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Compare And Contrast Love And Lust (Essay Sample) 2023

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Compare And Contrast Love And Lust

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Compare and Contrast Love and Lust

Love is a diversity of various mental and emotional conditions, typically positively and strongly encountered that is ranging from extensive interpersonal fondness to plain pleasure. An instance of this span of definitions is that the love of a mother is differing from the love of a couple which is differing from the love of food. Most frequently, love is referring to an emotion of individual attachment and strong attractiveness. Love can as well be a goodness that represents affection, kindness, and compassion. It may as well be describing affectionate and compassionate work towards other people, animals, or one’s self. Lust is a deep feeling or emotion. Lust can bear any shape like the lust for expensive things, lust for power, or the lust for sex. It can bear such boring shapes as the strong desire for food as different from the necessity of for food. Lust is a mental drive that produces intense desire for an item or situation accomplishing the feeling. This paper thrives to compare and contrast between love and lust and how they may impact an individual.

Love and lust are two terms that go hand in hand in partnership. Both are feelings that are interconnected with each other. When one is lacking it is hard to be having the other and as well it looks like in order to be in and staying in love, one must be desiring or lusting after one’s partner. If the desire, love, and want is lacking, then being with someone else can vanish away. In partnerships, both love and lust should be existing alongside each other, but it is crucial in understanding these feelings and keeping them in check. It is also crucial to comprehend their sameness and differences. Albeit both can be described by the use of the term longing, love is involving much more involving faithfulness. Lust is a feeling that can just come and go in a wink of an eye and it is crucial as with any feeling in controlling lust and normally it is associated with negative implication. In their similarities, both love and lust can hurt the feelings of an individual as well as brings joy and happiness in one’s life. Even if lust is a false feeling, it is a strong emotion because it turns into love. Love and lust bear the want to have their goals satisfied and both can root sexual impulse.

When one is lusting for someone, the portion of their brain is lighting up in the same as an addict of cocaine whey they feel high. This is making one to view the individual as how one wants to view them. When a person is in love, one is caring for the individual and feeling empathy towards them. One is also viewing the other person for who they are, their imperfections, and all. Love is when one is attracted to another person’s soul and wanting to know them better whereas lust is a bodily attraction where, when one meets with the other all the person is thinking about is sex. Physical attraction is playing a big role in relationships and when one loves another, it is becoming less about how they look and one takes them as they are but when one is lusting another, one’s brain is actually making them look more stunning than they truly are.

In conclusion, love and lust re sharing an amount of similarities and dissimilarities. Love is a diversity of various mental and emotional conditions, typically positively and strongly encountered that is ranging from extensive interpersonal fondness to plain pleasure and lust is a deep feeling or emotion. Both love and lust occur in the idea of a partnership and most commonly, they can both be driving a high level of potency in an individual, albeit lust can be slightly cynical.

Lust vs Love: Understanding the Difference in Relationships

Diving headfirst into the complex world of emotions, I’ve often found myself tangled in an intriguing web – lust vs. love . It’s a paradox that has intrigued poets, philosophers, and everyday individuals alike. Is it lust you’re feeling, or is it love? The distinction isn’t always clear and can be blurred by intense feelings and passionate moments.

Discerning between fleeting lust and enduring love becomes quite challenging when we’re caught up in these whirlwinds of emotion. Lust is typically marked by a powerful desire – think physical attraction or infatuation – while love tends to involve deeper connection and commitment. But the tricky part lies in how similarly these two emotions can present themselves initially.

In this ever-evolving conversation around lust versus love, I’ll offer my insights drawn from personal experiences, professional resources, and psychological studies. We’ll explore the characteristics of each and their interplay within relationships today. By shedding light on these emotional phenomena, we might just unravel some of the mystery surrounding our hearts’ desires.

Understanding Lust: A Deep Dive

I’ve spent a lot of time pondering about lust. It’s one of those intense feelings that can sweep you off your feet, leaving you feeling exhilarated and bewildered all at once. But what exactly is lust? Essentially, it’s an overwhelming desire or craving often associated with sexual attraction. When we talk about lust in this context, we’re referring to the heady mix of hormones and emotions that make up raw physical attraction.

Now let’s delve into the science behind it for a moment. Lust is primarily driven by the sex hormones testosterone and estrogen which are present in both men and women. These hormones trigger an intense longing for sexual gratification and physically appealing attributes.

Here are some intriguing statistics:

(Note: These figures are average hormone levels in adults)

In the throes of lust, our brains release dopamine – a neurotransmitter linked with reward and pleasure – sending us on an emotional high where reason often takes a backseat. This might explain why people sometimes do reckless things when they’re ‘in lust’.

But it’s important to remember that while lust can be thrilling and exciting, it isn’t always long-lasting. The intense desire tends to diminish over time as familiarity sets in or if not complemented with other forms of intimacy.

So there you have it – a deep dive into understanding lust. While it may be sweeping & passionate, it certainly doesn’t encapsulate everything love has to offer – but more on that later!

Defining Love: An In-Depth Look

Love is a complex emotion that has baffled poets, philosophers, and psychologists for centuries. It’s more than just intense affection or attraction toward someone. It goes deeper, often associated with selfless acts and profound feelings of connection.

When you’re in love, you care deeply about the other person’s well-being and are willing to sacrifice your own comfort and happiness for theirs. This isn’t fleeting or superficial—it’s a sustained emotional investment in another individual. To give an example, imagine staying up all night to care for a sick loved one without a second thought.

In contrast to lust—which is predominantly driven by physical attraction—love encompasses emotional intimacy too. A study conducted by Rutgers University found that when individuals are shown images of their beloved ones, areas of the brain associated with deep attachment light up significantly more than when they see pictures of physically attractive acquaintances.

While love can certainly involve physical attraction (and often does), it also involves trust, respect, and mutual understanding—a connection beyond the surface. Think about long-term relationships or marriage; these bonds are often built on shared experiences and commitment rather than just physical allure.

But if there’s one thing I want to emphasize here, it’s that love isn’t always easy or straightforward—and that’s okay! It might be messy at times or even challenging, but those hurdles only make the bond stronger when overcome together.

So, what really sets love apart from lust? Well, it’s not a sudden rush of adrenaline or defined by temporary desire. Instead, it’s characterized by patience and endurance—it sticks around even after the initial spark fades away.

The Emotional Aspects of Lust and Love

When you examine their emotional aspects, lust and love can seem incredibly similar at first glance. They’re both intense, passionate feelings that can sweep you off your feet. But beneath the surface, they diverge in significant ways.

Lust is primarily driven by physical desire. It’s that burning need to touch and be close to someone, fueled by an intense sexual attraction. When we’re in the throes of lust, our brains release a cocktail of chemicals like norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine which give us those fluttery butterflies in the stomach.

On the flip side, love extends beyond physical attraction. It’s about deep emotional connection and intimacy – you’re just as interested in their thoughts and dreams as you are in their body. When we fall in love, our brain secretes hormones such as oxytocin (the “love hormone”) and vasopressin which promote bonding and attachment.

Here’s a quick comparison:

Yet it’s not always black or white; sometimes lust evolves into love over time as a relationship deepens. And other times, love might start with a spark of lust! However, it pans out for each individual, depending on personal experiences and perspectives.

Still pondering whether it’s lust or love? Reflect upon these points:

• Do I care more about this person’s body or mind?
• Am I interested in their day-to-day life?
• Can I see a future with them?

Remember: Understanding how your emotions tie into your relationships is key to maintaining healthy dynamics.

Lust vs Love: Key Differences Explored

I’ve often found myself pondering the intriguing realm of romantic feelings, specifically the contrast between lust and love. Although these two emotions are frequently confused, they’re distinctly different in several crucial ways.

Let’s take a quick look at lust first. It’s primarily a physical attraction that focuses on outward appearance and can be summed up as an intense desire or craving. Lust is typically characterized by short-term gratification with little consideration for long-term compatibility.

On the other side of this emotional coin, we have love. This emotion runs deep, transcending mere physical attraction to encompass mental and emotional connection as well. When you’re in love, you value your partner’s personality traits, quirks, and overall character just as much as their physical attributes—if not more so. Love grows over time and fosters mutual respect, trust, compassion, and shared goals.

Here are some key differences:

• Duration : Lust usually fades quickly once satisfied, whereas love grows stronger over time.
• Focus : While lust focuses mainly on physical satisfaction, love values emotional connection and intellectual compatibility too.
• Selfishness vs Selflessness : Lust seeks personal pleasure while love prioritizes the other person’s happiness.

Now let’s bring some science into our discussion! According to research conducted by psychologist Dr. Helen Fisher—outlined in her book “Why We Love”—the brain releases different chemicals when experiencing lust (like testosterone) compared to when it experiences love (such as oxytocin). In essence:

This information not only provides us with fascinating insights into human behavior but also aids us in distinguishing between these two complex emotions more accurately. To sum it up, while both lust and love can be wonderful experiences, they vary significantly in terms of depth, duration, and focus.

How to Identify Between Lust and Love

Distinguishing between love and lust can be quite a challenge. It’s especially tricky when you’re caught up in the whirlwind of emotions that comes with a new relationship. Here, I’ll share some insights to help you differentiate between these two powerful feelings.

First off, let’s talk about the defining characteristics of lust. Generally, it’s driven by physical attraction and an intense desire for someone else’s body. You might find yourself constantly thinking about getting intimate with this person. In such situations, your focus is largely on fulfilling your own needs rather than considering theirs. When we peel back the layers, we realize that lust is typically more superficial — it doesn’t require deep emotional connection or commitment.

On the flip side, love tends to be more complex and multifaceted. It involves looking beyond surface-level attractiveness to appreciate someone for who they truly are — quirks, flaws, and all. When you’re in love, you’ll likely feel a strong empathy towards your partner; their happiness becomes as important as yours.

Here are some practical signs to look out for:

• Intense physical attraction
• Focus on self-gratification
• Little interest in non-sexual activities together
• Strong emotional bond
• Desire for shared experiences beyond intimacy
• Concern for each other’s well-being

Of course there are overlaps between lust and love — after all, many loving relationships do start with a spark of physical attraction! But as deeper feelings develop, true love often grows over time while transient lust fades away.

It’s crucial not just to rely on these signs but also to listen to your gut feeling — sometimes, our instincts know what our minds can’t articulate yet!

The Role of Time in Shaping Lust and Love

Let’s delve into how time plays a pivotal role in distinguishing between lust and love. When you’re caught up in the throes of attraction, it’s easy to mistake lust for something deeper. But as the clock ticks on, the differences start to become apparent.

Lust, by its very nature, is often short-lived. That intense physical desire hits you like a ton of bricks. You’re consumed by thoughts of passion and physical intimacy. This phase is characterized by high levels of hormones such as testosterone and estrogen, which are responsible for these feelings.

On the other hand, love doesn’t happen overnight; it takes time to grow. Love comes with understanding your partner’s strengths, weaknesses, dreams, and fears. It means seeing beyond the surface attractiveness to appreciate what lies beneath.

One key hormone associated with love is oxytocin, known as ‘the cuddle hormone.’ This brain chemical strengthens social bonds and deepens feelings of attachment.

But let me highlight – no definitive timeline separates lust from love. For some people, what starts out as lust can evolve into love over time. On other occasions, those initial intense desires may fade without developing into anything deeper.

Here are a few signs indicating a shift from lust to love:

• Your attraction becomes less about physique.
• You start making long-term plans together.
• Their happiness genuinely matters to you.

Time has a way of peeling back layers, revealing our true emotions. So, while it might be challenging to differentiate between these two powerful experiences at first glance – giving it time can make things clearer.

Psychological Perspectives on Lust vs. Love

Diving headfirst into the psychological depths of lust and love, we find fascinating differences between these two powerful emotions. Psychologists often distinguish lust from love in terms of their primary drives – lust being driven by sexual desires while love is more about emotional connection.

From a biological perspective, it’s interesting to note that different hormones are at play when we’re in the throes of lust versus when we’re deeply in love. Lust triggers the release of sex hormones like testosterone and estrogen. On the other hand, feelings of deep affection and attachment associated with love stimulate the production of oxytocin and vasopressin.

When it comes to brain activity, too, there’s a clear distinction between lust and love. Studies show that brain regions involved in pleasure response light up during states of intense lust. Conversely, areas tied to bonding and attachment become active when one is experiencing profound feelings of love.

• Lust: Activates pleasure centers
• Love: Engages areas related to bonding

Another compelling viewpoint stems from psychologist Robert Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love, which proposes three components: intimacy, passion, and commitment as key ingredients for various types of love. According to this theory:

• Passion alone might indicate infatuation (akin to lust)
• Intimacy plus passion could suggest romantic love
• A combination of all three; intimacy, passion, and commitment denotes consummate or “complete” love

In understanding these psychological perspectives on lust vs. love, we can better navigate our own emotions while fostering healthier relationships.

Conclusion: Balancing Lust and Love

Balancing love and lust isn’t always easy. I’ve found that it’s a delicate dance of passion and profundity, a choreographed blend of physical attraction and emotional connection. But in the end, it’s worth striving for.

Remember, lust is transient. It’ll come on strong but eventually ebbs away. Think of it like fireworks—it burns brightly, momentarily illuminating the darkness before fading into nothingness.

Love, on the other hand, is enduring. It doesn’t just burn; it glows steadily, providing constant light and warmth even in the darkest times.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m not saying lust is bad or unnecessary. Quite contrary! Lust provides that initial spark, lights up our senses, and drives us towards potential partners.

• Understand lust’s fleeting nature
• Don’t mistake intensity for longevity
• Recognize when you’re led by desire rather than deeper feelings

These pointers will help you stay firmly grounded while enjoying the passionate highs of new relationships.

When you balance these two powerful forces—lust and love—you create something incredibly special: a relationship filled with excitement yet grounded in genuine affection and respect—a bond that can stand life’s tests.

Striking this balance may seem challenging at first glance; nonetheless, with patience, understanding—and yes—a healthy dose of both love and lust—it’s more than possible to achieve.

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How to tell the difference between lust and love, according to relationship experts

• The main difference between lust and love is that lust is purely sexual attraction while love is both passionate and compassionate. 
• Signs of lust include spending most of your time with a partner being physically intimate, having little interest in their life outside the bedroom, and having different values. 
• Signs of love include being emotionally vulnerable, looking forward to meeting their friends and family, and feeling secure in the relationship. 

If you have butterflies in your stomach, feel giddy when you see them and daydream about your life together, you might be in love. Or is it lust? At the beginning of a relationship, it can be hard to tell the difference between the two. 

Understanding the difference between lust and love

Lust and love are often thought of as two distinct feelings, but anthropologists theorize they exist on a spectrum that can be broken down into three categories:  

• Lust : The craving for sexual satisfaction that drives humans to seek out sex partners. Lust is driven by a hormonal desire for sexual gratification.
• Attraction : Also called passionate love, attraction is associated with feelings of excitement, cravings for emotional connection, and intrusive thinking about the beloved. It involves the brain's reward center and can imitate the feel of drug addiction.  
• Attachment : Also called companionate love, attachment is characterized by feelings of calm, emotional union, and security. This mostly comes into play in long-term relationships including friendships, families, and committed romantic partnerships. 

"The most commonly understood distinction between lust and love is that lust is purely physical and sexual, whereas love includes care for someone well behind their function as a source of yearning and sexual gratification," says Alexandra Stockwell, MD , a Relationship and Intimacy Expert at Alexandra Stockwell Coaching and Consulting. 

While the categories can overlap, different hormones and brain chemicals are implicated in each stage. Here's how you can recognize the signs of lust vs. love. 

Signs of love 

Love can be divided into two spheres — passionate and companionate.

Passionate love , also referred to as attraction or infatuation, is defined as a state of intense desire to be with another person. Emotional arousal and sexual passion are prominent features of passionate love, and people experiencing this type of love are usually distressed when their relationship goes awry. 

When a person feels attraction towards another person or thing, the brain produces "feel good" chemicals like dopamine and norepinephrine that affect the same pathways associated with drug consumption and addictive behavior . This phenomenon explains the obsessive, euphoric behavior often seen in the early stages of romantic relationships. 

Companionate love is characterized by strong feelings of intimacy, affection, and commitment to another person. It's often slow to develop and can be seen in close friendships and long-term romantic partners.  

Companionate love involves the brain chemicals oxytocin and vasopressin which are associated with pair-bonding, like in the relationship between mother and child. 

According to Stockwell, signs you may be in love include: 

• You think of interesting things to tell one another.
• You look forward to meeting friends and family.
• You share vulnerable, tender things like challenges you are facing. 
• You know that if you live in different cities for a few months it will be okay.

"Love feels like security, respect, and admiration and typically includes a sense of safety and commitment within a partnership," Neidich says. 

In addition, Stockwell says both types of love can result in physical symptoms like sweaty palms, genital swelling or secretions, and the feeling of butterflies in your stomach — but lust can also cause these physical symptoms. 

Signs of lust 

" Lust is purely sexual attraction which is often accompanied by physical arousal. Lust occurs both within loving relationships and external," says Haley Neidich, LCSW, a psychotherapist and relationship expert at Haley Neidich Consulting. "Lust is a natural human occurrence. Lust is not always something we act on, it is a sense of sexual interest."

According to Stockwell, you might be experiencing lust if: 

• When you think of the person, your thoughts immediately go to what your bodies do for one another.
• When you think of the person you start smiling, feeling flushed, have sensations of excitement, and being turned on.
• As soon as you see one another you want to kiss.
• You don't necessarily have much in common, but when you are touching it really doesn't matter.

Lust is an intense feeling that dominates our thoughts and can drive us to do things against our better judgment in order to satisfy longing, Stockwell says. Feelings of lust are controlled by the brain's hypothalamus, which stimulates the production of sex hormones testosterone and estrogen.

Can lust become love? 

Relationship experts agree lust can turn into love — but warn that feeling lust does not guarantee an eventual loving relationship. 

"Sometimes lust can lead to love and is often experienced within a loving relationship. However, the presence of lust speaks to absolutely nothing about partners compatibility long-term," Neidich says. 

The blinding nature of lust means partners can miss potential "red flags" like dishonesty or selfishness, and have trouble determining if a sexual partner is a good fit for a serious relationship, according to Neidich.  

Recognizing the difference between hormone-driven lust and real love can help you determine if there's more to your relationship than just sex.  According to Stockwell, your relationship might be limited to lust if: 

• You spend most of your time being physically intimate with one another, and when you do anything else it's not engaging.
• They aren't interested in getting to know you beyond the bedroom.
• They are unwilling to make plans for the future.
• It often feels like you have different values.

Insider's takeaway 

Love and lust are exhilarating emotions, but it's important to be able to distinguish between the two when navigating relationships. 

"New love can feel intoxicating and exciting when a couple is first falling in love and imagining their life together. However, long term love that continues to feel "addicting" is actually quite concerning." Stockwell says. "That feeling of 'addiction' is often a major red flag that one or both partners may have a co-dependent attachment style which can lead to unhealthy partnerships."

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• Popular types of couples therapy and what to know when choosing a therapist
• What to expect at your first couples therapy session and the 4 relationship skills it can teach you
• How often couples should have sex, according to 3 sex therapists
• 5 health benefits of sex — and how much sex is healthy

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Love vs. Lust – Essay Samples

Love and lust are two terms that oppose each other in many ways, yet seem to get thrown together at times as well.  Both finding their way into romantic relationships, the relationship between these two words is certainly varied and open to interpretation.  Normal views tend to see the following three themes develop in the similarities and difference of lust and love within society.

The Human Relationship

One noticeable difference and similarity rests in the role of the relationship.  Love and lust seem to find similarities and differences when the term “relationship” is brought forth.  For some people, lust and love and separate while others argue that they are together on this issue, yet it may not be impossible for both to be true, in certain distinctions.

Lust is normally seen within a human relationship.  It is important to make clear that we are not referring to a “true” relationship, or one judged by moral standards.  It is rather in the state of a human relationship, however devoted or casual.

Thus lust is seen within a relationship.  Lusting after another is between two people, as evident from the necessary presence of a relationship.  If the previous concession as to the irrelevant nature of the state of the relationship is given, we see that lust must occur in these standards, between two humans in a relationship.

Here we come to the first similarity in that of lust and love.  Love must also normally be taken in context of a human relationship.  Most people will agree that love is between two people, in the most natural of examples.

Upon this similarity we find a difference of opinion for some, however.  Respective of the term “love,” it can also be taken to other objects.  For instance, one may love their job or love a particular activity.

On this we have seen the difficulties in the comparison.  In different degrees we see love and lust as similar to that of relationship, where both must usually be seen in this light.  However, love can be taken out of this context, opposing the two terms.

Love and lust are quite different in intensity.  However, both love and lust may see a high degree of intensity, while they are of different types.  In this area love and lust sees similarities and differences.

The major similarity is in the intensity in which love and lust are experienced.  Love is the easy choice here.  Most people agree that love is an intense feeling, emotion, or state.  Regardless upon one’s definition of love, it is intense.  Lust on the other hand is not as simple, yet its intensity cannot be denied.  Regardless of its development or moral considerations, lust may also be experienced in high regards to intensity.  Thus we find a certain similarity between the two terms in intensity.

In regards to intensity, it is interesting to find lust and love differing in a certain respect.  Love is normally seen as a developed and powerful state.  In regards to intensity, its prominence is unmistakable by most.  Lust, however, does not share this.  As it can arrive without development and within one’s desires, whether positive or negative, it does not share this “high” view as does love.  One may feel lustful for another out of nowhere, for example.  In this, its intensity is surely not up to par with that of love.

One definite difference between lust and love is value.  Lust simply is not valued in terms of morality.  Love, on the other hand, is the subject of literature, ethics, morality, religions, philosophy, and many others, as its prominence in one’s life is to be treasured, according to many.

Lust can be dangerous.  Lust can break relationships and transform people into who they do not want to be, in certain cases.  Thus lust has traditionally not seen anywhere near the impact of love on the positive of one’s life.  This can be attributed to its lesser overall value.

Love, however, does not share the lesser value of lust.  For instance, one is supposed to love his or her family, friends, and others within the community and around the world.  This value, inside and outside of relationships and one’s life is heralded throughout history and into present day.  Simply put, love overrides lust in terms of value.

Lust and love share a number of similarities.  They can both occur in the notion of a relationship.  More common, they can both drive a high level of intensity in a person, although lust can be quite negative.  In these similarities, we find reason why these two terms are placed together. However, these two terms are arguably placed together due to their differences.  Love is normally seen beyond that of lust, for moral reasons of value.  It is valued by all and takes the advantage in its role, power, and prominence within many individuals.

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Am I in Lust or Love?

Plus, how to tell the difference

Brittany is a health and lifestyle writer and former staffer at TODAY on NBC and CBS News. She's also contributed to dozens of magazines.

Margaret Seide, MS, MD, is a board-certified psychiatrist who specializes in the treatment of depression, addiction, and eating disorders. 

Karen Cilli is a fact-checker for Verywell Mind. She has an extensive background in research, with 33 years of experience as a reference librarian and educator.

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What Is Lust?

What is love, can you feel lust and love at the same time, take the love quiz, how to express these feelings to someone, keep in mind.

When it comes to lust and love, most people have experienced at least one or the other. However, with that being said, some people might agree that experiencing both in a relationship is pretty rare.

Whether you've always thought of your relationship in terms of one or the other or even if you're just wondering how to tell the difference between the two , there are some important things to know about both of these feelings.

We spoke with Sherry Benton, PhD, a practicing therapist and founder of the mental health platform  TAO Connect , to find out more about these two feelings and what kind of meaning they carry in our personal lives.

At a Glance

Lust is a completely normal biological feeling, however, it is very different than love. It describes the desire for physical intimacy and refers to physical attraction. Love, on the other hand, is the feeling of wanting or needing to be with someone, caring about their happiness, and sharing personal thoughts and concerns with them. While love isn't as exciting as lust or infatuation, you can still experience lust for someone while being in love with them. You may also notice that infatuation can lessen and be replaced by sincere, realistic love and caring for the other person (which is a good thing!).

"Lust is purely wanting sexual contact," says Dr. Benton. "This is largely selfish with little thought or regard for the other person’s well-being."

Just because you're lusting after someone doesn't mean that you can't or don't love them. Since it denotes physical attraction and sexual desire, you can actually experience the feeling of lust in or out of a relationship. That said, when people mention love at first sight , they are probably talking predominantly about lust.

"Lust exists on a continuum–you can certainly have [an] initial attraction to people you don’t know," explains Dr. Benton. "Sometimes we have a little attraction, sometimes more. Sometimes the attraction is immediate; other times it builds after we get to know someone."

But, What About Infatuation?

Aside from the feelings of lust and love, Dr. Benton adds the word "infatuation," which occurs early in a relationship and is sometimes called the “velcro stage."

"With infatuation, you tend to idealize the other person and are very wrapped up in a shallow understanding of the other person," says Dr. Benton. "Infatuation can bring people together, but it rarely keeps people together."

Basically, infatuation is the weird in-between phase of lust and love that most people experience as the fun stage of relationships before life kicks in and hard truths are realized.

Psychologists have long attempted different methods to measure and define love by studying couples with different backgrounds, attachment styles , among other personal attributes.

However, psychologist Zick Rubin determined that romantic love is made up of three components: attachment, caring, and intimacy. Put simply, these three words mean wanting or needing to be with someone, caring about their happiness, and sharing personal thoughts and concerns with them.

Dr. Benton echoes these findings. "Love happens when a relationship has evolved into mutual caring and understanding," says Dr. Benton. "With love, people are focused on fostering each other’s well-being and nurturing the relationship. It can be less exciting than lust or infatuation, but it lasts."

Dr. Benton also explains that "love isn’t as much of an emotional high as infatuation." Unfortunately, this lack of an emotional high can be hard for some people to reconcile, especially in long-term relationships .

In other words, it can mean that you feel like you desire the other person less than you once did or like the relationship has become less passionate. However, this is normal as we grow more comfortable in our relationship. Similar to the infatuation phase, passionate love usually primarily exists in the beginning phases of a relationship.

"In any good relationship, sexual desire increases and decreases from day to day," says Dr. Benton. "It is actually a good thing when infatuation diminishes and is replaced by sincere, realistic love and caring for the other person."

You might not be able to cultivate lust necessarily, but it is possible to build on intimacy. Since sexual desire will ebb and flow in long-term relationships, it's more important to focus on keeping the relationship vibrant in other ways. 

To do this, Dr. Benton suggests taking alone time away just for yourselves as a couple. The beginnings of relationships are fun because you are getting to know all of this new information about a person.

While you may not be constantly learning new facts about your partner in a long-term relationship, you can continually cultivate a deeper level of intimacy.

The goal is to continue being open and honest so that you continually build your bond on a foundation of trust. There will be new excitement in exploring a deeper connection with someone, and it certainly leads to something more lasting.

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.

If you're in a position wherein you find yourself wanting to tell someone you're in love with them and, in the words of Dr. Benton, "the relationship is appropriate and possible," go for it. While the fear of rejection, and rejection itself, are real concerns, it's also important to express your feelings .

If you want to express lustful feelings toward someone, prioritize honesty. Once you've told the person that you feel attracted to them in this way, move on to prioritizing consent.

Alternatively, if you're in a relationship and you find yourself lusting after someone else, if at all possible, tell your partner the truth so that the two of you together can decide your comfort levels in terms of acting on it.

While both lust and love can cause stress, it's important to remember that these emotions are normal, and everyone is learning how to navigate them. While it may not be easy sometimes to tell someone how you really feel about them, try to prioritize honesty even if you mostly feel physically attracted to someone.

Also, remember that it's OK not to constantly experience the butterflies that are typically associated with a relationship's beginning stages. Getting to the point of love takes work. To reach the stage of love, you need to take the time to build a connection with someone. While it may not always feel like a head rush, deeper levels of intimacy are always rewarding.

Paquette V, Rapaport M, St-Louis AC, Vallerand RJ. Why are you passionately in love? Attachment styles as determinants of romantic passion and conflict resolution strategies .  Motiv Emot . 2020;44(4):621-639. doi:10.1007/s11031-020-09821-x

Rubin Z.  Lovers and Other Strangers: The Development of Intimacy in Encounters and Relationships: Experimental studies of self-disclosure between strangers at bus stops and in airport departure lounges can provide clues about the development of intimate relationships .  American Scientist.  1974;62(2):182-190.

Leary MR.  Emotional responses to interpersonal rejection .  Dialogues Clin Neurosci.  2015;17(4):435-41. doi:10.31887/DCNS.2015.17.4/mleary

By Brittany Loggins Brittany is a health and lifestyle writer and former staffer at TODAY on NBC and CBS News. She's also contributed to dozens of magazines.

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How to Understand Love vs Lust: Signs & Spotting the Differences

Angela Welch is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Licensed Chemical Dependency Counselor Intern from Valparaiso,IN. She earned her Master of Arts in Marriage and... Read More

Sylvia Smith shares insights on love revitalization and conscious living. She believes purposeful actions can transform relationships into happier, healthier ones.

In This Article

Understanding the difference between love vs lust can be quite tricky, especially because lust is usually the first phase of most romantic relationships . It can last up to two years. 

Lust is often the first phase of ‘love,’ but lust doesn’t always develop into a loving romantic relationship. 

However, when you are in a relationship and don’t realize the difference between love and lust, it can be difficult to tell whether the relationship has the potential to last. 

Read on to understand more about lust and love. Use this to figure out how and why your relationship (or sex life, for that matter) might appear to change as you progress from lust to love. 

What is love?

Love signifies an emotional attachment that you have towards someone, which has inspired countless songs and movies.

It is a powerful feeling where you are completely bonded to another person, and you look to sharing your life. It builds up over time and gets stronger as you learn to deal with tough situations together. 

Love involves a perspective where you see your life and your lover’s life attached to each other. You don’t see your life and your lover’s life as separate from each other. 

Love involves a companionship that you can depend on emotionally, sexually, and socially.

5 signs of love in a relationship

Love is a magical sensation that many people yearn for. But the signs of love are sometimes confusing for people to decipher. 

If you are overwhelmed by your emotions, you may not notice when you start falling in love with someone. But how do you know it’s love?

Here are some apparent signs of love that are easy to pick up on:

1. You feel emotionally attached

Unlike lust, love brings together both passion and compassion that you feel for your beloved.

You feel emotionally bound to what the other person is feeling. It matters to you how they feel.

Research shows that emotional intimacy is an integral part of all loving relationships. In addition to sexual satisfaction, you seek to build intimacy and affection when you love someone. 

2. You make plans for the future

Love is a lasting emotion that makes you envision a future together.

From planning trips to getting old together, you can make plans for a future that involves the partner. It is an indicator that you see them as a part of your future. 

3. You can be emotionally vulnerable

Love offers not just sexual fulfillment but also emotional satisfaction . A big part of this is the feeling of security and comfort that love offers ideally.

Love gives you an avenue to be who you are and comfortably express your vulnerabilities and flaws. And studies show that positive reception of emotional vulnerability can enhance a relationship.

You don’t fear rejection and judgment when you are genuinely in love with your lover, and they love you back.

4. You are invested in their life

Love makes you see you and your lover as bound to each other in every way. Their pain, problems, happiness, and choices impact how you feel.

You care about what happens in their personal and professional life . 

5. It builds over time

Unlike lust and infatuation, love builds up over time and has depth and breadth to it.

Love becomes more robust and durable when you and the one you love can combat challenging situations together.

Just like the other two feelings, love can be powerful and overwhelming. But it is not as unstable or temporary as lust. 

It is harder to deal with separation from a partner when you are in love than if you simply lust for them as you are more emotionally invested.

What is lust?

Lust is based on the sexual attraction that draws you towards another person. It is often described as a raw, primal feeling that’s mostly physical.

Sexual attraction, arousal, and fulfillment are the components of lust. It is a temporary sensation that is intense and overwhelming at times. It can make you act in irrational ways.

5 signs of lust in a relationship

When you are under the spell of lust, your hormones and sexual desire may make you overwhelmed. You may not notice all the signs of lust because you are caught up in your emotions. 

However, here are some signs of lust in a relationship:

1. Overwhelmed by thoughts of sex

When you lust over someone, your mind is consumed by thoughts of sexual fulfillment and physical closeness. It can become obsessive and consuming for you.

Your attraction towards someone else becomes an important aspect of your life. Your desire for them defines your conduct towards them.

2. Lack of curiosity about their life

You are interested in the physical attributes and sexual desire of the one you are interested in. But anything apart from that is not something you feel too interested in.

You don’t need to get to know this person by talking to them about varied topics. You are more self-centered when you have lustful feelings, as it is your sexual satisfaction that matters to you the most. 

3. Living in the present

Lust in a relationship can make you hyper-focused on the present and what you need right now. 

The love vs. lust difference is evident when you are not actively envisioning a future together. Lust is focused on instant sexual gratification, where you don’t think about whether you could be in a long-term relationship with them. 

4. Unbothered by different values

Lust is all about sexual compatibility and nothing else. 

Firstly you don’t feel the need to figure out how the other person feels about different things, what their values are, and what matters to them. And secondly, if you find out that they are opposing views, you are unaffected by them.

You don’t spend time trying to change the opinion of the person you are involved with as you feel that it does not make a difference in your life.

5. More private time than public or social time

Physical signs of lust include the time you are willing to spend in the bedroom with them instead of being around people. 

Lust entails the desire for constant sexual fulfillment, which leads to most of your time being spent inside the bedroom. You don’t feel the need to go out on dates, engage with others as a couple or get to know each other outside of the bedroom.

Why should you understand the difference between love vs lust?

Understanding the differences between love and lust is crucial for fostering healthy and meaningful relationships. 

Love involves deep emotional connection, care, and mutual respect, promoting long-term commitment and support. On the other hand, lust is driven by physical desires and lacks the emotional depth and sustainability of love. 

Confusing the two can lead to heartache, miscommunication, and the pursuit of shallow connections. Differentiating between love and lust empowers individuals to make informed choices, ensuring they seek genuine connections based on emotional compatibility and shared values. 

By grasping these distinctions, individuals can build stronger, more fulfilling relationships that stand the test of time, promoting emotional well-being and overall happiness.

7 ways to tell the difference between love and lust

In understanding lust vs love, realize that these are different emotions, yet it can sometimes be challenging to differentiate between them.

Sexual desire is usually a part of both lust and love, making it hard to distinguish between the two. 

Lust may overwhelm your sense in a way that makes you feel that it is love. You may feel drawn to someone due to a sexual desire , but you may assume the pull you feel is because of love. 

“Is it lust or love?”

To avoid getting confused between love and lust, try to give the relationship more time, as things will become clear eventually. You can also read the difference between the two and assess your relationship based on these.

Certain sentiments are common to both love and lust, which can confuse you about whether you love someone or you just feel lustful towards them. 

Here are some ways to tell the difference between love vs lust:

1. Feelings

The feelings associated with real love vs lust in marriage are very different. Love is an intense feeling of care and affection for another person. It’s so intense that a person who experiences love often forms a secure emotional attachment to the person they love. 

Lust is more of a raw sexual desire and a pull between each other, often based on physical attraction . This can either fizzle out or turn into love.

So, what is the difference between lust and love?

Love usually occurs as a couple discovers each other’s personality and develops trust and understanding. 

Another difference is that love isn’t a selfish feeling. You want what’s best for the other person, and you’re motivated and energized to be a better person yourself.

2. Timelines

When comparing love vs lust, most people will generally say that they understand that love takes time to grow (unless they advocate love at first sight). But lust can happen immediately.

However, lust can sometimes take time to develop between two people. The lustful feeling may intensify over time as you spend more time around a person.

Also, you may feel intense lust that may cloud your judgment temporarily. So you can give yourself a chance to decide if love will have a chance to grow from lust.

Research shows that love makes one look and envision the future, while lust makes you focus on the present. 

Love is a long-lasting and fulfilling emotion that takes time to develop. And it gets better with age, just like fine wine. 

Over time, the lust will start to calm down and instead may be replaced with a more profound sense of love. At this point, some couples might not understand that this is when the effort is needed to keep your sex life fun and exciting. 

3. Time spent together

When you are in the last stage of a relationship, you’ll probably spend more time enjoying sex rather than spending time investing in a deeply emotional conversation. But the difference between love vs lust becomes apparent when you compare this with love. 

As time moves on, however, and as you start to fall in love, you’ll begin to find that you spend as much time learning about each other and discussing your emotional commitment toward each other.

4. Future commitment

In the lustful stage of your relationship , you may not have any immediate desire for commitment. But when you reach the love stage, you’ll be invested and committed emotionally and physically.

When you are in love, you want to plan for your future together and continue learning more about your partner. If you don’t develop this desire – you probably don’t want to turn this particular relationship into a loving one! 

When it comes to love vs lust, you want to think about your loving future together, but that might not be the case in lust.

5. Relationship dynamics

If you are in a stage of lust, you may be lovers, but you may not necessarily be friends. However, if you are in love, you will be friends too. You probably won’t stop thinking about your partner and will want to know as much as you can about them. 

Furthermore, you have a more balanced view of your partner and accept them, imperfections and all.

Instead of building an idealized image of them, you are open to their flaws and love them all the same. You are also comfortable being yourself, and your differences don’t stand in the way.

In a relationship that transitions from the lust to the love stage, you may start out not being friends, but over time you’ll develop deeper feelings and a stronger bond between you both. There is always friendship involved in love in love vs lust, but not necessarily in lust.

6. Level of security

In a loving relationship, there is typically a sense of emotional security and comfort. Partners usually feel safe and supported, knowing that they can rely on each other during difficult times and that their feelings and needs are respected.

In contrast, lust-driven relationships may lack this emotional security as they are primarily focused on physical attraction and immediate gratification; it may not provide the same level of emotional support and reassurance. In a lustful relationship, there might be a constant underlying feeling of insecurity or uncertainty about the depth of the connection.

Lust can be intense and passionate, but it may not necessarily fulfill the emotional needs that come with love. Emotional security is a fundamental aspect of a healthy and lasting relationship, and it is often more present in relationships built on love, where partners are committed to each other’s emotional well-being and personal growth.

Watch this video to learn whether your anxiety is sabotaging your relationship:

7. Commitment to growth

In a loving relationship, partners are often committed to growing together and supporting each other’s personal development. They recognize that both individuals will face challenges, and they are willing to work through these difficulties as a team. 

On the other hand, lust-driven relationships may avoid deeper emotional connections and may not foster personal growth. Lust tends to focus on the physical aspect of the relationship and may not address underlying emotional issues or engage in meaningful discussions about personal development.

In a lustful relationship, partners may not feel the same level of commitment to one another’s growth, and there might be a lack of willingness to work through challenges together. Instead, the relationship may remain on a surface level, with little exploration of each other’s deeper thoughts, feelings, and aspirations.

Love encourages partners to embrace each other’s imperfections and support each other’s journey of self-improvement. It involves recognizing that growth and change are natural parts of life, and it requires a commitment to adapt and evolve as a couple. 

Understanding this distinction helps individuals assess the nature of their relationship and determine if it is built on a foundation of genuine emotional connection and potential for long-term growth.

Some commonly asked questions

Here are the answers to some questions that can help you understand the lust and love difference better:

Is love stronger than lust?

Simply put, love is indeed stronger than lust.

Lust is a heady and addictive experience that can wreak havoc on your emotions. It can seem more intense and consuming when it is at its peak. However, it is not long-lasting. 

If you’re not in a long-term relationship, it’s important to remind yourself that lust is a temporary feeling. It is an important aspect of love vs lust. 

Healthy relationships are rarely built upon lust alone, especially if you’re looking for a deeper connection.

Unlike in love, you’re not looking to develop a deep emotional attachment with the other person when it comes to lust. You simply want their touch and physical energy.

If the object of your lust is your partner, you can leverage lustful emotions to boost your sexual intimacy , improving your relationship as a result. But lust alone will fizzle out over time. 

Can lust turn into love?

Yes, lust can evolve into love, but it’s not always the case. 

Lust is an intense physical and sexual attraction, while love involves a deeper emotional connection. When a strong physical desire is accompanied by emotional intimacy, it can pave the way for love to develop. However, this transformation requires time, effort, and mutual understanding. 

Genuine love involves caring, trust, and compatibility beyond physical desire. It’s essential for both partners to communicate openly, nurture their emotional bond, and explore each other’s personalities to build a lasting, loving relationship.

What are the three stages of love lust?

The three stages of love lust are as follows:

• Infatuation

This initial stage is characterized by intense physical attraction and passion. The individuals involved may experience heightened emotions, euphoria, and obsession with each other. However, it is often more based on idealization and projection rather than a deep understanding of the other person.

• Romantic love

As the relationship progresses, romantic love sets in. This stage involves a combination of emotional attachment and physical desire. The couple experiences affection, care, and a growing emotional bond. Romantic gestures and efforts to impress each other are common during this phase.

The final stage is commitment, where the relationship moves beyond intense passion and settles into a more stable and enduring love. It involves a deep sense of trust, respect, and a willingness to make long-term plans together, as it transitions into a more mature and lasting love.

How long does lust usually last in a relationship?

The key difference in love vs lust is that love lasts much longer than lust. But how long can lust last depends on each couple and their circumstances. 

For some couples, the lustful phase can go well beyond a year, while for others, it can last for a couple of months. However, couples can prolong this period by keeping things spicy in the bedroom and trying new things all the time.

Is it normal to feel lust in a loving relationship?

Yes, it’s entirely normal to experience feelings of lust in a loving relationship. Lust and love are distinct emotions, and they can coexist in a healthy partnership. 

Love involves emotional connection, while lust is primarily based on physical desire. Feeling attracted to your partner and experiencing passion is a natural aspect of human relationships.

However, it’s essential to strike a balance between the physical and emotional aspects of the relationship. A strong emotional bond can enhance the physical connection and vice versa. Communication and understanding each other’s needs are vital in ensuring that both partners feel fulfilled in the relationship.

How can one manage feelings of lust?

Managing feelings of lust requires a combination of self-awareness, mindfulness, and healthy coping strategies. 

First, acknowledge the emotions without judgment, understanding that they are natural but need control. Engaging in regular mindfulness practices, such as meditation or deep breathing, can help center thoughts and impulses. Redirecting focus towards fulfilling hobbies, exercise, or creative pursuits can channel energy positively. 

Setting clear boundaries and avoiding triggering situations is vital. Building strong connections based on emotional intimacy rather than physical desire fosters deeper relationships. Seeking support from friends, family, or a professional therapist can aid in navigating and understanding these complex feelings.

Final thoughts

Some relationships will make it to the live stage, while others are never destined to get there. Love vs lust, either way, there will be an incredible journey of self-discovery waiting for you, and one day the right relationship will turn from lust into true love. 

By now, the difference between love versus lust would be clear to you. Now you can make out where your relationship actually stands.

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Sylvia Smith loves to share insights on how couples can revitalize their love lives in and out of the bedroom. As a writer at Marriage.com, she is a big believer in living consciously and encourages couples to adopt this principle Read more in their lives too. Sylvia believes that every couple can transform their relationship into a happier, healthier one by taking purposeful and wholehearted action. Read less

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Lust vs Love: Do You Know the Difference?

How to tell love from lust..

Posted August 15, 2011 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma

• Lust can lead to love, but they are not the same. Lust is based solely on physical attraction and fantasy, whereas love is about the real person.
• Signs of lust might include being more interested in sex than conversation, while a sign of love is wanting to spend quality time together.
• Listening to one's gut early in a relationship can reveal signs of trouble.

As a psychiatrist, I've seen how intense sexual attraction is notorious for obliterating common sense and intuition in the most sensible people. Why? Lust is an altered state of consciousness programmed by the primal urge to procreate. Studies suggest that the brain in this phase is much like a brain on drugs. MRI scans illustrate that the same area lights up when an addict gets a fix of cocaine as when a person is experiencing the intense lust of physical attraction.

Also in the early stages of a relationship, when the sex hormones are raging, lust is fueled by idealization and projection —you see what you hope someone will be or need them to be—rather than seeing the real person, flaws and all.

In my book on intuitive healing, I discuss the difference between lust and love as well as techniques to enhance sexual wellness. Pure lust is based solely on physical attraction and fantasy , it often dissipates when the "real person" surfaces. It's the stage of wearing rose-colored glasses when he or she "can do no wrong." Being in love doesn't exclude lust. In fact, lust can lead to love. However, real love, not based on idealization or projection, requires time to get to know each other. Here are some signs to watch for to differentiate pure lust from love.

Signs of Lust

• You're totally focused on a person's looks and body.
• You're interested in having sex, but not in having conversations.
• You'd rather keep the relationship on a fantasy level, not discuss real feelings.
• You want to leave soon after sex rather than cuddling or breakfast the next morning.
• You are lovers, but not friends.

Signs of Love

• You want to spend quality time together, other than just having sex.
• You get lost in conversations and forget about the hours passing.
• You want to honestly listen to each other's feelings, make each other happy.
• He or she motivates you to be a better person.
• You want to meet his or her family and friends.

Another challenge of sexual attraction is learning to stay centered and listen to your gut in the early stages of being with someone. This isn't easy in the midst of hormones surging, but it's essential to make healthy relationship decisions. Here are some tips to help you keep your presence of mind when you're attracted to someone. This needn't pull the plug on passion, but it'll make you more aware so you don't go looking for trouble.

Four Negative Gut Feelings About Relationships

• A little voice in your gut says "danger" or "beware."
• You have a sense of malaise, discomfort, or feeling drained after you're together.
• Your attraction feels destructive or dark.
• You're uncomfortable with how this person is treating you, but you're afraid that if you mention it, you'll push him or her away.

Over the years, I've spoken at women's prisons and domestic violence centers. My talk, "How Listening to Your Gut Can Prevent Domestic Violence," focuses on showing women how to identify and act on their inner voice . The gut senses a potential for kindness and violence.

Many women who'd been in abusive relationships admitted, "My gut initially told me something was wrong, but I ignored it." The pattern was consistent. They'd say, "I'd meet a man. At first, he'd be charming, sexy, sweep me off my feet. The electricity between us was amazing. I'd write off the voice in my gut that said 'you better watch out' as fear of getting involved. When later the abuse began, I was already hooked."

Some gut instincts , though, are anything but subtle. On a first date, one woman landed in the hospital with an IV, retching from "psychosomatic" abdominal pain. But did that stop her from seeing the guy? No. From these women, we gain a real-world lesson: No matter how irresistibly attractive someone appears, close attention to your gut will enable you to see beneath exteriors.

It's so much nicer to be involved with someone your gut likes. Then you're not always guarding against a basic suspicion or incompatibility. You must also give yourself permission to listen to your gut when it says, "This person is healthy for you. You are going to make each other happy." To be happy, take a risk, but also pay attention to the warning signs I presented. This allows you to wisely go for the fulfilling relationships you deserve.

Judith Orloff, M.D. , is an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA and the author of The Empath's Survival Guide.

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Romeo and Juliet: Lust vs. Love Essay Example

How can 2 teenagers who just met be considered in love? In the story Romeo and Juliet, the 2 do not “fall in love,” they “fall in lust.” It is not loved because that takes time to develop, the 2 just wanted to be rebellious to their strict parents, and Romeo had just been rejected by a girl a week early he can’t move on that quick and call in love. The 2 teenagers were too quick to act to consider themselves in love instead they fell in lust. 

These 2 teens, Romeo and Juliet, were not in love, love happens or developed over time. The 2 teens were just introduced to each other and already considered themselves in love. Love does not happen instantaneously because, for example, I know people who have known a person since high school and were really good friends but started dating around 7 to 10 years after college. So in that case the love for each other is happening and developing over time and I am sure many people have had similar experiences, maybe just a little less time. The average person does not meet someone on Monday and by Friday they are planning to get married. People’s love happens over time. 

Romeo and Juliet wanted to go against their strict parents and be rebellious. Based on experience and being a teen. When your parents are heavily against something there is a slight urge to want to do that thing to get a reaction out of your parents. Also, Juliet had recently fought with her parents, and out of anger and dumb decisions of being a teen, she wanted to rebel against them. She found the perfect opportunity when a boy from a rival group of people met and she knew that her parents would be against falling in love with him so that's exactly what she did but it didn’t love it was just something to do to get back at their parents.

Romeo is not in love with Juliet because he had just been in love with a different girl a few days earlier. That girl rejected him but there is no way that he got over that girl in a week that he had claimed to be in love with. He then meets Juliet who is just in love with him so that she can rebel against her parents. So Romeo also claims to fall in love with her. But love is a long-term idea and emotion. So Romeo can not love one girl one week then a week later meet a random girl and fall in love with her. That is not how love works, there is no long-term commitment in the way that Romeo uses the word love. People in love get married and live a long time together. Romeo’s love lasted a week so that is not the way that love is supposed to work. So the love between the two was more of lust.

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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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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

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

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Love vs Lust, Research Paper Example

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Love and lust are two terms that oppose each other in many ways, yet seem to get thrown together at times as well.  Both finding their way into romantic relationships, the relationship between these two words is certainly varied and open to interpretation.  Normal views tend to see the following three themes develop in the similarities and difference of lust and love within society.

The Human Relationship

One noticeable difference and similarity rests in the role of the relationship.  Love and lust seem to find similarities and differences when the term “relationship” is brought forth.  For some people, lust and love and separate while others argue that they are together on this issue, yet it may not be impossible for both to be true, in certain distinctions.

Lust is normally seen within a human relationship.  It is important to make clear that we are not referring to a “true” relationship, or one judged by moral standards.  It is rather in the state of a human relationship, however devoted or casual.

Thus lust is seen within a relationship.  Lusting after another is between two people, as evident from the necessary presence of a relationship.  If the previous concession as to the irrelevant nature of the state of the relationship is given, we see that lust must occur in these standards, between two humans in a relationship.

Here we come to the first similarity in that of lust and love.  Love must also normally be taken in context of a human relationship.  Most people will agree that love is between two people, in the most natural of examples.

Upon this similarity we find a difference of opinion for some, however.  Respective of the term “love,” it can also be taken to other objects.  For instance, one may love their job or love a particular activity.

On this we have seen the difficulties in the comparison.  In different degrees we see love and lust as similar to that of relationship, where both must usually be seen in this light.  However, love can be taken out of this context, opposing the two terms.

Love and lust are quite different in intensity.  However, both love and lust may see a high degree of intensity, while they are of different types.  In this area love and lust sees similarities and differences.

The major similarity is in the intensity in which love and lust are experienced.  Love is the easy choice here.  Most people agree that love is an intense feeling, emotion, or state.  Regardless upon one’s definition of love, it is intense.  Lust on the other hand is not as simple, yet its intensity cannot be denied.  Regardless of its development or moral considerations, lust may also be experienced in high regards to intensity.  Thus we find a certain similarity between the two terms in intensity.

In regards to intensity, it is interesting to find lust and love differing in a certain respect.  Love is normally seen as a developed and powerful state.  In regards to intensity, its prominence is unmistakable by most.  Lust, however, does not share this.  As it can arrive without development and within one’s desires, whether positive or negative, it does not share this “high” view as does love.  One may feel lustful for another out of nowhere, for example.  In this, its intensity is surely not up to par with that of love.

One definite difference between lust and love is value.  Lust simply is not valued in terms of morality.  Love, on the other hand, is the subject of literature, ethics, morality, religions, philosophy, and many others, as its prominence in one’s life is to be treasured, according to many.

Lust can be dangerous.  Lust can break relationships and transform people into who they do not want to be, in certain cases.  Thus lust has traditionally not seen anywhere near the impact of love on the positive of one’s life.  This can be attributed to its lesser overall value.

Love, however, does not share the lesser value of lust.  For instance, one is supposed to love his or her family, friends, and others within the community and around the world.  This value, inside and outside of relationships and one’s life is heralded throughout history and into present day.  Simply put, love overrides lust in terms of value.

Lust and love share a number of similarities.  They can both occur in the notion of a relationship.  More common, they can both drive a high level of intensity in a person, although lust can be quite negative.  In these similarities, we find reason why these two terms are placed together.

However, these two terms are arguably placed together due to their differences.  Love is normally seen beyond that of lust, for moral reasons of value.  It is valued by all and takes the advantage in its role, power, and prominence within many individuals.

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Comparing Love vs. Lust

Love gives, lust takes.

A relationship based on lust can be devastating. It's impossible to know how many people's lives have been really messed up because of lust. I do know lust has left a lot of people as hurting victims. Amy sent me a poem this week about lust . It's pretty deep. Got me thinking. Thought you might like it.

I desire in the moment, not in the heart I chose to spend a night with you, But those hours were spent in lust , I felt your passion, Touched by dominance, I felt something in me I stared into your eyes, But after the moments over I begin to despise, I have a heart that believes the words you say, I don't know how I will be able to walk away, But I praise myself if I don't think of you today. My dreams wander to the person I love, You constantly reappear, I force myself to vomit thoughts of you, I slip into sinful fantasies, But the night is a painful reminder, That I remain alone. - Amy

Love is every bit as beautiful as lust is ugly. Lust causes so much confusion it can lead you in the opposite direction of where love is. So, you go down the road of lust thinking you will find love only to find emptiness and a craving for more love. I appreciate the comment Dara sent me. Her words were honest, straightforward, and cold as ice. That's what lust will do to you turn you into someone as cold as ice.  I hate being alone and find lust easier than love. Lust does hurt, each and every time. I know what the outcome will be and [yet] I still touch the hot stove with my bare hand. Maybe for girls, all women, all ages that are dealing with and understanding what I'm saying I leave you with this one thought...... We have to LUST TO FIND LOVE, the world is cold and when we find something warm it feels so good, so we lust. Lust to me is what you have to go through to find your love, the world isn't a perfect place. Problem is lust seldom leads to love.

So, what are the differences between love and lust that would make them such opposites? There are far too many differences for me to list in one blog, but a few will suffice.

It is true that lust causes confusion, sometimes fooling us and luring us into its trap. But most of the time, we recognize lust for what it is and choose to follow it blindly. Somehow, we hope lust will bring us to a happy ending. It never does. It can't. It does not know how. Lust will never change. It will always be what it is.

Love never changes either. Love wants to lead us to the right path where there is happiness, hope, and a deep sense of self-respect. Love always gives because God is love. So, ask yourself again, Am I in love or am I fooling myself all the while walking into the cruel trap of lust? The decision is ours and will always be so. Will we walk down the road of love or lust? How we answer this question will dictate what our lives will become. Choose love

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One comment on “comparing love vs. lust”.

thanks to you people for the great job that you are doing. My question is that,lf you look at a girl in a lustful way but you don't have interest in her is it sin or not.

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Romeo and Juliet: Love vs. Lust Essay Example

• Pages: 5 (1163 words)
• Published: September 14, 2017
• Type: Literature Analysis

True Love Mistaken for True Lust "An intense feeling of deep attraction. " That is the definition of love. Love between a man and a dog, a kid and ice-cream, a mother and her family, and love between two selfless people. This is true love. In the play, Romeo and Juliet, written by William Shakespeare, the feeling of attraction between the two main characters is not true love. The setting of this play is the streets of Verona, Italy, during a time when arranged marriages at the age of 14 were socially acceptable.

Two young teens, Romeo and Juliet, were convinced that they had feelings for each other, but acted ore out of lust than anything else. Lust is defined as "a very strong sexual desire", and it becomes more apparent as the play prog

resses that these two young teens act on lustful desires. Love is more potent than lust, but it is clear that Romeo and Juliet act out of sheer lust, not love. In Act I of Romeo and Juliet, Romeo claims to have a deep and meaningful love for Rosalie. A couple of days later, Romeo claimed to be deeply in love with Juliet.

This is first sign that this "love" may not be so real after all. Juliet is the rebound, or plan-B for Romeo. The only difference between Romeos previous situation with Rosalie and the situation with Juliet is that Juliet "loves" Romeo back. Romeo and Juliet begin to talk about getting married the very first time they meet. When two young teenagers are desperate for love, all realization and reason is lost because they are overcome by emotion.

Friar Lawrence, a man of integrity and wisdom, summarizes the relationship between Romeo and Juliet as nothing more than immature lusting for one another.

This immature lusting may be out of protest of the idea of an "arranged marriage", or imply being a young teens attempting to be rebel without a cause. Even the language Romeo and Juliet use when they speak is focused solely on appearance and looks. For example, Romeo is quoted with the following description of Juliet; But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, Who is already sick and pale with grief That thou, her maid, art far more fair than she... The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars As daylight doth a lamp; her eye in heaven

WSDL through the airy region stream so bright That birds would sing and think it were not night. (II. IL. 2-6, 19-23) The previous passage was Romeo describing Juliet as beautiful as the sun, and professing his love for Juliet . At this point, Romeo is in the garden speaking to Juliet on the balcony. He refers to Juliet as the light of his world, and uses colorful imagery to describe her looks. This is one another example of the false love that exists. In addition to this quote, the narrator of the play describes Romeo and Juliet as "star-crossed lovers".

Another quote by Juliet describing Romeo in a sexual, lustful way is as follows; Hiss! Romeo, hiss! ?Oh, for a falconer's voice, To lure this tassel-gentle back again! Bondage is hoarse, and may

not speak aloud, Else would I tear the cave where Echo lies, And make her airy tongue more hoarse than mine, With repetition of "My Romeo! (II. I'. 161-166) This lust-filled quote proclaimed by Juliet and intended for Romeo is yet another example of false love or love based on looks in their relationship. Lust is the same as false love, and so this quote can be used as a demonstration of both.

Romeo again states his feelings for not Juliet but rather Gullet's looks in his following quote; Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright! It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night Like a rich Jewel in an Tiptoe's ear, Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear. So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows As yonder lady o'er her fellows shows. (l. V. 42-47) This is Romeos description of Juliet the very first time he laid eyes on her. Romeo describes Juliet as hot as fire, and too beautiful for this world. He even describes her like a dove amongst crows (Ivory amongst Ebony).

In all of the three previous quotes, the colorful language focused mainly on the looks of the other person signals that their feelings may be more lust than love. Not once was a personality trait mentioned, or any other sign of love than physical attractiveness. Although Romeo and Juliet do not show true love for each other throughout the play, there is real love that exists between other characters. One of the greatest examples of love in the play is the love Capsule has for his daughter, Juliet. Capsule said; Too soon marred

are those so early made Earth hath swallowed all my hopes but she.

She's the hopeful lady of my earth. But woo her, gentle Paris, get her heart. My will to her consent is but a part. An she agreed within her scope of choice, Lies my consent and fair according voice. (l. It. 13-19) Capsule is going against society, and taking into consideration Gullet's feelings about marriage. Capsule wants Juliet to be happy. This is an unusual act for the time, but this quote by Capsule to Paris exemplifies the genuine love that a father has for his only daughter. There is also love between Romeo and his dead cousin Mercuric. In a ambition of both love and sorrow that Romeos feelings express.

Romeo said; Away to heaven, respective lenient, And fire-eyed fury be my conduct now. Now, Table, take the Milan" back again That late thou agaves me, for Americium's soul Is but a little way above our heads, Staying for thin to keep him company. Either thou or l, or both, must go with him. (Ill. I. 123-129) This is as true as love can get. Romeo realizes the loss of a great friend, and mourns his death in the streets of Verona. This is a model example of love in Romeo and Juliet, and love that is more non-fiction than that of Juliet and Romeo.

The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet exemplifies what results from hatred, revenge, and rivalry, and ends in death for many. This goes down as the greatest love story of all time, but the main problem with the play is the lack of love. If there was

real love between Romeo and Juliet and their families, the outcome of the play would be a lot different. As Mason Cooley, an American aphorism, once said, "Love begins with an image, lust with a sensation". The attraction between Romeo and Juliet began with nothing more than a sensation, and can only be considered a prime example of passionate lust.

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