People commonly talk about love as black-and-white when it isn’t.
It is used as a semantic stopsign or applause light.
Love is a cluster concept made up of many aspects, but the way people talk about love obscures this. The concept of “true love” serves to keep people in the dark by suggesting that the apparent grab-bag nature of love is just the way people talk, & there’s an underlying truth to be discovered. Because experiences of love are fairly rare, people can only accumulate personal evidence about this slowly, so it remains plausible that what they’ve experienced is “just infatuation” or something else, and the “true love” remains to be discovered. People will fight about what love is in sideways ways, EG “you don’t know what love is” can be used to undercut the other person’s authority on love (when a more accurate representation of the situation might be “I didn’t enjoy participating in the social dynamic you’re presently calling love”). Different people will sometimes express different detailed views about what love is, but there seems to be little drive to reach an agreement about this, at least between people who aren’t romantic partners.
I once had the experience of a roommate asking if I believe in love. I said yes, absolutely, explaining that it is a real human emotion (I said something about chemicals in the brain). He responded: it sounds like you don’t believe in love!
(I think this has to do with ambiguity about believe-in as much as about love, to be fair.)
So, a question: is ‘love’ worth saving as a concept? The way some people use the word might be pretty terrible, but, should we try to rescue it? Is there a good way to use it which recovers many aspects of the common use, while restoring coherence?
I do personally feel that there is some emotional core to love, so I’m sympathetic to the “it’s a specific emotion” definition. This accounts with people not being able to give a specific definition. Emotions are feelings, so they’re tough to define. They just feel a specific way. You can try to give cognitive-behavioral definitions, and that’s pretty useful; but, for example, you could show behavioral signs of being afraid without actually experiencing fear.
I’m also sympathetic to the view that “love” is a kind of ritual, with saying “I love you” being the centerpiece of the ritual, and a cluster of loving behaviors being the rest of it. “I love you” can then be interpreted as a desire or intention or commitment to participate in the rest of it.
I do personally feel that there is some emotional core to love, so I’m sympathetic to the “it’s a specific emotion” definition.
The definition of love as an emotion seems wrong to me, because emotions are short-lived. Intuitively, we think of statements like “I love my son” as being true all the time. But I do not experience an emotion of “love” towards him all the time. When I am away from him, hours can pass where I do not think of him at all, and when I am with him I sometimes feel an emotion of annoyance rather than “love”.
So this kind of definition does not seem to match how people use the concept.
I agree that:
People commonly talk about love as black-and-white when it isn’t.
It is used as a semantic stopsign or applause light.
Love is a cluster concept made up of many aspects, but the way people talk about love obscures this. The concept of “true love” serves to keep people in the dark by suggesting that the apparent grab-bag nature of love is just the way people talk, & there’s an underlying truth to be discovered. Because experiences of love are fairly rare, people can only accumulate personal evidence about this slowly, so it remains plausible that what they’ve experienced is “just infatuation” or something else, and the “true love” remains to be discovered. People will fight about what love is in sideways ways, EG “you don’t know what love is” can be used to undercut the other person’s authority on love (when a more accurate representation of the situation might be “I didn’t enjoy participating in the social dynamic you’re presently calling love”). Different people will sometimes express different detailed views about what love is, but there seems to be little drive to reach an agreement about this, at least between people who aren’t romantic partners.
I once had the experience of a roommate asking if I believe in love. I said yes, absolutely, explaining that it is a real human emotion (I said something about chemicals in the brain). He responded: it sounds like you don’t believe in love!
(I think this has to do with ambiguity about believe-in as much as about love, to be fair.)
So, a question: is ‘love’ worth saving as a concept? The way some people use the word might be pretty terrible, but, should we try to rescue it? Is there a good way to use it which recovers many aspects of the common use, while restoring coherence?
I do personally feel that there is some emotional core to love, so I’m sympathetic to the “it’s a specific emotion” definition. This accounts with people not being able to give a specific definition. Emotions are feelings, so they’re tough to define. They just feel a specific way. You can try to give cognitive-behavioral definitions, and that’s pretty useful; but, for example, you could show behavioral signs of being afraid without actually experiencing fear.
I’m also sympathetic to the view that “love” is a kind of ritual, with saying “I love you” being the centerpiece of the ritual, and a cluster of loving behaviors being the rest of it. “I love you” can then be interpreted as a desire or intention or commitment to participate in the rest of it.
The definition of love as an emotion seems wrong to me, because emotions are short-lived. Intuitively, we think of statements like “I love my son” as being true all the time. But I do not experience an emotion of “love” towards him all the time. When I am away from him, hours can pass where I do not think of him at all, and when I am with him I sometimes feel an emotion of annoyance rather than “love”.
So this kind of definition does not seem to match how people use the concept.