I can’t comment on whether people are confused about what “love” means as I’m not sufficiently deep in love discourse to say. But one thing I’m noticing about your characterizations of love is that they are missing an indexical element to the point of approaching sollipsism.
Romance and sexuality makes for a good example. Consider the following scenarios:
A woman is on a date with a man, which she enjoys until she sees that his home is a dump.
A teenager has a crush on a celebrity, with elaborate daydreams about how cool the celebrity is, not realizing how much of this is a facade created for entertainment.
A man visits a prostitute and feels excited as he causes her to orgasm, not realizing that she fakes it for the business.
In all of these cases, one could say that there is a disconnect between what people think about their object of attraction, versus what that object of attraction really is like.
A Bayesian of parsing this is that their feelings of attraction represents an estimate of how well they fit together, but that this estimate differs from how well they really fit together. The actual fit seems important to think and talk about, and one should probably coin a short word for it—or at least for the coincidence between actual and estimated fit. This could be called “true love”.
I can’t comment on whether people are confused about what “love” means as I’m not sufficiently deep in love discourse to say. But one thing I’m noticing about your characterizations of love is that they are missing an indexical element to the point of approaching sollipsism.
Romance and sexuality makes for a good example. Consider the following scenarios:
A woman is on a date with a man, which she enjoys until she sees that his home is a dump.
A teenager has a crush on a celebrity, with elaborate daydreams about how cool the celebrity is, not realizing how much of this is a facade created for entertainment.
A man visits a prostitute and feels excited as he causes her to orgasm, not realizing that she fakes it for the business.
In all of these cases, one could say that there is a disconnect between what people think about their object of attraction, versus what that object of attraction really is like.
A Bayesian of parsing this is that their feelings of attraction represents an estimate of how well they fit together, but that this estimate differs from how well they really fit together. The actual fit seems important to think and talk about, and one should probably coin a short word for it—or at least for the coincidence between actual and estimated fit. This could be called “true love”.