does true love really exist 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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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.

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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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Phillips, Jonathan , Luke Misenheimer , and Joshua Knobe . “ The Ordinary Concept of Happiness (And Others Like It). ” Emotion Review 3, no. 3 ( 2011 ): 320–322.

Rosch, Eleanor , and Carolyn B. Mervis , “ Family Resemblances: Studies in the Internal Structure of Categories. ” Cognitive Psychology 7, no. 4 ( 1975 ): 573–605.

Smith, Edward E. , and Douglas L. Medin . Categories and Concepts . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981 .

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

Strohminger, Nina , 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.

Velleman, David J. “ Love as a Moral Emotion. ” Ethics 109, no. 2 ( 1999 ): 338–374.

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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Understanding Relationships: What's True Love?

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This essay focuses on personal love, or the love of particular persons as such. Part of the philosophical task in understanding personal love is to distinguish the various kinds of personal love. For example, the way in which I love my wife is seemingly very different from the way I love my mother, my child, and my friend. This task has typically proceeded hand-in-hand with philosophical analyses of these kinds of personal love, analyses that in part respond to various puzzles about love. Can love be justified? If so, how? What is the value of personal love? What impact does love have on the autonomy of both the lover and the beloved?

1. Preliminary Distinctions

2. love as union, 3. love as robust concern, 4.1 love as appraisal of value, 4.2 love as bestowal of value, 4.3 an intermediate position, 5.1 love as emotion proper, 5.2 love as emotion complex, 6. the value and justification of love, other internet resources, related entries.

In ordinary conversations, we often say things like the following:

• I love chocolate (or skiing).
• I love doing philosophy (or being a father).
• I love my dog (or cat).
• I love my wife (or mother or child or friend).

However, what is meant by ‘love’ differs from case to case. (1) may be understood as meaning merely that I like this thing or activity very much. In (2) the implication is typically that I find engaging in a certain activity or being a certain kind of person to be a part of my identity and so what makes my life worth living; I might just as well say that I value these. By contrast, (3) and (4) seem to indicate a mode of concern that cannot be neatly assimilated to anything else. Thus, we might understand the sort of love at issue in (4) to be, roughly, a matter of caring about another person as the person she is, for her own sake. (Accordingly, (3) may be understood as a kind of deficient mode of the sort of love we typically reserve for persons.) Philosophical accounts of love have focused primarily on the sort of personal love at issue in (4); such personal love will be the focus here (though see Frankfurt (1999) and Jaworska & Wonderly (2017) for attempts to provide a more general account that applies to non-persons as well).

Even within personal love, philosophers from the ancient Greeks on have traditionally distinguished three notions that can properly be called “love”: eros , agape , and philia . It will be useful to distinguish these three and say something about how contemporary discussions typically blur these distinctions (sometimes intentionally so) or use them for other purposes.

‘ Eros ’ originally meant love in the sense of a kind of passionate desire for an object, typically sexual passion (Liddell et al., 1940). Nygren (1953a,b) describes eros as the “‘love of desire,’ or acquisitive love” and therefore as egocentric (1953b, p. 89). Soble (1989b, 1990) similarly describes eros as “selfish” and as a response to the merits of the beloved—especially the beloved’s goodness or beauty. What is evident in Soble’s description of eros is a shift away from the sexual: to love something in the “erosic” sense (to use the term Soble coins) is to love it in a way that, by being responsive to its merits, is dependent on reasons. Such an understanding of eros is encouraged by Plato’s discussion in the Symposium , in which Socrates understands sexual desire to be a deficient response to physical beauty in particular, a response which ought to be developed into a response to the beauty of a person’s soul and, ultimately, into a response to the form, Beauty.

Soble’s intent in understanding eros to be a reason-dependent sort of love is to articulate a sharp contrast with agape , a sort of love that does not respond to the value of its object. ‘ Agape ’ has come, primarily through the Christian tradition, to mean the sort of love God has for us persons, as well as our love for God and, by extension, of our love for each other—a kind of brotherly love. In the paradigm case of God’s love for us, agape is “spontaneous and unmotivated,” revealing not that we merit that love but that God’s nature is love (Nygren 1953b, p. 85). Rather than responding to antecedent value in its object, agape instead is supposed to create value in its object and therefore to initiate our fellowship with God (pp. 87–88). Consequently, Badhwar (2003, p. 58) characterizes agape as “independent of the loved individual’s fundamental characteristics as the particular person she is”; and Soble (1990, p. 5) infers that agape , in contrast to eros , is therefore not reason dependent but is rationally “incomprehensible,” admitting at best of causal or historical explanations. [ 1 ]

Finally, ‘ philia ’ originally meant a kind of affectionate regard or friendly feeling towards not just one’s friends but also possibly towards family members, business partners, and one’s country at large (Liddell et al., 1940; Cooper, 1977). Like eros , philia is generally (but not universally) understood to be responsive to (good) qualities in one’s beloved. This similarity between eros and philia has led Thomas (1987) to wonder whether the only difference between romantic love and friendship is the sexual involvement of the former—and whether that is adequate to account for the real differences we experience. The distinction between eros and philia becomes harder to draw with Soble’s attempt to diminish the importance of the sexual in eros (1990).

Maintaining the distinctions among eros , agape , and philia becomes even more difficult when faced with contemporary theories of love (including romantic love) and friendship. For, as discussed below, some theories of romantic love understand it along the lines of the agape tradition as creating value in the beloved (cf. Section 4.2 ), and other accounts of romantic love treat sexual activity as merely the expression of what otherwise looks very much like friendship.

Given the focus here on personal love, Christian conceptions of God’s love for persons (and vice versa ) will be omitted, and the distinction between eros and philia will be blurred—as it typically is in contemporary accounts. Instead, the focus here will be on these contemporary understandings of love, including romantic love, understood as an attitude we take towards other persons. [ 2 ]

In providing an account of love, philosophical analyses must be careful to distinguish love from other positive attitudes we take towards persons, such as liking. Intuitively, love differs from such attitudes as liking in terms of its “depth,” and the problem is to elucidate the kind of “depth” we intuitively find love to have. Some analyses do this in part by providing thin conceptions of what liking amounts to. Thus, Singer (1991) and Brown (1987) understand liking to be a matter of desiring, an attitude that at best involves its object having only instrumental (and not intrinsic) value. Yet this seems inadequate: surely there are attitudes towards persons intermediate between having a desire with a person as its object and loving the person. I can care about a person for her own sake and not merely instrumentally, and yet such caring does not on its own amount to (non-deficiently) loving her, for it seems I can care about my dog in exactly the same way, a kind of caring which is insufficiently personal for love.

It is more common to distinguish loving from liking via the intuition that the “depth” of love is to be explained in terms of a notion of identification: to love someone is somehow to identify yourself with him, whereas no such notion of identification is involved in liking. As Nussbaum puts it, “The choice between one potential love and another can feel, and be, like a choice of a way of life, a decision to dedicate oneself to these values rather than these” (1990, p. 328); liking clearly does not have this sort of “depth” (see also Helm 2010; Bagley 2015). Whether love involves some kind of identification, and if so exactly how to understand such identification, is a central bone of contention among the various analyses of love. In particular, Whiting (2013) argues that the appeal to a notion of identification distorts our understanding of the sort of motivation love can provide, for taken literally it implies that love motivates through self -interest rather than through the beloved’s interests. Thus, Whiting argues, central to love is the possibility that love takes the lover “outside herself”, potentially forgetting herself in being moved directly by the interests of the beloved. (Of course, we need not take the notion of identification literally in this way: in identifying with one’s beloved, one might have a concern for one’s beloved that is analogous to one’s concern for oneself; see Helm 2010.)

Another common way to distinguish love from other personal attitudes is in terms of a distinctive kind of evaluation, which itself can account for love’s “depth.” Again, whether love essentially involves a distinctive kind of evaluation, and if so how to make sense of that evaluation, is hotly disputed. Closely related to questions of evaluation are questions of justification: can we justify loving or continuing to love a particular person, and if so, how? For those who think the justification of love is possible, it is common to understand such justification in terms of evaluation, and the answers here affect various accounts’ attempts to make sense of the kind of constancy or commitment love seems to involve, as well as the sense in which love is directed at particular individuals.

In what follows, theories of love are tentatively and hesitantly classified into four types: love as union, love as robust concern, love as valuing, and love as an emotion. It should be clear, however, that particular theories classified under one type sometimes also include, without contradiction, ideas central to other types. The types identified here overlap to some extent, and in some cases classifying particular theories may involve excessive pigeonholing. (Such cases are noted below.) Part of the classificatory problem is that many accounts of love are quasi-reductionistic, understanding love in terms of notions like affection, evaluation, attachment, etc., which themselves never get analyzed. Even when these accounts eschew explicitly reductionistic language, very often little attempt is made to show how one such “aspect” of love is conceptually connected to others. As a result, there is no clear and obvious way to classify particular theories, let alone identify what the relevant classes should be.

The union view claims that love consists in the formation of (or the desire to form) some significant kind of union, a “we.” A central task for union theorists, therefore, is to spell out just what such a “we” comes to—whether it is literally a new entity in the world somehow composed of the lover and the beloved, or whether it is merely metaphorical. Variants of this view perhaps go back to Aristotle (cf. Sherman 1993) and can also be found in Montaigne ([E]) and Hegel (1997); contemporary proponents include Solomon (1981, 1988), Scruton (1986), Nozick (1989), Fisher (1990), and Delaney (1996).

Scruton, writing in particular about romantic love, claims that love exists “just so soon as reciprocity becomes community: that is, just so soon as all distinction between my interests and your interests is overcome” (1986, p. 230). The idea is that the union is a union of concern, so that when I act out of that concern it is not for my sake alone or for your sake alone but for our sake. Fisher (1990) holds a similar, but somewhat more moderate view, claiming that love is a partial fusion of the lovers’ cares, concerns, emotional responses, and actions. What is striking about both Scruton and Fisher is the claim that love requires the actual union of the lovers’ concerns, for it thus becomes clear that they conceive of love not so much as an attitude we take towards another but as a relationship: the distinction between your interests and mine genuinely disappears only when we together come to have shared cares, concerns, etc., and my merely having a certain attitude towards you is not enough for love. This provides content to the notion of a “we” as the (metaphorical?) subject of these shared cares and concerns, and as that for whose sake we act.

Solomon (1988) offers a union view as well, though one that tries “to make new sense out of ‘love’ through a literal rather than metaphoric sense of the ‘fusion’ of two souls” (p. 24, cf. Solomon 1981; however, it is unclear exactly what he means by a “soul” here and so how love can be a “literal” fusion of two souls). What Solomon has in mind is the way in which, through love, the lovers redefine their identities as persons in terms of the relationship: “Love is the concentration and the intensive focus of mutual definition on a single individual, subjecting virtually every personal aspect of one’s self to this process” (1988, p. 197). The result is that lovers come to share the interests, roles, virtues, and so on that constitute what formerly was two individual identities but now has become a shared identity, and they do so in part by each allowing the other to play an important role in defining his own identity.

Nozick (1989) offers a union view that differs from those of Scruton, Fisher, and Solomon in that Nozick thinks that what is necessary for love is merely the desire to form a “we,” together with the desire that your beloved reciprocates. Nonetheless, he claims that this “we” is “a new entity in the world…created by a new web of relationships between [the lovers] which makes them no longer separate” (p. 70). In spelling out this web of relationships, Nozick appeals to the lovers “pooling” not only their well-beings, in the sense that the well-being of each is tied up with that of the other, but also their autonomy, in that “each transfers some previous rights to make certain decisions unilaterally into a joint pool” (p. 71). In addition, Nozick claims, the lovers each acquire a new identity as a part of the “we,” a new identity constituted by their (a) wanting to be perceived publicly as a couple, (b) their attending to their pooled well-being, and (c) their accepting a “certain kind of division of labor” (p. 72):

A person in a we might find himself coming across something interesting to read yet leaving it for the other person, not because he himself would not be interested in it but because the other would be more interested, and one of them reading it is sufficient for it to be registered by the wider identity now shared, the we . [ 3 ]

Opponents of the union view have seized on claims like this as excessive: union theorists, they claim, take too literally the ontological commitments of this notion of a “we.” This leads to two specific criticisms of the union view. The first is that union views do away with individual autonomy. Autonomy, it seems, involves a kind of independence on the part of the autonomous agent, such that she is in control over not only what she does but also who she is, as this is constituted by her interests, values, concerns, etc. However, union views, by doing away with a clear distinction between your interests and mine, thereby undermine this sort of independence and so undermine the autonomy of the lovers. If autonomy is a part of the individual’s good, then, on the union view, love is to this extent bad; so much the worse for the union view (Singer 1994; Soble 1997). Moreover, Singer (1994) argues that a necessary part of having your beloved be the object of your love is respect for your beloved as the particular person she is, and this requires respecting her autonomy.

Union theorists have responded to this objection in several ways. Nozick (1989) seems to think of a loss of autonomy in love as a desirable feature of the sort of union lovers can achieve. Fisher (1990), somewhat more reluctantly, claims that the loss of autonomy in love is an acceptable consequence of love. Yet without further argument these claims seem like mere bullet biting. Solomon (1988, pp. 64ff) describes this “tension” between union and autonomy as “the paradox of love.” However, this a view that Soble (1997) derides: merely to call it a paradox, as Solomon does, is not to face up to the problem.

The second criticism involves a substantive view concerning love. Part of what it is to love someone, these opponents say, is to have concern for him for his sake. However, union views make such concern unintelligible and eliminate the possibility of both selfishness and self-sacrifice, for by doing away with the distinction between my interests and your interests they have in effect turned your interests into mine and vice versa (Soble 1997; see also Blum 1980, 1993). Some advocates of union views see this as a point in their favor: we need to explain how it is I can have concern for people other than myself, and the union view apparently does this by understanding your interests to be part of my own. And Delaney, responding to an apparent tension between our desire to be loved unselfishly (for fear of otherwise being exploited) and our desire to be loved for reasons (which presumably are attractive to our lover and hence have a kind of selfish basis), says (1996, p. 346):

Given my view that the romantic ideal is primarily characterized by a desire to achieve a profound consolidation of needs and interests through the formation of a we , I do not think a little selfishness of the sort described should pose a worry to either party.

The objection, however, lies precisely in this attempt to explain my concern for my beloved egoistically. As Whiting (1991, p. 10) puts it, such an attempt “strikes me as unnecessary and potentially objectionable colonization”: in love, I ought to be concerned with my beloved for her sake, and not because I somehow get something out of it. (This can be true whether my concern with my beloved is merely instrumental to my good or whether it is partly constitutive of my good.)

Although Whiting’s and Soble’s criticisms here succeed against the more radical advocates of the union view, they in part fail to acknowledge the kernel of truth to be gleaned from the idea of union. Whiting’s way of formulating the second objection in terms of an unnecessary egoism in part points to a way out: we persons are in part social creatures, and love is one profound mode of that sociality. Indeed, part of the point of union accounts is to make sense of this social dimension: to make sense of a way in which we can sometimes identify ourselves with others not merely in becoming interdependent with them (as Singer 1994, p. 165, suggests, understanding ‘interdependence’ to be a kind of reciprocal benevolence and respect) but rather in making who we are as persons be constituted in part by those we love (cf., e.g., Rorty 1986/1993; Nussbaum 1990).

Along these lines, Friedman (1998), taking her inspiration in part from Delaney (1996), argues that we should understand the sort of union at issue in love to be a kind of federation of selves:

On the federation model, a third unified entity is constituted by the interaction of the lovers, one which involves the lovers acting in concert across a range of conditions and for a range of purposes. This concerted action, however, does not erase the existence of the two lovers as separable and separate agents with continuing possibilities for the exercise of their own respective agencies. [p. 165]

Given that on this view the lovers do not give up their individual identities, there is no principled reason why the union view cannot make sense of the lover’s concern for her beloved for his sake. [ 4 ] Moreover, Friedman argues, once we construe union as federation, we can see that autonomy is not a zero-sum game; rather, love can both directly enhance the autonomy of each and promote the growth of various skills, like realistic and critical self-evaluation, that foster autonomy.

Nonetheless, this federation model is not without its problems—problems that affect other versions of the union view as well. For if the federation (or the “we”, as on Nozick’s view) is understood as a third entity, we need a clearer account than has been given of its ontological status and how it comes to be. Relevant here is the literature on shared intention and plural subjects. Gilbert (1989, 1996, 2000) has argued that we should take quite seriously the existence of a plural subject as an entity over and above its constituent members. Others, such as Tuomela (1984, 1995), Searle (1990), and Bratman (1999) are more cautious, treating such talk of “us” having an intention as metaphorical.

As this criticism of the union view indicates, many find caring about your beloved for her sake to be a part of what it is to love her. The robust concern view of love takes this to be the central and defining feature of love (cf. Taylor 1976; Newton-Smith 1989; Soble 1990, 1997; LaFollette 1996; Frankfurt 1999; White 2001). As Taylor puts it:

To summarize: if x loves y then x wants to benefit and be with y etc., and he has these wants (or at least some of them) because he believes y has some determinate characteristics ψ in virtue of which he thinks it worth while to benefit and be with y . He regards satisfaction of these wants as an end and not as a means towards some other end. [p. 157]

In conceiving of my love for you as constituted by my concern for you for your sake, the robust concern view rejects the idea, central to the union view, that love is to be understood in terms of the (literal or metaphorical) creation of a “we”: I am the one who has this concern for you, though it is nonetheless disinterested and so not egoistic insofar as it is for your sake rather than for my own. [ 5 ]

At the heart of the robust concern view is the idea that love “is neither affective nor cognitive. It is volitional” (Frankfurt 1999, p. 129; see also Martin 2015). Frankfurt continues:

That a person cares about or that he loves something has less to do with how things make him feel, or with his opinions about them, than with the more or less stable motivational structures that shape his preferences and that guide and limit his conduct.

This account analyzes caring about someone for her sake as a matter of being motivated in certain ways, in part as a response to what happens to one’s beloved. Of course, to understand love in terms of desires is not to leave other emotional responses out in the cold, for these emotions should be understood as consequences of desires. Thus, just as I can be emotionally crushed when one of my strong desires is disappointed, so too I can be emotionally crushed when things similarly go badly for my beloved. In this way Frankfurt (1999) tacitly, and White (2001) more explicitly, acknowledge the way in which my caring for my beloved for her sake results in my identity being transformed through her influence insofar as I become vulnerable to things that happen to her.

Not all robust concern theorists seem to accept this line, however; in particular, Taylor (1976) and Soble (1990) seem to have a strongly individualistic conception of persons that prevents my identity being bound up with my beloved in this sort of way, a kind of view that may seem to undermine the intuitive “depth” that love seems to have. (For more on this point, see Rorty 1986/1993.) In the middle is Stump (2006), who follows Aquinas in understanding love to involve not only the desire for your beloved’s well-being but also a desire for a certain kind of relationship with your beloved—as a parent or spouse or sibling or priest or friend, for example—a relationship within which you share yourself with and connect yourself to your beloved. [ 6 ]

One source of worry about the robust concern view is that it involves too passive an understanding of one’s beloved (Ebels-Duggan 2008). The thought is that on the robust concern view the lover merely tries to discover what the beloved’s well-being consists in and then acts to promote that, potentially by thwarting the beloved’s own efforts when the lover thinks those efforts would harm her well-being. This, however, would be disrespectful and demeaning, not the sort of attitude that love is. What robust concern views seem to miss, Ebels-Duggan suggests, is the way love involves interacting agents, each with a capacity for autonomy the recognition and engagement with which is an essential part of love. In response, advocates of the robust concern view might point out that promoting someone’s well-being normally requires promoting her autonomy (though they may maintain that this need not always be true: that paternalism towards a beloved can sometimes be justified and appropriate as an expression of one’s love). Moreover, we might plausibly think, it is only through the exercise of one’s autonomy that one can define one’s own well-being as a person, so that a lover’s failure to respect the beloved’s autonomy would be a failure to promote her well-being and therefore not an expression of love, contrary to what Ebels-Duggan suggests. Consequently, it might seem, robust concern views can counter this objection by offering an enriched conception of what it is to be a person and so of the well-being of persons.

Another source of worry is that the robust concern view offers too thin a conception of love. By emphasizing robust concern, this view understands other features we think characteristic of love, such as one’s emotional responsiveness to one’s beloved, to be the effects of that concern rather than constituents of it. Thus Velleman (1999) argues that robust concern views, by understanding love merely as a matter of aiming at a particular end (viz., the welfare of one’s beloved), understand love to be merely conative. However, he claims, love can have nothing to do with desires, offering as a counterexample the possibility of loving a troublemaking relation whom you do not want to be with, whose well being you do not want to promote, etc. Similarly, Badhwar (2003) argues that such a “teleological” view of love makes it mysterious how “we can continue to love someone long after death has taken him beyond harm or benefit” (p. 46). Moreover Badhwar argues, if love is essentially a desire, then it implies that we lack something; yet love does not imply this and, indeed, can be felt most strongly at times when we feel our lives most complete and lacking in nothing. Consequently, Velleman and Badhwar conclude, love need not involve any desire or concern for the well-being of one’s beloved.

This conclusion, however, seems too hasty, for such examples can be accommodated within the robust concern view. Thus, the concern for your relative in Velleman’s example can be understood to be present but swamped by other, more powerful desires to avoid him. Indeed, keeping the idea that you want to some degree to benefit him, an idea Velleman rejects, seems to be essential to understanding the conceptual tension between loving someone and not wanting to help him, a tension Velleman does not fully acknowledge. Similarly, continued love for someone who has died can be understood on the robust concern view as parasitic on the former love you had for him when he was still alive: your desires to benefit him get transformed, through your subsequent understanding of the impossibility of doing so, into wishes. [ 7 ] Finally, the idea of concern for your beloved’s well-being need not imply the idea that you lack something, for such concern can be understood in terms of the disposition to be vigilant for occasions when you can come to his aid and consequently to have the relevant occurrent desires. All of this seems fully compatible with the robust concern view.

One might also question whether Velleman and Badhwar make proper use of their examples of loving your meddlesome relation or someone who has died. For although we can understand these as genuine cases of love, they are nonetheless deficient cases and ought therefore be understood as parasitic on the standard cases. Readily to accommodate such deficient cases of love into a philosophical analysis as being on a par with paradigm cases, and to do so without some special justification, is dubious.

Nonetheless, the robust concern view as it stands does not seem properly able to account for the intuitive “depth” of love and so does not seem properly to distinguish loving from liking. Although, as noted above, the robust concern view can begin to make some sense of the way in which the lover’s identity is altered by the beloved, it understands this only an effect of love, and not as a central part of what love consists in.

This vague thought is nicely developed by Wonderly (2017), who emphasizes that in addition to the sort of disinterested concern for another that is central to robust-concern accounts of love, an essential part of at least romantic love is the idea that in loving someone I must find them to be not merely important for their own sake but also important to me . Wonderly (2017) fleshes out what this “importance to me” involves in terms of the idea of attachment (developed in Wonderly 2016) that she argues can make sense of the intimacy and depth of love from within what remains fundamentally a robust-concern account. [ 8 ]

4. Love as Valuing

A third kind of view of love understands love to be a distinctive mode of valuing a person. As the distinction between eros and agape in Section 1 indicates, there are at least two ways to construe this in terms of whether the lover values the beloved because she is valuable, or whether the beloved comes to be valuable to the lover as a result of her loving him. The former view, which understands the lover as appraising the value of the beloved in loving him, is the topic of Section 4.1 , whereas the latter view, which understands her as bestowing value on him, will be discussed in Section 4.2 .

Velleman (1999, 2008) offers an appraisal view of love, understanding love to be fundamentally a matter of acknowledging and responding in a distinctive way to the value of the beloved. (For a very different appraisal view of love, see Kolodny 2003.) Understanding this more fully requires understanding both the kind of value of the beloved to which one responds and the distinctive kind of response to such value that love is. Nonetheless, it should be clear that what makes an account be an appraisal view of love is not the mere fact that love is understood to involve appraisal; many other accounts do so, and it is typical of robust concern accounts, for example (cf. the quote from Taylor above , Section 3 ). Rather, appraisal views are distinctive in understanding love to consist in that appraisal.

In articulating the kind of value love involves, Velleman, following Kant, distinguishes dignity from price. To have a price , as the economic metaphor suggests, is to have a value that can be compared to the value of other things with prices, such that it is intelligible to exchange without loss items of the same value. By contrast, to have dignity is to have a value such that comparisons of relative value become meaningless. Material goods are normally understood to have prices, but we persons have dignity: no substitution of one person for another can preserve exactly the same value, for something of incomparable worth would be lost (and gained) in such a substitution.

On this Kantian view, our dignity as persons consists in our rational nature: our capacity both to be actuated by reasons that we autonomously provide ourselves in setting our own ends and to respond appropriately to the intrinsic values we discover in the world. Consequently, one important way in which we exercise our rational natures is to respond with respect to the dignity of other persons (a dignity that consists in part in their capacity for respect): respect just is the required minimal response to the dignity of persons. What makes a response to a person be that of respect, Velleman claims, still following Kant, is that it “arrests our self-love” and thereby prevents us from treating him as a means to our ends (p. 360).

Given this, Velleman claims that love is similarly a response to the dignity of persons, and as such it is the dignity of the object of our love that justifies that love. However, love and respect are different kinds of responses to the same value. For love arrests not our self-love but rather

our tendencies toward emotional self-protection from another person, tendencies to draw ourselves in and close ourselves off from being affected by him. Love disarms our emotional defenses; it makes us vulnerable to the other. [1999, p. 361]

This means that the concern, attraction, sympathy, etc. that we normally associate with love are not constituents of love but are rather its normal effects, and love can remain without them (as in the case of the love for a meddlesome relative one cannot stand being around). Moreover, this provides Velleman with a clear account of the intuitive “depth” of love: it is essentially a response to persons as such, and to say that you love your dog is therefore to be confused.

Of course, we do not respond with love to the dignity of every person we meet, nor are we somehow required to: love, as the disarming of our emotional defenses in a way that makes us especially vulnerable to another, is the optional maximal response to others’ dignity. What, then, explains the selectivity of love—why I love some people and not others? The answer lies in the contingent fit between the way some people behaviorally express their dignity as persons and the way I happen to respond to those expressions by becoming emotionally vulnerable to them. The right sort of fit makes someone “lovable” by me (1999, p. 372), and my responding with love in these cases is a matter of my “really seeing” this person in a way that I fail to do with others who do not fit with me in this way. By ‘lovable’ here Velleman seems to mean able to be loved, not worthy of being loved, for nothing Velleman says here speaks to a question about the justification of my loving this person rather than that. Rather, what he offers is an explanation of the selectivity of my love, an explanation that as a matter of fact makes my response be that of love rather than mere respect.

This understanding of the selectivity of love as something that can be explained but not justified is potentially troubling. For we ordinarily think we can justify not only my loving you rather than someone else but also and more importantly the constancy of my love: my continuing to love you even as you change in certain fundamental ways (but not others). As Delaney (1996, p. 347) puts the worry about constancy:

while you seem to want it to be true that, were you to become a schmuck, your lover would continue to love you,…you also want it to be the case that your lover would never love a schmuck.

The issue here is not merely that we can offer explanations of the selectivity of my love, of why I do not love schmucks; rather, at issue is the discernment of love, of loving and continuing to love for good reasons as well as of ceasing to love for good reasons. To have these good reasons seems to involve attributing different values to you now rather than formerly or rather than to someone else, yet this is precisely what Velleman denies is the case in making the distinction between love and respect the way he does.

It is also questionable whether Velleman can even explain the selectivity of love in terms of the “fit” between your expressions and my sensitivities. For the relevant sensitivities on my part are emotional sensitivities: the lowering of my emotional defenses and so becoming emotionally vulnerable to you. Thus, I become vulnerable to the harms (or goods) that befall you and so sympathetically feel your pain (or joy). Such emotions are themselves assessable for warrant, and now we can ask why my disappointment that you lost the race is warranted, but my being disappointed that a mere stranger lost would not be warranted. The intuitive answer is that I love you but not him. However, this answer is unavailable to Velleman, because he thinks that what makes my response to your dignity that of love rather than respect is precisely that I feel such emotions, and to appeal to my love in explaining the emotions therefore seems viciously circular.

Although these problems are specific to Velleman’s account, the difficulty can be generalized to any appraisal account of love (such as that offered in Kolodny 2003). For if love is an appraisal, it needs to be distinguished from other forms of appraisal, including our evaluative judgments. On the one hand, to try to distinguish love as an appraisal from other appraisals in terms of love’s having certain effects on our emotional and motivational life (as on Velleman’s account) is unsatisfying because it ignores part of what needs to be explained: why the appraisal of love has these effects and yet judgments with the same evaluative content do not. Indeed, this question is crucial if we are to understand the intuitive “depth” of love, for without an answer to this question we do not understand why love should have the kind of centrality in our lives it manifestly does. [ 9 ] On the other hand, to bundle this emotional component into the appraisal itself would be to turn the view into either the robust concern view ( Section 3 ) or a variant of the emotion view ( Section 5.1 ).

In contrast to Velleman, Singer (1991, 1994, 2009) understands love to be fundamentally a matter of bestowing value on the beloved. To bestow value on another is to project a kind of intrinsic value onto him. Indeed, this fact about love is supposed to distinguish love from liking: “Love is an attitude with no clear objective,” whereas liking is inherently teleological (1991, p. 272). As such, there are no standards of correctness for bestowing such value, and this is how love differs from other personal attitudes like gratitude, generosity, and condescension: “love…confers importance no matter what the object is worth” (p. 273). Consequently, Singer thinks, love is not an attitude that can be justified in any way.

What is it, exactly, to bestow this kind of value on someone? It is, Singer says, a kind of attachment and commitment to the beloved, in which one comes to treat him as an end in himself and so to respond to his ends, interests, concerns, etc. as having value for their own sake. This means in part that the bestowal of value reveals itself “by caring about the needs and interests of the beloved, by wishing to benefit or protect her, by delighting in her achievements,” etc. (p. 270). This sounds very much like the robust concern view, yet the bestowal view differs in understanding such robust concern to be the effect of the bestowal of value that is love rather than itself what constitutes love: in bestowing value on my beloved, I make him be valuable in such a way that I ought to respond with robust concern.

For it to be intelligible that I have bestowed value on someone, I must therefore respond appropriately to him as valuable, and this requires having some sense of what his well-being is and of what affects that well-being positively or negatively. Yet having this sense requires in turn knowing what his strengths and deficiencies are, and this is a matter of appraising him in various ways. Bestowal thus presupposes a kind of appraisal, as a way of “really seeing” the beloved and attending to him. Nonetheless, Singer claims, it is the bestowal that is primary for understanding what love consists in: the appraisal is required only so that the commitment to one’s beloved and his value as thus bestowed has practical import and is not “a blind submission to some unknown being” (1991, p. 272; see also Singer 1994, pp. 139ff).

Singer is walking a tightrope in trying to make room for appraisal in his account of love. Insofar as the account is fundamentally a bestowal account, Singer claims that love cannot be justified, that we bestow the relevant kind of value “gratuitously.” This suggests that love is blind, that it does not matter what our beloved is like, which seems patently false. Singer tries to avoid this conclusion by appealing to the role of appraisal: it is only because we appraise another as having certain virtues and vices that we come to bestow value on him. Yet the “because” here, since it cannot justify the bestowal, is at best a kind of contingent causal explanation. [ 10 ] In this respect, Singer’s account of the selectivity of love is much the same as Velleman’s, and it is liable to the same criticism: it makes unintelligible the way in which our love can be discerning for better or worse reasons. Indeed, this failure to make sense of the idea that love can be justified is a problem for any bestowal view. For either (a) a bestowal itself cannot be justified (as on Singer’s account), in which case the justification of love is impossible, or (b) a bestowal can be justified, in which case it is hard to make sense of value as being bestowed rather than there antecedently in the object as the grounds of that “bestowal.”

More generally, a proponent of the bestowal view needs to be much clearer than Singer is in articulating precisely what a bestowal is. What is the value that I create in a bestowal, and how can my bestowal create it? On a crude Humean view, the answer might be that the value is something projected onto the world through my pro-attitudes, like desire. Yet such a view would be inadequate, since the projected value, being relative to a particular individual, would do no theoretical work, and the account would essentially be a variant of the robust concern view. Moreover, in providing a bestowal account of love, care is needed to distinguish love from other personal attitudes such as admiration and respect: do these other attitudes involve bestowal? If so, how does the bestowal in these cases differ from the bestowal of love? If not, why not, and what is so special about love that requires a fundamentally different evaluative attitude than admiration and respect?

Nonetheless, there is a kernel of truth in the bestowal view: there is surely something right about the idea that love is creative and not merely a response to antecedent value, and accounts of love that understand the kind of evaluation implicit in love merely in terms of appraisal seem to be missing something. Precisely what may be missed will be discussed below in Section 6 .

Perhaps there is room for an understanding of love and its relation to value that is intermediate between appraisal and bestowal accounts. After all, if we think of appraisal as something like perception, a matter of responding to what is out there in the world, and of bestowal as something like action, a matter of doing something and creating something, we should recognize that the responsiveness central to appraisal may itself depend on our active, creative choices. Thus, just as we must recognize that ordinary perception depends on our actively directing our attention and deploying concepts, interpretations, and even arguments in order to perceive things accurately, so too we might think our vision of our beloved’s valuable properties that is love also depends on our actively attending to and interpreting him. Something like this is Jollimore’s view (2011). According to Jollimore, in loving someone we actively attend to his valuable properties in a way that we take to provide us with reasons to treat him preferentially. Although we may acknowledge that others might have such properties even to a greater degree than our beloved does, we do not attend to and appreciate such properties in others in the same way we do those in our beloveds; indeed, we find our appreciation of our beloved’s valuable properties to “silence” our similar appreciation of those in others. (In this way, Jollimore thinks, we can solve the problem of fungibility, discussed below in Section 6 .) Likewise, in perceiving our beloved’s actions and character, we do so through the lens of such an appreciation, which will tend as to “silence” interpretations inconsistent with that appreciation. In this way, love involves finding one’s beloved to be valuable in a way that involves elements of both appraisal (insofar as one must thereby be responsive to valuable properties one’s beloved really has) and bestowal (insofar as through one’s attention and committed appreciation of these properties they come to have special significance for one).

One might object that this conception of love as silencing the special value of others or to negative interpretations of our beloveds is irrational in a way that love is not. For, it might seem, such “silencing” is merely a matter of our blinding ourselves to how things really are. Yet Jollimore claims that this sense in which love is blind is not objectionable, for (a) we can still intellectually recognize the things that love’s vision silences, and (b) there really is no impartial perspective we can take on the values things have, and love is one appropriate sort of partial perspective from which the value of persons can be manifest. Nonetheless, one might wonder about whether that perspective of love itself can be distorted and what the norms are in terms of which such distortions are intelligible. Furthermore, it may seem that Jollimore’s attempt to reconcile appraisal and bestowal fails to appreciate the underlying metaphysical difficulty: appraisal is a response to value that is antecedently there, whereas bestowal is the creation of value that was not antecedently there. Consequently, it might seem, appraisal and bestowal are mutually exclusive and cannot be reconciled in the way Jollimore hopes.

Whereas Jollimore tries to combine separate elements of appraisal and of bestowal in a single account, Helm (2010) and Bagley (2015) offer accounts that reject the metaphysical presupposition that values must be either prior to love (as with appraisal) or posterior to love (as with bestowal), instead understanding the love and the values to emerge simultaneously. Thus, Helm presents a detailed account of valuing in terms of the emotions, arguing that while we can understand individual emotions as appraisals , responding to values already their in their objects, these values are bestowed on those objects via broad, holistic patterns of emotions. How this amounts to an account of love will be discussed in Section 5.2 , below. Bagley (2015) instead appeals to a metaphor of improvisation, arguing that just as jazz musicians jointly make determinate the content of their musical ideas through on-going processes of their expression, so too lovers jointly engage in “deep improvisation”, thereby working out of their values and identities through the on-going process of living their lives together. These values are thus something the lovers jointly construct through the process of recognizing and responding to those very values. To love someone is thus to engage with them as partners in such “deep improvisation”. (This account is similar to Helm (2008, 2010)’s account of plural agency, which he uses to provide an account of friendship and other loving relationships; see the discussion of shared activity in the entry on friendship .)

5. Emotion Views

Given these problems with the accounts of love as valuing, perhaps we should turn to the emotions. For emotions just are responses to objects that combine evaluation, motivation, and a kind of phenomenology, all central features of the attitude of love.

Many accounts of love claim that it is an emotion; these include: Wollheim 1984, Rorty 1986/1993, Brown 1987, Hamlyn 1989, Baier 1991, and Badhwar 2003. [ 11 ] Thus, Hamlyn (1989, p. 219) says:

It would not be a plausible move to defend any theory of the emotions to which love and hate seemed exceptions by saying that love and hate are after all not emotions. I have heard this said, but it does seem to me a desperate move to make. If love and hate are not emotions what is?

The difficulty with this claim, as Rorty (1980) argues, is that the word, ‘emotion,’ does not seem to pick out a homogeneous collection of mental states, and so various theories claiming that love is an emotion mean very different things. Consequently, what are here labeled “emotion views” are divided into those that understand love to be a particular kind of evaluative-cum-motivational response to an object, whether that response is merely occurrent or dispositional (‘emotions proper,’ see Section 5.1 , below), and those that understand love to involve a collection of related and interconnected emotions proper (‘emotion complexes,’ see Section 5.2 , below).

An emotion proper is a kind of “evaluative-cum-motivational response to an object”; what does this mean? Emotions are generally understood to have several objects. The target of an emotion is that at which the emotion is directed: if I am afraid or angry at you, then you are the target. In responding to you with fear or anger, I am implicitly evaluating you in a particular way, and this evaluation—called the formal object —is the kind of evaluation of the target that is distinctive of a particular emotion type. Thus, in fearing you, I implicitly evaluate you as somehow dangerous, whereas in being angry at you I implicitly evaluate you as somehow offensive. Yet emotions are not merely evaluations of their targets; they in part motivate us to behave in certain ways, both rationally (by motivating action to avoid the danger) and arationally (via certain characteristic expressions, such as slamming a door out of anger). Moreover, emotions are generally understood to involve a phenomenological component, though just how to understand the characteristic “feel” of an emotion and its relation to the evaluation and motivation is hotly disputed. Finally, emotions are typically understood to be passions: responses that we feel imposed on us as if from the outside, rather than anything we actively do. (For more on the philosophy of emotions, see entry on emotion .)

What then are we saying when we say that love is an emotion proper? According to Brown (1987, p. 14), emotions as occurrent mental states are “abnormal bodily changes caused by the agent’s evaluation or appraisal of some object or situation that the agent believes to be of concern to him or her.” He spells this out by saying that in love, we “cherish” the person for having “a particular complex of instantiated qualities” that is “open-ended” so that we can continue to love the person even as she changes over time (pp. 106–7). These qualities, which include historical and relational qualities, are evaluated in love as worthwhile. [ 12 ] All of this seems aimed at spelling out what love’s formal object is, a task that is fundamental to understanding love as an emotion proper. Thus, Brown seems to say that love’s formal object is just being worthwhile (or, given his examples, perhaps: worthwhile as a person), and he resists being any more specific than this in order to preserve the open-endedness of love. Hamlyn (1989) offers a similar account, saying (p. 228):

With love the difficulty is to find anything of this kind [i.e., a formal object] which is uniquely appropriate to love. My thesis is that there is nothing of this kind that must be so, and that this differentiates it and hate from the other emotions.

Hamlyn goes on to suggest that love and hate might be primordial emotions, a kind of positive or negative “feeling towards,” presupposed by all other emotions. [ 13 ]

The trouble with these accounts of love as an emotion proper is that they provide too thin a conception of love. In Hamlyn’s case, love is conceived as a fairly generic pro-attitude, rather than as the specific kind of distinctively personal attitude discussed here. In Brown’s case, spelling out the formal object of love as simply being worthwhile (as a person) fails to distinguish love from other evaluative responses like admiration and respect. Part of the problem seems to be the rather simple account of what an emotion is that Brown and Hamlyn use as their starting point: if love is an emotion, then the understanding of what an emotion is must be enriched considerably to accommodate love. Yet it is not at all clear whether the idea of an “emotion proper” can be adequately enriched so as to do so. As Pismenny & Prinz (2017) point out, love seems to be too varied both in its ground and in the sort of experience it involves to be capturable by a single emotion.

The emotion complex view, which understands love to be a complex emotional attitude towards another person, may initially seem to hold out great promise to overcome the problems of alternative types of views. By articulating the emotional interconnections between persons, it could offer a satisfying account of the “depth” of love without the excesses of the union view and without the overly narrow teleological focus of the robust concern view; and because these emotional interconnections are themselves evaluations, it could offer an understanding of love as simultaneously evaluative, without needing to specify a single formal object of love. However, the devil is in the details.

Rorty (1986/1993) does not try to present a complete account of love; rather, she focuses on the idea that “relational psychological attitudes” which, like love, essentially involve emotional and desiderative responses, exhibit historicity : “they arise from, and are shaped by, dynamic interactions between a subject and an object” (p. 73). In part this means that what makes an attitude be one of love is not the presence of a state that we can point to at a particular time within the lover; rather, love is to be “identified by a characteristic narrative history” (p. 75). Moreover, Rorty argues, the historicity of love involves the lover’s being permanently transformed by loving who he does.

Baier (1991), seeming to pick up on this understanding of love as exhibiting historicity, says (p. 444):

Love is not just an emotion people feel toward other people, but also a complex tying together of the emotions that two or a few more people have; it is a special form of emotional interdependence.

To a certain extent, such emotional interdependence involves feeling sympathetic emotions, so that, for example, I feel disappointed and frustrated on behalf of my beloved when she fails, and joyful when she succeeds. However, Baier insists, love is “more than just the duplication of the emotion of each in a sympathetic echo in the other” (p. 442); the emotional interdependence of the lovers involves also appropriate follow-up responses to the emotional predicaments of your beloved. Two examples Baier gives (pp. 443–44) are a feeling of “mischievous delight” at your beloved’s temporary bafflement, and amusement at her embarrassment. The idea is that in a loving relationship your beloved gives you permission to feel such emotions when no one else is permitted to do so, and a condition of her granting you that permission is that you feel these emotions “tenderly.” Moreover, you ought to respond emotionally to your beloved’s emotional responses to you: by feeling hurt when she is indifferent to you, for example. All of these foster the sort of emotional interdependence Baier is after—a kind of intimacy you have with your beloved.

Badhwar (2003, p. 46) similarly understands love to be a matter of “one’s overall emotional orientation towards a person—the complex of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings”; as such, love is a matter of having a certain “character structure.” Central to this complex emotional orientation, Badhwar thinks, is what she calls the “look of love”: “an ongoing [emotional] affirmation of the loved object as worthy of existence…for her own sake” (p. 44), an affirmation that involves taking pleasure in your beloved’s well-being. Moreover, Badhwar claims, the look of love also provides to the beloved reliable testimony concerning the quality of the beloved’s character and actions (p. 57).

There is surely something very right about the idea that love, as an attitude central to deeply personal relationships, should not be understood as a state that can simply come and go. Rather, as the emotion complex view insists, the complexity of love is to be found in the historical patterns of one’s emotional responsiveness to one’s beloved—a pattern that also projects into the future. Indeed, as suggested above, the kind of emotional interdependence that results from this complex pattern can seem to account for the intuitive “depth” of love as fully interwoven into one’s emotional sense of oneself. And it seems to make some headway in understanding the complex phenomenology of love: love can at times be a matter of intense pleasure in the presence of one’s beloved, yet it can at other times involve frustration, exasperation, anger, and hurt as a manifestation of the complexities and depth of the relationships it fosters.

This understanding of love as constituted by a history of emotional interdependence enables emotion complex views to say something interesting about the impact love has on the lover’s identity. This is partly Rorty’s point (1986/1993) in her discussion of the historicity of love ( above ). Thus, she argues, one important feature of such historicity is that love is “ dynamically permeable ” in that the lover is continually “changed by loving” such that these changes “tend to ramify through a person’s character” (p. 77). Through such dynamic permeability, love transforms the identity of the lover in a way that can sometimes foster the continuity of the love, as each lover continually changes in response to the changes in the other. [ 14 ] Indeed, Rorty concludes, love should be understood in terms of “a characteristic narrative history” (p. 75) that results from such dynamic permeability. It should be clear, however, that the mere fact of dynamic permeability need not result in the love’s continuing: nothing about the dynamics of a relationship requires that the characteristic narrative history project into the future, and such permeability can therefore lead to the dissolution of the love. Love is therefore risky—indeed, all the more risky because of the way the identity of the lover is defined in part through the love. The loss of a love can therefore make one feel no longer oneself in ways poignantly described by Nussbaum (1990).

By focusing on such emotionally complex histories, emotion complex views differ from most alternative accounts of love. For alternative accounts tend to view love as a kind of attitude we take toward our beloveds, something we can analyze simply in terms of our mental state at the moment. [ 15 ] By ignoring this historical dimension of love in providing an account of what love is, alternative accounts have a hard time providing either satisfying accounts of the sense in which our identities as person are at stake in loving another or satisfactory solutions to problems concerning how love is to be justified (cf. Section 6 , especially the discussion of fungibility ).

Nonetheless, some questions remain. If love is to be understood as an emotion complex, we need a much more explicit account of the pattern at issue here: what ties all of these emotional responses together into a single thing, namely love? Baier and Badhwar seem content to provide interesting and insightful examples of this pattern, but that does not seem to be enough. For example, what connects my amusement at my beloved’s embarrassment to other emotions like my joy on his behalf when he succeeds? Why shouldn’t my amusement at his embarrassment be understood instead as a somewhat cruel case of schadenfreude and so as antithetical to, and disconnected from, love? Moreover, as Naar (2013) notes, we need a principled account of when such historical patterns are disrupted in such a way as to end the love and when they are not. Do I stop loving when, in the midst of clinical depression, I lose my normal pattern of emotional concern?

Presumably the answer requires returning to the historicity of love: it all depends on the historical details of the relationship my beloved and I have forged. Some loves develop so that the intimacy within the relationship is such as to allow for tender, teasing responses to each other, whereas other loves may not. The historical details, together with the lovers’ understanding of their relationship, presumably determine which emotional responses belong to the pattern constitutive of love and which do not. However, this answer so far is inadequate: not just any historical relationship involving emotional interdependence is a loving relationship, and we need a principled way of distinguishing loving relationships from other relational evaluative attitudes: precisely what is the characteristic narrative history that is characteristic of love?

Helm (2009, 2010) tries to answer some of these questions in presenting an account of love as intimate identification. To love another, Helm claims, is to care about him as the particular person he is and so, other things being equal, to value the things he values. Insofar as a person’s (structured) set of values—his sense of the kind of life worth his living—constitutes his identity as a person, such sharing of values amounts to sharing his identity, which sounds very much like union accounts of love. However, Helm is careful to understand such sharing of values as for the sake of the beloved (as robust concern accounts insist), and he spells this all out in terms of patterns of emotions. Thus, Helm claims, all emotions have not only a target and a formal object (as indicated above), but also a focus : a background object the subject cares about in terms of which the implicit evaluation of the target is made intelligible. (For example, if I am afraid of the approaching hailstorm, I thereby evaluate it as dangerous, and what explains this evaluation is the way that hailstorm bears on my vegetable garden, which I care about; my garden, therefore, is the focus of my fear.) Moreover, emotions normally come in patterns with a common focus: fearing the hailstorm is normally connected to other emotions as being relieved when it passes by harmlessly (or disappointed or sad when it does not), being angry at the rabbits for killing the spinach, delighted at the productivity of the tomato plants, etc. Helm argues that a projectible pattern of such emotions with a common focus constitute caring about that focus. Consequently, we might say along the lines of Section 4.3 , while particular emotions appraise events in the world as having certain evaluative properties, their having these properties is partly bestowed on them by the overall patterns of emotions.

Helm identifies some emotions as person-focused emotions : emotions like pride and shame that essentially take persons as their focuses, for these emotions implicitly evaluate in terms of the target’s bearing on the quality of life of the person that is their focus. To exhibit a pattern of such emotions focused on oneself and subfocused on being a mother, for example, is to care about the place being a mother has in the kind of life you find worth living—in your identity as a person; to care in this way is to value being a mother as a part of your concern for your own identity. Likewise, to exhibit a projectible pattern of such emotions focused on someone else and subfocused on his being a father is to value this as a part of your concern for his identity—to value it for his sake. Such sharing of another’s values for his sake, which, Helm argues, essentially involves trust, respect, and affection, amounts to intimate identification with him, and such intimate identification just is love. Thus, Helm tries to provide an account of love that is grounded in an explicit account of caring (and caring about something for the sake of someone else) that makes room for the intuitive “depth” of love through intimate identification.

Jaworska & Wonderly (2017) argue that Helm’s construal of intimacy as intimate identification is too demanding. Rather, they argue, the sort of intimacy that distinguishes love from mere caring is one that involves a kind of emotional vulnerability in which things going well or poorly for one’s beloved are directly connected not merely to one’s well-being, but to one’s ability to flourish. This connection, they argue, runs through the lover’s self-understanding and the place the beloved has in the lover’s sense of a meaningful life.

Why do we love? It has been suggested above that any account of love needs to be able to answer some such justificatory question. Although the issue of the justification of love is important on its own, it is also important for the implications it has for understanding more clearly the precise object of love: how can we make sense of the intuitions not only that we love the individuals themselves rather than their properties, but also that my beloved is not fungible—that no one could simply take her place without loss. Different theories approach these questions in different ways, but, as will become clear below, the question of justification is primary.

One way to understand the question of why we love is as asking for what the value of love is: what do we get out of it? One kind of answer, which has its roots in Aristotle, is that having loving relationships promotes self-knowledge insofar as your beloved acts as a kind of mirror, reflecting your character back to you (Badhwar, 2003, p. 58). Of course, this answer presupposes that we cannot accurately know ourselves in other ways: that left alone, our sense of ourselves will be too imperfect, too biased, to help us grow and mature as persons. The metaphor of a mirror also suggests that our beloveds will be in the relevant respects similar to us, so that merely by observing them, we can come to know ourselves better in a way that is, if not free from bias, at least more objective than otherwise.

Brink (1999, pp. 264–65) argues that there are serious limits to the value of such mirroring of one’s self in a beloved. For if the aim is not just to know yourself better but to improve yourself, you ought also to interact with others who are not just like yourself: interacting with such diverse others can help you recognize alternative possibilities for how to live and so better assess the relative merits of these possibilities. Whiting (2013) also emphasizes the importance of our beloveds’ having an independent voice capable of reflecting not who one now is but an ideal for who one is to be. Nonetheless, we need not take the metaphor of the mirror quite so literally; rather, our beloveds can reflect our selves not through their inherent similarity to us but rather through the interpretations they offer of us, both explicitly and implicitly in their responses to us. This is what Badhwar calls the “epistemic significance” of love. [ 16 ]

In addition to this epistemic significance of love, LaFollette (1996, Chapter 5) offers several other reasons why it is good to love, reasons derived in part from the psychological literature on love: love increases our sense of well-being, it elevates our sense of self-worth, and it serves to develop our character. It also, we might add, tends to lower stress and blood pressure and to increase health and longevity. Friedman (1993) argues that the kind of partiality towards our beloveds that love involves is itself morally valuable because it supports relationships—loving relationships—that contribute “to human well-being, integrity, and fulfillment in life” (p. 61). And Solomon (1988, p. 155) claims:

Ultimately, there is only one reason for love. That one grand reason…is “because we bring out the best in each other.” What counts as “the best,” of course, is subject to much individual variation.

This is because, Solomon suggests, in loving someone, I want myself to be better so as to be worthy of his love for me.

Each of these answers to the question of why we love understands it to be asking about love quite generally, abstracted away from details of particular relationships. It is also possible to understand the question as asking about particular loves. Here, there are several questions that are relevant:

• What, if anything, justifies my loving rather than not loving this particular person?
• What, if anything, justifies my coming to love this particular person rather than someone else?
• What, if anything, justifies my continuing to love this particular person given the changes—both in him and me and in the overall circumstances—that have occurred since I began loving him?

These are importantly different questions. Velleman (1999), for example, thinks we can answer (1) by appealing to the fact that my beloved is a person and so has a rational nature, yet he thinks (2) and (3) have no answers: the best we can do is offer causal explanations for our loving particular people, a position echoed by Han (2021). Setiya (2014) similarly thinks (1) has an answer, but points not to the rational nature of persons but rather to the other’s humanity , where such humanity differs from personhood in that not all humans need have the requisite rational nature for personhood, and not all persons need be humans. And, as will become clear below , the distinction between (2) and (3) will become important in resolving puzzles concerning whether our beloveds are fungible, though it should be clear that (3) potentially raises questions concerning personal identity (which will not be addressed here).

It is important not to misconstrue these justificatory questions. Thomas (1991) , for example, rejects the idea that love can be justified: “there are no rational considerations whereby anyone can lay claim to another’s love or insist that an individual’s love for another is irrational” (p. 474). This is because, Thomas claims (p. 471):

no matter how wonderful and lovely an individual might be, on any and all accounts, it is simply false that a romantically unencumbered person must love that individual on pain of being irrational. Or, there is no irrationality involved in ceasing to love a person whom one once loved immensely, although the person has not changed.

However, as LaFollette (1996, p. 63) correctly points out,

reason is not some external power which dictates how we should behave, but an internal power, integral to who we are.… Reason does not command that we love anyone. Nonetheless, reason is vital in determining whom we love and why we love them.

That is, reasons for love are pro tanto : they are a part of the overall reasons we have for acting, and it is up to us in exercising our capacity for agency to decide what on balance we have reason to do or even whether we shall act contrary to our reasons. To construe the notion of a reason for love as compelling us to love, as Thomas does, is to misconstrue the place such reasons have within our agency. [ 17 ]

Most philosophical discussions of the justification of love focus on question (1) , thinking that answering this question will also, to the extent that we can, answer question (2) , which is typically not distinguished from (3) . The answers given to these questions vary in a way that turns on how the kind of evaluation implicit in love is construed. On the one hand, those who understand the evaluation implicit in love to be a matter of the bestowal of value (such as Telfer 1970–71; Friedman 1993; Singer 1994) typically claim that no justification can be given (cf. Section 4.2 ). As indicated above, this seems problematic, especially given the importance love can have both in our lives and, especially, in shaping our identities as persons. To reject the idea that we can love for reasons may reduce the impact our agency can have in defining who we are.

On the other hand, those who understand the evaluation implicit in love to be a matter of appraisal tend to answer the justificatory question by appeal to these valuable properties of the beloved. This acceptance of the idea that love can be justified leads to two further, related worries about the object of love.

The first worry is raised by Vlastos (1981) in a discussion Plato’s and Aristotle’s accounts of love. Vlastos notes that these accounts focus on the properties of our beloveds: we are to love people, they say, only because and insofar as they are objectifications of the excellences. Consequently, he argues, in doing so they fail to distinguish “ disinterested affection for the person we love” from “ appreciation of the excellences instantiated by that person ” (p. 33). That is, Vlastos thinks that Plato and Aristotle provide an account of love that is really a love of properties rather than a love of persons—love of a type of person, rather than love of a particular person—thereby losing what is distinctive about love as an essentially personal attitude. This worry about Plato and Aristotle might seem to apply just as well to other accounts that justify love in terms of the properties of the person: insofar as we love the person for the sake of her properties, it might seem that what we love is those properties and not the person. Here it is surely insufficient to say, as Solomon (1988, p. 154) does, “if love has its reasons, then it is not the whole person that one loves but certain aspects of that person—though the rest of the person comes along too, of course”: that final tagline fails to address the central difficulty about what the object of love is and so about love as a distinctly personal attitude. (Clausen 2019 might seem to address this worry by arguing that we love people not as having certain properties but rather as having “ organic unities ”: a holistic set of properties the value of each of which must be understood in essential part in terms of its place within that whole. Nonetheless, while this is an interesting and plausible way to think about the value of the properties of persons, that organic unity itself will be a (holistic) property held by the person, and it seems that the fundamental problem reemerges at the level of this holistic property: do we love the holistic unity rather than the person?)

The second worry concerns the fungibility of the object of love. To be fungible is to be replaceable by another relevantly similar object without any loss of value. Thus, money is fungible: I can give you two $5 bills in exchange for a $10 bill, and neither of us has lost anything. Is the object of love fungible? That is, can I simply switch from loving one person to loving another relevantly similar person without any loss? The worry about fungibility is commonly put this way: if we accept that love can be justified by appealing to properties of the beloved, then it may seem that in loving someone for certain reasons, I love him not simply as the individual he is, but as instantiating those properties. And this may imply that any other person instantiating those same properties would do just as well: my beloved would be fungible. Indeed, it may be that another person exhibits the properties that ground my love to a greater degree than my current beloved does, and so it may seem that in such a case I have reason to “trade up”—to switch my love to the new, better person. However, it seems clear that the objects of our loves are not fungible: love seems to involve a deeply personal commitment to a particular person, a commitment that is antithetical to the idea that our beloveds are fungible or to the idea that we ought to be willing to trade up when possible. [ 18 ]

In responding to these worries, Nozick (1989) appeals to the union view of love he endorses (see the section on Love as Union ):

The intention in love is to form a we and to identify with it as an extended self, to identify one’s fortunes in large part with its fortunes. A willingness to trade up, to destroy the very we you largely identify with, would then be a willingness to destroy your self in the form of your own extended self. [p. 78]

So it is because love involves forming a “we” that we must understand other persons and not properties to be the objects of love, and it is because my very identity as a person depends essentially on that “we” that it is not possible to substitute without loss one object of my love for another. However, Badhwar (2003) criticizes Nozick, saying that his response implies that once I love someone, I cannot abandon that love no matter who that person becomes; this, she says, “cannot be understood as love at all rather than addiction” (p. 61). [ 19 ]

Instead, Badhwar (1987) turns to her robust-concern account of love as a concern for the beloved for his sake rather than one’s own. Insofar as my love is disinterested — not a means to antecedent ends of my own—it would be senseless to think that my beloved could be replaced by someone who is able to satisfy my ends equally well or better. Consequently, my beloved is in this way irreplaceable. However, this is only a partial response to the worry about fungibility, as Badhwar herself seems to acknowledge. For the concern over fungibility arises not merely for those cases in which we think of love as justified instrumentally, but also for those cases in which the love is justified by the intrinsic value of the properties of my beloved. Confronted with cases like this, Badhwar (2003) concludes that the object of love is fungible after all (though she insists that it is very unlikely in practice). (Soble (1990, Chapter 13) draws similar conclusions.)

Nonetheless, Badhwar thinks that the object of love is “phenomenologically non-fungible” (2003, p. 63; see also 1987, p. 14). By this she means that we experience our beloveds to be irreplaceable: “loving and delighting in [one person] are not completely commensurate with loving and delighting in another” (1987, p. 14). Love can be such that we sometimes desire to be with this particular person whom we love, not another whom we also love, for our loves are qualitatively different. But why is this? It seems as though the typical reason I now want to spend time with Amy rather than Bob is, for example, that Amy is funny but Bob is not. I love Amy in part for her humor, and I love Bob for other reasons, and these qualitative differences between them is what makes them not fungible. However, this reply does not address the worry about the possibility of trading up: if Bob were to be at least as funny (charming, kind, etc.) as Amy, why shouldn’t I dump her and spend all my time with him?

A somewhat different approach is taken by Whiting (1991). In response to the first worry concerning the object of love, Whiting argues that Vlastos offers a false dichotomy: having affection for someone that is disinterested —for her sake rather than my own—essentially involves an appreciation of her excellences as such. Indeed, Whiting says, my appreciation of these as excellences, and so the underlying commitment I have to their value, just is a disinterested commitment to her because these excellences constitute her identity as the person she is. The person, therefore, really is the object of love. Delaney (1996) takes the complementary tack of distinguishing between the object of one’s love, which of course is the person, and the grounds of the love, which are her properties: to say, as Solomon does, that we love someone for reasons is not at all to say that we only love certain aspects of the person. In these terms, we might say that Whiting’s rejection of Vlastos’ dichotomy can be read as saying that what makes my attitude be one of disinterested affection—one of love—for the person is precisely that I am thereby responding to her excellences as the reasons for that affection. [ 20 ]

Of course, more needs to be said about what it is that makes a particular person be the object of love. Implicit in Whiting’s account is an understanding of the way in which the object of my love is determined in part by the history of interactions I have with her: it is she, and not merely her properties (which might be instantiated in many different people), that I want to be with; it is she, and not merely her properties, on whose behalf I am concerned when she suffers and whom I seek to comfort; etc. This addresses the first worry, but not the second worry about fungibility, for the question still remains whether she is the object of my love only as instantiating certain properties, and so whether or not I have reason to “trade up.”

To respond to the fungibility worry, Whiting and Delaney appeal explicitly to the historical relationship. [ 21 ] Thus, Whiting claims, although there may be a relatively large pool of people who have the kind of excellences of character that would justify my loving them, and so although there can be no answer to question (2) about why I come to love this rather than that person within this pool, once I have come to love this person and so have developed a historical relation with her, this history of concern justifies my continuing to love this person rather than someone else (1991, p. 7). Similarly, Delaney claims that love is grounded in “historical-relational properties” (1996, p. 346), so that I have reasons for continuing to love this person rather than switching allegiances and loving someone else. In each case, the appeal to both such historical relations and the excellences of character of my beloved is intended to provide an answer to question (3) , and this explains why the objects of love are not fungible.

There seems to be something very much right with this response. Relationships grounded in love are essentially personal, and it would be odd to think of what justifies that love to be merely non-relational properties of the beloved. Nonetheless, it is still unclear how the historical-relational propreties can provide any additional justification for subsequent concern beyond that which is already provided (as an answer to question (1) ) by appeal to the excellences of the beloved’s character (cf. Brink 1999). The mere fact that I have loved someone in the past does not seem to justify my continuing to love him in the future. When we imagine that he is going through a rough time and begins to lose the virtues justifying my initial love for him, why shouldn’t I dump him and instead come to love someone new having all of those virtues more fully? Intuitively (unless the change she undergoes makes her in some important sense no longer the same person he was), we think I should not dump him, but the appeal to the mere fact that I loved him in the past is surely not enough. Yet what historical-relational properties could do the trick? (For an interesting attempt at an answer, see Kolodny 2003 and also Howard 2019.)

If we think that love can be justified, then it may seem that the appeal to particular historical facts about a loving relationship to justify that love is inadequate, for such idiosyncratic and subjective properties might explain but cannot justify love. Rather, it may seem, justification in general requires appealing to universal, objective properties. But such properties are ones that others might share, which leads to the problem of fungibility. Consequently it may seem that love cannot be justified. In the face of this predicament, accounts of love that understand love to be an attitude towards value that is intermediate between appraisal and bestowal, between recognizing already existing value and creating that value (see Section 4.3 ) might seem to offer a way out. For once we reject the thought that the value of our beloveds must be either the precondition or the consequence of our love, we have room to acknowledge that the deeply personal, historically grounded, creative nature of love (central to bestowal accounts) and the understanding of love as responsive to valuable properties of the beloved that can justify that love (central to appraisal accounts) are not mutually exclusive (Helm 2010; Bagley 2015).

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• Aristotle , Nicomachean Ethics , translated by W.D. Ross.
• Moseley, A., “ Philosophy of Love ,” in J. Fieser (ed.), Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

character, moral | emotion | friendship | impartiality | obligations: special | personal identity | Plato: ethics | Plato: rhetoric and poetry | respect | value: intrinsic vs. extrinsic

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Sure, your heart thumps, but let’s look at what’s happening physically and psychologically

“They gave each other a smile with a future in it.” — Ring Lardner

Love’s warm squishiness seems a thing far removed from the cold, hard reality of science. Yet the two do meet, whether in lab tests for surging hormones or in austere chambers where MRI scanners noisily thunk and peer into brains that ignite at glimpses of their soulmates.

When it comes to thinking deeply about love, poets, philosophers, and even high school boys gazing dreamily at girls two rows over have a significant head start on science. But the field is gamely racing to catch up.

One database of scientific publications turns up more than 6,600 pages of results in a search for the word “love.” The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is conducting 18 clinical trials on it (though, like love itself, NIH’s “love” can have layered meanings, including as an acronym for a study of Crohn’s disease). Though not normally considered an intestinal ailment, love is often described as an illness, and the smitten as lovesick. Comedian George Burns once described love as something like a backache: “It doesn’t show up on X-rays, but you know it’s there.”

Richard Schwartz , associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and a consultant to McLean and Massachusetts General (MGH) hospitals, says it’s never been proven that love makes you physically sick, though it does raise levels of cortisol, a stress hormone that has been shown to suppress immune function.

Love also turns on the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is known to stimulate the brain’s pleasure centers. Couple that with a drop in levels of serotonin — which adds a dash of obsession — and you have the crazy, pleasing, stupefied, urgent love of infatuation.

It’s also true, Schwartz said, that like the moon — a trigger of its own legendary form of madness — love has its phases.

“It’s fairly complex, and we only know a little about it,” Schwartz said. “There are different phases and moods of love. The early phase of love is quite different” from later phases.

During the first love-year, serotonin levels gradually return to normal, and the “stupid” and “obsessive” aspects of the condition moderate. That period is followed by increases in the hormone oxytocin, a neurotransmitter associated with a calmer, more mature form of love. The oxytocin helps cement bonds, raise immune function, and begin to confer the health benefits found in married couples, who tend to live longer, have fewer strokes and heart attacks, be less depressed, and have higher survival rates from major surgery and cancer.

Schwartz has built a career around studying the love, hate, indifference, and other emotions that mark our complex relationships. And, though science is learning more in the lab than ever before, he said he still has learned far more counseling couples. His wife and sometime collaborator, Jacqueline Olds , also an associate professor of psychiatry at HMS and a consultant to McLean and MGH, agrees.

Spouses Richard Schwartz and Jacqueline Olds, both associate professors of psychiatry, have collaborated on a book about marriage.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

More knowledge, but struggling to understand

“I think we know a lot more scientifically about love and the brain than we did a couple of decades ago, but I don’t think it tells us very much that we didn’t already know about love,” Schwartz said. “It’s kind of interesting, it’s kind of fun [to study]. But do we think that makes us better at love, or helping people with love? Probably not much.”

Love and companionship have made indelible marks on Schwartz and Olds. Though they have separate careers, they’re separate together, working from discrete offices across the hall from each other in their stately Cambridge home. Each has a professional practice and independently trains psychiatry students, but they’ve also collaborated on two books about loneliness and one on marriage. Their own union has lasted 39 years, and they raised two children.

“I think we know a lot more scientifically about love and the brain than we did a couple of decades ago … But do we think that makes us better at love, or helping people with love? Probably not much.” Richard Schwartz, associate professor of psychiatry, Harvard Medical School

“I have learned much more from doing couples therapy, and being in a couple’s relationship” than from science, Olds said. “But every now and again, something like the fMRI or chemical studies can help you make the point better. If you say to somebody, ‘I think you’re doing this, and it’s terrible for a relationship,’ they may not pay attention. If you say, ‘It’s corrosive, and it’s causing your cortisol to go way up,’ then they really sit up and listen.”

A side benefit is that examining other couples’ trials and tribulations has helped their own relationship over the inevitable rocky bumps, Olds said.

“To some extent, being a psychiatrist allows you a privileged window into other people’s triumphs and mistakes,” Olds said. “And because you get to learn from them as they learn from you, when you work with somebody 10 years older than you, you learn what mistakes 10 years down the line might be.”

People have written for centuries about love shifting from passionate to companionate, something Schwartz called “both a good and a sad thing.” Different couples experience that shift differently. While the passion fades for some, others keep its flames burning, while still others are able to rekindle the fires.

“You have a tidal-like motion of closeness and drifting apart, closeness and drifting apart,” Olds said. “And you have to have one person have a ‘distance alarm’ to notice the drifting apart so there can be a reconnection … One could say that in the couples who are most successful at keeping their relationship alive over the years, there’s an element of companionate love and an element of passionate love. And those each get reawakened in that drifting back and forth, the ebb and flow of lasting relationships.”

Children as the biggest stressor

Children remain the biggest stressor on relationships, Olds said, adding that it seems a particular problem these days. Young parents feel pressure to raise kids perfectly, even at the risk of their own relationships. Kids are a constant presence for parents. The days when child care consisted of the instruction “Go play outside” while mom and dad reconnected over cocktails are largely gone.

When not hovering over children, America’s workaholic culture, coupled with technology’s 24/7 intrusiveness, can make it hard for partners to pay attention to each other in the evenings and even on weekends. It is a problem that Olds sees even in environments that ought to know better, such as psychiatry residency programs.

“There are all these sweet young doctors who are trying to have families while they’re in residency,” Olds said. “And the residencies work them so hard there’s barely time for their relationship or having children or taking care of children. So, we’re always trying to balance the fact that, in psychiatry, we stand for psychological good health, but [in] the residency we run, sometimes we don’t practice everything we preach.”

“There is too much pressure … on what a romantic partner should be. They should be your best friend, they should be your lover, they should be your closest relative, they should be your work partner, they should be the co-parent, your athletic partner. … Of course everybody isn’t able to quite live up to it.” Jacqueline Olds, associate professor of psychiatry, Harvard Medical School

All this busy-ness has affected non-romantic relationships too, which has a ripple effect on the romantic ones, Olds said. A respected national social survey has shown that in recent years people have gone from having three close friends to two, with one of those their romantic partner.

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“Often when you scratch the surface … the second [friend] lives 3,000 miles away, and you can’t talk to them on the phone because they’re on a different time schedule,” Olds said. “There is too much pressure, from my point of view, on what a romantic partner should be. They should be your best friend, they should be your lover, they should be your closest relative, they should be your work partner, they should be the co-parent, your athletic partner. There’s just so much pressure on the role of spouse that of course everybody isn’t able to quite live up to it.”

Since the rising challenges of modern life aren’t going to change soon, Schwartz and Olds said couples should try to adopt ways to fortify their relationships for life’s long haul. For instance, couples benefit from shared goals and activities, which will help pull them along a shared life path, Schwartz said.

“You’re not going to get to 40 years by gazing into each other’s eyes,” Schwartz said. “I think the fact that we’ve worked on things together has woven us together more, in good ways.”

Maintain curiosity about your partner

Also important is retaining a genuine sense of curiosity about your partner, fostered both by time apart to have separate experiences, and by time together, just as a couple, to share those experiences. Schwartz cited a study by Robert Waldinger, clinical professor of psychiatry at MGH and HMS, in which couples watched videos of themselves arguing. Afterwards, each person was asked what the partner was thinking. The longer they had been together, the worse they actually were at guessing, in part because they thought they already knew.

“What keeps love alive is being able to recognize that you don’t really know your partner perfectly and still being curious and still be exploring,” Schwartz said. “Which means, in addition to being sure you have enough time and involvement with each other — that that time isn’t stolen — making sure you have enough separateness that you can be an object of curiosity for the other person.”

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Does True Love Really Exist?

October 26, 2023

Molly Daniels

The idea of true love has been probed, questioned, and depicted to death since the dawn of time (think Adam and Eve) across cultures and in philosophical, literati, psychological, and even neuroscientific circles.

We balk at the idea that someone would dare ask the question, “Does true love exist?” How dare they! Of course, it exists!

All one has to do is crack open a history book to see evidence of couples whose love sparked actual wars, gave birth to literary, musical, and artistic masterpieces, and had the public obsessed with their every move . True love can move mountains—and change the course of history. A quick Google search of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn will tell you that the Tudor King broke with the Catholic Church and replaced the pope—he literally split Rome in half for love. That may not be a perfect example, but true love can be messy!

And while we know that it definitely exists, how to know if it’s true love is a different story. That depends on a number of factors, including romantic compatibility, mutual respect, trust, communication, evolving and growing together, and, above all, time.

Instead of getting all scientific on you, we are going to provide you with proof that true love exists with real-life examples of true love! Some you may have heard of, some may be news to you, but all show that there is such a thing as true love.

Get ready to be enchanted by these true love tales that span centuries into the here and now!

True Stories That Prove True Love Exists

1 – johnny cash and june carter.

The true love story of Johnny Cash and June Carter is perhaps the epitome of romance with a country music backdrop. Both being celebrated artists in their own right, their paths crossed backstage at the iconic Grand Ole Opry. When they met for the first time, Carter reportedly said to Cash, “I feel like I know you already.” 

They toured together, found true love along the way, and tied the knot in 1968. She played a pivotal role in helping him overcome his drug addiction, which only made them a stronger dynamic duo. Their shared achievements include two Grammys, alongside two individual Grammys for Carter and 11 for Cash. Their union lasted a lifetime, with their passing occurring merely four months apart . The trueness of their love was apparent—when asked what his paradise was, Cash responded, “This morning, with her, having coffee.”

2 – George and Amal Clooney

For decades, no one could lock down George Clooney—he repeatedly said he would never marry. Hollywood’s silver fox spoke too soon; he just hadn’t met his “one” yet. That all changed when he met a human rights lawyer named Amal , and the rest is a true love story! 

They were introduced by a mutual friend and soon began exchanging emails, with George humorously writing as if his dog, Einstein, was the author. Six months into dating, George proposed while the song ‘Why Shouldn’t I?’ played in the background during dinner. “It’s a really good song about why can’t I be in love?” George explained. The couple juggles Amal’s demanding career and his acting commitments and raising their twins, Ella and Alexander.

3 – John Quincy Adams and Abigail Smith

At the age of 20, Abigail Smith wed the Founding Father, bore five children (among them, America’s fifth president, John Quincy Adams), and became John Adams’s trusted confidante, political advisor, and First Lady. The extensive correspondence of over 1,000 letters between them shows the depth of mutual affection and enduring friendship they shared. 

Their bond transcended revolutionary political ideologies; it was solidified by trust and devotion . Abigail penned : “There is a tye more binding than Humanity, and stronger than Friendship … and by this chord I am not ashamed to say that I am bound, nor do I [believe] that you are wholly free from it.” On his part, John conveyed :

“I want to hear you think, or see your Thoughts. The Conclusion of your Letter makes my Heart throb, more than a Cannonade would. You bid me burn your Letters. But I must forget you first.” – John Quincy Adams

4 – Barack and Michelle Obama

Barack and Michelle Obama are destined to be remembered as one of history’s notable tales that show true love exists . Long before ascending to the roles of President and First Lady of the United States, their paths crossed at a Chicago law firm where they both worked. They exchanged vows on October 3, 1992, and later became parents to daughters Malia and Sasha. 

Throughout Barack’s presidency, from 2009 to 2017, Michelle remained his ride or die, and the couple frequently reflect on their marital journey, sharing insights on navigating through the tough times and how their bond continues to thrive post-White House era.

5 – Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo

The gifted young Mexican artist Kahlo sought out the well-known muralist Rivera at his studio, looking for guidance on her career path. Rivera observed a remarkable dignity and confidence in her , alongside “a strange fire in her eyes.” 

Despite the turbulence in their relationship, Rivera recognized early on that Kahlo “was the most important fact in my life and she would continue to be until she died 27 years later.” Kahlo, expressing her own sentiments, said ,

“You deserve a lover who listens when you sing, who supports you when you feel shame and respects your freedom; who flies with you and isn’t afraid to fall. You deserve a lover who takes away the lies and brings you hope, coffee, and poetry.” – Frida Kahlo

6 – Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward

Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward first crossed paths during the production of Picnic , and after filming The Long, Hot Summer together , they soon tied the knot. Their union stood in stark contrast to many fleeting Hollywood romances sparked on-set , as Newman and Woodward’s dedication to each other flourished over a remarkable fifty-year span. When questioned about fidelity within his marriage to Woodward, Newman famously remarked,

“I have a steak at home. Why should I go out for hamburger?” – Paul Newman

Shifting away from the bustling Hollywood scene, the couple chose the tranquility of Westport, Connecticut, to raise their family and remained there until Paul Newman’s passing in 2008. If you had asked Paul Newman, “does true love exist?” You would certainly be met with a resounding “yes.”

7 – Prince Rainier and Grace Kelly

In what came to be known as the wedding of the century , American movie star Grace Kelly stepped away from Hollywood at the peak of her fame to marry Prince Rainier , becoming the Princess of Monaco. The spark between Prince Rainier and Grace ignited when they met during the filming of To Catch a Thief in the French Riviera. Their romance blossomed through exchanged letters until they announced their engagement at the Kelly family’s home in Philadelphia, leading to their marriage in 1956. After Grace’s tragic death in 1982, Prince Rainier remained a widower, never remarrying.

8 – Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively

The actors first encountered each other on the set of Green Lantern in 2010, where they played romantic partners on-screen—a scripted affection that transitioned into real-life affection. Not right away; Ryan was married to Scarlett Johansson at the time! But a year later, after his divorce from ScarJo, they went out on a double date and are now possibly the most adorable celebrity couple in Hollywood. 

There were wedding bells in a private ceremony in 2012, and the world has watched the couple playfully roast, troll , and openly express their true love for each other on social media. They’re also the proud parents to daughters James, Inez, and Betty, in addition to a fourth child whose name and gender has not yet been revealed publicly. 

These stories not only prove true love exists, but they are timeless and continue to inspire, and they serve as a poignant reminder of the wonders of true love and the ways in which caring for another can enhance our own lives .

And for those who haven’t found “the one,” they give those still searching for their soul mate faith that they will find their match.

About Molly Daniels

Molly Daniels is a relationship expert in the truest sense–she has been in and out of more than she can count–not like that! She just didn’t always know what she was looking for in terms of romance and had to kiss a lot of frogs before one of them turned into her prince.

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• Relationships

By ENA • March 4, 2023

Unpacking the Complex Concept of True Love: What Does It Really Mean?

Love is a complex and multi-faceted emotion that has captivated human beings for millennia. From ancient myths to modern romance novels, the idea of true love has been a constant theme in our collective imagination. But what exactly is true love? Is it an idealistic fantasy or a tangible reality? In this article, we'll explore the concept of true love, its many meanings and interpretations, and how it manifests in our lives.

Defining True Love

The concept of true love is difficult to define, as it means different things to different people. At its core, true love is often characterized by a deep and abiding connection between two people, marked by trust, respect, and mutual affection. It's a feeling of warmth and tenderness that goes beyond mere attraction or infatuation and is rooted in a profound understanding of the other person.

However, true love is more than just an emotion. It's a commitment to supporting and nurturing your partner, even in difficult times. It involves a willingness to communicate openly and honestly, to share in each other's joys and sorrows, and to work through challenges together. In short, true love is a complex and multifaceted concept that encompasses both emotional and behavioral elements.

The Many Faces of True Love

True love can manifest in many different forms, from the passionate intensity of a new relationship to the steady warmth of a long-term partnership. Some people experience true love as a sudden and overwhelming feeling, while others develop it gradually over time. Some view true love as a divine force that transcends human understanding, while others see it as a natural and biological phenomenon.

Moreover, true love can take many different forms depending on cultural and societal norms. In some cultures, true love is seen as a mystical and transcendent force, while in others it's viewed as a practical and pragmatic partnership. Some people see true love as a romantic ideal, while others see it as a friendship or familial bond. Ultimately, the nature and expression of true love are shaped by a complex interplay of personal, cultural, and historical factors.

Obstacles to True Love

While true love is often seen as a universal and transcendent force, it's not immune to obstacles and challenges. In fact, many relationships are tested by a variety of factors, including distance, infidelity, communication breakdowns, and external stressors such as financial or family problems. These obstacles can cause doubt, insecurity, and even conflict, and may threaten the stability and strength of the relationship.

However, overcoming these obstacles can also be a powerful way to strengthen the bond of true love. By working together to address challenges and communicate openly and honestly, partners can deepen their understanding of each other and build a more resilient and supportive relationship. This can involve seeking the help of a counselor or therapist, finding ways to prioritize the relationship in the face of external pressures, or simply committing to a daily practice of communication and mutual support.

The Importance of Self-Love

Finally, it's worth noting that true love is not just about the relationship between two people. It's also about the relationship you have with yourself. In order to experience true love with another person, it's essential to cultivate a sense of self-worth and self-respect. This involves accepting yourself for who you are, setting healthy boundaries, and engaging in self-care practices that nourish your physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being.

Without a foundation of self-love, it's easy to fall into patterns of neediness, codependency, or toxic relationships. By prioritizing your own needs and building a strong sense of self, you can create the conditions for true love to flourish in your life.

True love is a complex and multifaceted concept that encompasses both emotional and behavioral elements. It's characterized by a deep and abiding connection between two people, marked by trust, respect, and mutual affection. However, true love is not just an emotion; it's a commitment to supporting and nurturing your partner, even in difficult times.

True love can manifest in many different forms, depending on cultural and societal norms. It can take many different shapes and sizes, from the passionate intensity of a new relationship to the steady warmth of a long-term partnership. However, all forms of true love involve a willingness to communicate openly and honestly, to share in each other's joys and sorrows, and to work through challenges together.

Overcoming obstacles to true love can be a powerful way to strengthen the bond between partners. By working together to address challenges and communicate openly and honestly, partners can deepen their understanding of each other and build a more resilient and supportive relationship.

Finally, it's essential to cultivate a sense of self-love in order to experience true love with another person. This involves accepting yourself for who you are, setting healthy boundaries, and engaging in self-care practices that nourish your physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being.

At its best, true love can be a source of profound joy, fulfillment, and support in our lives. It can help us weather life's challenges and celebrate its joys, and provide a sense of belonging and connection that is essential to our well-being. However, true love is not a one-time event or a fleeting feeling; it's a ongoing process of commitment, communication, and mutual support.

Ultimately, the nature and expression of true love are shaped by a complex interplay of personal, cultural, and historical factors. But no matter how it manifests, true love is an essential aspect of the human experience, and one that continues to captivate us with its power and beauty.

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What Is True Love? Figuring Out If You’ve Found The One

The concept of true love has intrigued poets, philosophers, and everyday individuals for centuries. It’s a term that evokes deep emotion and brings images of fairy tales, romantic movies, and eternal commitment. But what does it really mean? How do you know if you’ve found “the one”? True love is often more complex and multifaceted than the romanticized portrayals in pop culture. 

This article will explore the concept of true love, providing insights to help you determine if you’ve found that special connection and offer guidance to nurture and grow that love in your relationship.

Characteristics of true love

While each relationship and connection will vary, some key characteristics of true love often include the following.

Mutual respect

In true love, both partners recognize and value each other’s individuality, opinions, and feelings. They listen without judgment and show consideration for each other’s needs and wishes. Respect in true love means treating each other with kindness and honor, even in disagreements.

Deep connection

True love fosters a connection that goes beyond the superficial. It’s a bond that often involves understanding each other’s core values, beliefs, and life goals. This connection creates a sense of companionship, where both partners feel they’re on the same team, working towards common dreams.

Trust and honesty

Trust is the bedrock of true love. It means believing in each other’s integrity and having faith in each other’s intentions. Honesty, in turn, nurtures this trust. Being truthful with each other strengthens the bond, even if the truth is difficult to face at times.

Empathy is the ability to deeply understand each other’s feelings. In true love, partners try to understand each other’s perspectives, feelings, and needs, providing support and compassion. Empathy helps partners to be more patient and tolerant with each other.

Unconditional support

True love means standing by each other’s side. Whether in success or failure, happiness or distress, partners in true love support each other’s highs and lows without conditions or reservations.

Commitment is a conscious choice to stay together and make the relationship work, even during challenging times. It’s not just about loyalty; it’s about actively investing in the relationship and nurturing it.

Common growth

True love often encourages personal growth and self-improvement. Partners in a loving relationship motivate each other to become better individuals, supporting each other’s ambitions and helping each other reach their full potential.

Acceptance means embracing each other’s flaws and imperfections. True love doesn’t seek to change the other person but accepts them for who they are, acknowledging that nobody is perfect.

How to know if you’ve found “the one”

Recognizing that you’ve found “the one” can seem like a profound realization, yet it might be elusive or challenging to put into words. Let’s explore some signs that may indicate you’ve found that special person with whom you have a deep, meaningful connection.

Comfort and safety

When you’re with “the one,” you might feel a sense of ease, comfort, and safety. You can be your authentic self without fear of judgment or criticism. There’s generally a feeling of home, a place where you’re understood and accepted.

Research suggests that feelings of love  reduce stress and provide various health benefits, including lower blood pressure, better sleep, and more .

Healthy communication

Communication with “the one” often feels natural and effortless. Even in disagreements, you find ways to understand each other and reach compromises. Your conversations are meaningful, and you’re not afraid to discuss your feelings, fears, or dreams. If you are not seeing eye-to-eye, you want to make an effort to reach a mutual understanding while remaining respectful during the conversation.

Same goals and dreams

You and “the one” likely have aligned life goals and a vision for the future. Whether it’s career paths, family planning, or personal growth, you work together towards these goals, supporting each other along the way.

You overcome challenges together

Life is not without its challenges, but with “the one,” you face them together. Instead of tearing you apart, hardships tend to strengthen your bond. You become a team that can weather any storm, learning and growing from each experience.

Mutual admiration and inspiration

You admire each other’s qualities and find inspiration in each other’s strengths. There’s usually mutual respect and encouragement that pushes both of you to be better individuals.

Intuition and gut feeling

Sometimes, knowing you’ve found “the one” is an intuitive feeling, a deep inner knowing that this person is right for you. It’s a connection that feels different, more profound than other relationships.

Your happiness is their happiness

You find joy in each other’s happiness and strive to make each other’s lives more fulfilling. Your partner’s successes feel like your own, and you celebrate them together.

They make you want to be a better person

Being with “the one” encourages you to grow and improve yourself. You feel motivated to be the best version of yourself, not out of pressure but because of their positive influence on you.

You think long-term

When envisioning your future, your partner is an integral part of it. You make plans together, considering each other’s needs and desires, and see a lasting future together.

How can you tell if you’ve found your true love? Navigate relationships with therapy

The difference between infatuation and true love.

Love is a complex and multifaceted emotion that can take various forms. Two of the most commonly confused types are infatuation and true love. While they might seem similar at first glance, especially during the early stages of a relationship, they are fundamentally different in many ways. 

When determining whether you are experiencing infatuation or true love, keep a lookout for these differences. 

Characteristics of infatuation:

• Duration - Infatuation is often a short-lived, intense emotion. It can feel overwhelming and all-consuming but typically fades over time.
• Focus - The focus of infatuation is often more on the self and how the other person makes you feel. It’s about the pleasure, excitement, and gratification the relationship brings you.
• Idealization - Infatuation often involves placing the other person on a pedestal, ignoring their flaws, and creating an idealized image of them. This can lead to unrealistic expectations.
• Emotional Roller Coaster - Infatuation can bring intense highs but also significant lows. The mood of the relationship can change dramatically and unpredictably.
• Physical Attraction - Infatuation often centers around physical attraction and desire. While these elements can be present in true love, they are typically more pronounced and prioritized in infatuation.

Characteristics of true love:

• Duration - True love grows over time, deepening and becoming more profound. It’s a lasting connection that continues to thrive as you grow together.
• Focus - The focus of true love extends beyond self-gratification. It’s about mutual growth, support, respect, and understanding. Both partners are invested in each other’s happiness and well-being.
• Acceptance - True love means accepting each other’s imperfections and loving the whole person, flaws and all. It’s a more grounded and realistic view of each other.
• Stability - True love brings stability and consistency to the relationship. While there may be ups and downs, they are typically navigated with mutual respect and communication, avoiding extreme emotional swings.
• Emotional and Intellectual Connection - True love involves a deep emotional and intellectual connection that goes beyond physical attraction. It’s about common values, goals, and a genuine understanding of each other.

Nurturing true love in your relationship

Even if you consider your partner your true love, keeping a relationship takes time, effort, and commitment. Making sure you keep communicating with regular, open, and honest communication can be important to understanding each other’s needs as you grow together.

Spending quality time together can also help foster closeness in a relationship over time. You can do this by engaging in the same activities and hobbies or simply enjoying each other’s company.

In addition to this, regularly expressing gratitude and appreciation can help keep the love fresh and vibrant and each partner feeling valued in the relationship.

As you progress in your relationship, therapists or relationship coaches can offer professional insights and guidance tailored to your unique relationship.

Benefits of online therapy in relationships

Online therapy for relationships offers increased availability and flexibility for individuals and couples, allowing you to seek professional guidance regardless of location and schedule. The convenience of being in your own home can create a relaxed environment conducive to open communication while also potentially reducing costs. Online platforms, like Betterhelp and Regain, often provide additional tools and resources to supplement therapy sessions.

The benefits extend to long-distance relationships, providing joint sessions and ongoing support even when partners are in different locations. From addressing daily challenges to deeper relationship concerns, online therapy’s location independence, affordability, comfort, and specialized help make it a valuable resource in the modern, connected world. It breaks down barriers to entry and ensures that more individuals and couples have the therapeutic support they need.

The efficacy of online therapy has been an area of growing interest and study in mental health care, particularly as technology continues to advance. Research suggests that online therapy, also known as teletherapy, can be just as effective as traditional in-person therapy for relationship counseling .

Efficacy of online therapy

“As someone who had sought counseling/therapy for the first time, I had serious doubts about the effectiveness of online therapy, but my first meeting with Susan took out those doubts immediately. Over the last six months, Susan has not only given me tools to help me establish boundaries but has given me a new perspective on relationships and life in general. After a few sessions, I was able to turn a corner and have a new outlook on my interactions with others. I wholeheartedly recommend Susan and hope to work with her again in the future.”

“I am so happy I got paired with Ruthie Brooks. My sessions with her have been a positive and insightful experience.  As a result, I can see my relationships improving and I have a better understanding of myself. She is very professional, kind, and great at what she does.”

What are the signs of true love?

True love is felt differently from person to person. Research suggests that a person’s culture, upbringing, and personal beliefs can significantly influence what they consider to be signs of love. However, evidence suggests some common themes regarding how love is perceived. Most people consider receiving compliments, feeling appreciated, receiving a gift, or being granted an act of kindness as signs of love. Depending on who is witnessing them, many other loving acts may also be perceived as signs of true love. 

How rare is true love?

It is likely not possible to quantify how often true love happens in the world. The definition of “true love” is highly subjective, varying considerably from person to person. Some might equate love with preservation, feeling most loved when their partner provides safety. Others might consider love to mean acceptance, feeling the strongest connection to those who understand and accept them as they are. Regardless of how true love is defined, it is likely possible, even if its rarity is uncertain. 

How do you tell if a man loves you?

Ultimately, the best way to know if a man loves you is to have a conversation about how both of you feel. While there are certain signs that a man may be into you , like wanting to spend more time with you, trying to make you smile, and being vulnerable, there is no way to be sure of his feelings without an honest discussion. If you feel like you are his priority and that communicating with him is easy, it is more likely that he has feelings for you. You may wish to consider inquiring about his feelings as long as you are ready to express yours. 

How do you tell if a girl loves you?

Arguably, the best way to tell if a girl loves you is to discuss your feelings openly and inquire about hers. There may be signs, like if she tries to support you, allows you to be vulnerable, and seeks time with you, but likely the only way to be certain is with an honest conversation. Don’t be afraid to broach the subject if you think she might have strong feelings for you. If you don’t want the relationship to continue, it’s important to address her feelings respectfully and kindly. On the other hand, if you hope she has feelings for you, discussing your thoughts might bring renewed relief and understanding to you both. 

What kind of love is real love?

“Real love” is likely different for everybody, but for most healthy adults with secure attachment styles , love often has the following components:

• Long-lasting. True love, which is separate from infatuation or a “crush,” tends to grow over time as partners get to know each other's positive and negative qualities. 
• Focus. True love tends to be focused on both partners’ mutual growth rather than what one person can get from the other. 
• Acceptance. Real love tends to be based on acceptance, wherein both partners know, understand, and accept each other, flaws and all. 
• Stability. Up and downs occur in every relationship, but healthy relationships based on true love have downs that are navigated with respect, empathy, and kindness. 
• Deep Connection. Real love likely involves a deep emotional and intellectual connection based on more than physical attraction. Mutual core values, goals, and mutual understanding are all a part of true love. 

What makes you fall in love with someone?

Love is a complex neurochemical process that involves several biological and psychological factors. Lust, or infatuation, tends to be mediated by the sex hormones testosterone and estrogen before moving on to more stable attraction, which is promoted through dopamine and norepinephrine. Long-term attachment is often attributed to hormones like oxytocin and vasopressin. 

Although love is chemically mediated, psychological and personality factors also play a role. In addition, social factors like proximity, or how much time two people spend together, are likely also important. Researchers are still determining the exact formula for love, but two people with similar interests who spend a lot of time together are potential candidates. 

• For The Girl That You Love: Lyrics And Songs To Send Her Medically reviewed by Karen Foster , LPC
• What Does Unconditional Love Mean? Medically reviewed by Dr. April Brewer , DBH, LPC
• Relationships and Relations

Dear Tyler and Jay: Does true love exist?

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

Q: Does true love exist?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

Articles like these are sponsored free for every Catholic through the support of generous readers just like you.

Help us continue to bring the Gospel to people everywhere through uplifting Catholic news, stories, spirituality, and more.

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Does True Love Really Exist?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Table of Contents

17 Things That Define True Love

1. true love is unconditional.

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

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

2. Complete acceptance

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

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

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

3. You're comfortable sharing anything with them

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

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

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

4. You're comfortable being yourself around your partner

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

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

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

5. True love means mutual respect

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

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

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

6. You share similar values

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

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

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

7. You feed each other's energies

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

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

8. True love is a partnership

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

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

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

9. There are no bad intentions involved

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

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

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

10. It's not demanding

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

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

11. True love is giving

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

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

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

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

12. True love is built on friendship

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

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

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

13. True love starts with you

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

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

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

14. True love is committed

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

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

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

15. True love is certain

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

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

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

16. True love is open

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

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

17. True love is not dramatic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Olivia Surtees

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Is Love at First Sight Real?

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

Posted January 27, 2018 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma

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• Love at first sight can happen multiple times.

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

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

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

But did it really happen?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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