and demonstrates that where a Christocentric and Eurocentric Žižek resides in the middle Lacan,’ he – in contrast – shows that an inventive use of Islam allows us to venture further into the latest Lacan (Žižek, 2000, 2016; Žižek & Milbank, 2009). In this sense, he is following an important path mapped out by scholars such as Stefania Pandolfo and others who are bringing Islam and Lacanian theory into dialogue with one another. (Pandolfo, 2018; Parker & Siddiqui, 2018)

Bibliography:

Badiou, A. (2003).  Saint Paul: The  foundation of universalism . Stanford University Press.

Badiou, A. (2012).  In praise of love  (N. Truong, Trans.). Profile Books.

Lacan, J. (1974).  The seminar of Jacques Lacan. R.S.I. 1974-1975. Seminar XXII.  (C. Gallagher, Trans.; 1st ed.). Lacan in Ireland.  https://www.lacaninireland.com/web/translations/seminars/

Lacan, J. (1999).  The Ssminar of Jacques Lacan book XX: On feminine \sexuality the limits of love and knowledge 1972-1973  (J.-A. Miller, Ed.; 2nd ed.). W.W Norton & Company.

Marion, J.-L. (2008).  The  erotic phenomenon . University of Chicago Press.

Nygren, A. (1953).  Agape and Eros . Westminster Press.

Pandolfo, S. (2018).  Knot of the  soul: Madness, psychoanalysis, Islam . University of Chicago Press.

Parker, I., & Siddiqui, S. (2018).  Islamic  psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic Islam: Cultural and clinical dialogues . Routledge.

Philips, T. (2019).  Joker  [Film]. Warner Bros.

Rich, A. (2016).  Self-love: Start  loving yourself and change the world . Create Space Independent Publishing Platform

Tutt, D. (2019, October 9). A Lacanian reading of Joker.  Daniel Tutt . https://danieltutt.com/2019/10/09/a-lacanian-reading-of-joker/

Žižek, S. (2000).  The  fragile absolute  (1st ed.). Verso.

Žižek, S. (2016).  Against the  double blackmail: Refugees, terror and other troubles with the neighbours . Penguin UK.

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[1] Waterstone’s is a popular bookshop in the UK.

Mark Gerard Murphy  is an editor for the political journal and blog Taiwan Insight and a visiting lecturer at St Mary’s University, Scotland, Gillis Centre, convening courses on ethics, philosophy, and mystical theology/spirituality.

He completed his PhD in 2019 at St Mary’s University, which examined the similarities and differences between the spiritual direction of John of the Cross and the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan. It aimed to show how the practice of 16th-century Spanish spirituality was markedly similar to the ethical vision of Lacan’s work in clinical psychoanalysis. At the core of the thesis was an examination and critique of the ethical problem of religious experientialism—and its relationship to 21st-century consumerism—within the practice of modern spiritual direction and mystical theology.

Publication Date:

May 20, 2022

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Vol. 9, No. 1, 2022

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• Publication Date

Gerard, M. (2022). Book Review Essay: “Real Love: Essays on Psychoanalysis, Religion, Society” by Duane Rousselle. European Journal of Psychoanalysis , Vol. 9, No. 1.

The Diversity of Love

Our Love Destiny in Life

Do we have a choice in love? Or is love really our destiny that we need to realize and follow?

Throughout history, folklore, literature, and art have portrayed romantic love as a mysterious connection between two people. People could not explain this feeling through rational thinking, logic, or reason. It seems there is some kind of “magic of love.” Such a mysterious force of love is love destiny or fate.

What Is Destiny?

Beliefs in destiny have been part of the cultures of many societies for hundreds of years. The term came from the Latin verb “ dēstināre ” which means “to determine.” The word refers to a powerful supernatural force that determines what happens in people’s lives. It is an unknown cosmic or divine superpower.

The modern term “destiny” commonly describes a preset and unavoidable future occurrence, experience, or outcome. The word also refers to the powerful force that determines them. Instead of natural causation , people believe in supernatural causation, which is responsible for the events. People can understand natural causes and generally control them. However, people cannot comprehend supernatural causes, and they are beyond their control.

“Fate” is just another word that people use to describe the meaning of the word “destiny.”

The belief in destiny has endured throughout time and cultures. Destiny  has often been personified and represented as a person, idol, or other natural thing with supernatural power. It was often a goddess who possessed the power to determine the course of events in life.

The psychological phenomenon of “hindsight bias” easily explains the belief in love’s destiny. In other words, this is the “knew-it-all-along” phenomenon when people overestimate how predictable past events were. This is a psychological illusion of predictability. Hindsight bias misrepresents memories of what has occurred.

What Is Love Destiny

A belief in fate and destined love implies that we have just one predestined real love with a single person for life. According to this belief, we have a prospective partner who is destined for us.

The men and women who are waiting for the strike of true love are faithfully waiting for such a “magical” moment. Romantic novels and movies beautifully depict this “special” moment when a mysterious spark strikes the heart.

When a man or a woman is already in the state of being in romantic love, they have a magical experience that they have waited for and loved this person their whole life.

• They feel a tacit sense of love destiny.
• They realize they haven’t chosen their beloved.
• They believe that unknown fortune, like fate, brought them this blessing of love.
• They suddenly experience this impulse of natural attraction that comes from some supernatural force.
• They call it “love destiny.”

“He believes it was his destiny to be there that day so that he could meet her—it was meant to be.”

According to the “love destiny” myth, men and women are predestined (or not predestined) to fall in love with someone. They do not choose to love someone; love destiny predetermines whom they fall in love with—once and for the rest of their lives. Romantic love ideals suggest that love is an unpredictable force and an unknown reality.

Romantic lovers deem that they have only one person in the world who is truly predestined for them. That person is their soul mate for life, with all their strengths and weaknesses. They believe it is better to “follow your heart than your head.” All these things are possible for true love, and it will find its way and endure forever.

Do You Believe or Not in Love Destiny?

Romantic ideals of predestined love have endured throughout the centuries. They were the sources of ultimate happiness, drama, and tragedy. Belief in destiny is a kind of “superstition.” Science often teaches us to abandon superstitions as scientifically invalid. Shall we do this in love?

However, such idealistic beliefs can be useful in life. Studies have found that romantic partners who believe in romantic destiny experience higher relationship satisfaction and have more stable relationships. Researchers found that it is true, at least for many Americans (e.g., Knee, 1998).

Yet “love destiny” can be a phenomenon that people believe in across cultures .

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Real Love Is a Choice

• Category: Life , Education
• Topic: Falling in Love , Personal Statement

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