thesis on true love

The Concept of True Love Definition Essay

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Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Faulkner, William. “Rose for Emily”.

Dahl, Roald. “Bitch”- Switch bitch”.

Joyce, James.”Araby”.

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

Millay, Edna.“Love Is Not All”

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IvyPanda. (2018, September 20). The Concept of True Love. https://ivypanda.com/essays/true-love/

"The Concept of True Love." IvyPanda , 20 Sept. 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/true-love/.

IvyPanda . (2018) 'The Concept of True Love'. 20 September.

IvyPanda . 2018. "The Concept of True Love." September 20, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/true-love/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Concept of True Love." September 20, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/true-love/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Concept of True Love." September 20, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/true-love/.

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

1. Preliminary Distinctions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Love as Valuing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Emotion Views

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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• Willigenburg, T. Van, 2005, “Reason and Love: A Non-Reductive Analysis of the Normativity of Agent-Relative Reasons”, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice , 8: 45–62.
• Wollheim, R., 1984, The Thread of Life , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Wonderly, M., 2016, “On Being Attached”, Philosophical Studies , 173: 223–42.
• –––, 2017, “Love and Attachment”, American Philosophical Quarterly , 54: 235–50.

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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Toward a Theology of Love: Defining Love as the Scriptures—Not the World—Define It

Over 15 years ago, the late theologian Marva Dawn wrote a helpful little book that she called Talking the Walk: Letting Christian Language Live Again , in which she encouraged readers to consider the depth of meaning of several words that have long been part of the Christian tradition. She warned that we are in danger of corrupting these words by treating them as clichés or slogans and, in some cases, neglecting them all together.

In her introduction, she explains that the book is her response to a crisis in churches—a crisis she describes as “the frequent corruption or rejection of key words in biblical faith for reasons that often seem to be merely quick fixes of, instead of genuine solutions to, deeper problems.” She continues, “During the last century, English-speaking Christians have been stressing that we should walk our talk, that our way of living should match the values we espouse. That Christians frequently don’t act on what they know and say is still a problem. However, the opposite is often increasingly true: that the way we talk doesn’t offer the deepest truth of the Christian faith. Could we also practice letting the Christian language live again in all of its glory? Can we work together with the whole church throughout time and space on rectifying the names and thereby learn more fully to talk our walk?”

Marva Dawn was concerned that some words have gotten a bad reputation while others, like “hell,” are largely ignored and others, like “awesome” (which is a biblical word), are used with such excess that we lose sight of their theological significance and profundity. These examples are in addition to other words that Christians treat as outdated or irrelevant. Surprisingly, one Christian word that Marva Dawn didn’t include in her book is “love.”

In the relatively short space I have, I’d like to begin to think about the profundity and the significance of love, particularly the love Scripture commands us to have for one another. Of course, anything I say about the topic is going to be just scratching the surface. If you ever wonder why it is that there are so many theology books with the title “Toward a Theology of . . ., ” it’s because the author is saying upfront, “I’m not going to say everything that there is to say about this. This isn’t the last word, but this is an entryway.” And so we might think about this as “toward a theology of love.”

We should begin by asking, “What does love mean?” You might think that this is an unnecessary exercise. “Who doesn’t know what love is?” you might ask. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? Why in the world do we need to take time to explore what love is?” I would answer those questions in this way: because there are a multitude of misconceptions about the nature of love.

Common cultural notions of love prevail in our world. For example, “love’s primary aim is to make the one loved feel good.” Or “love never causes discomfort to the one loved.” Or “love never finds fault or corrects but leaves the object of love to him or herself to do as seems best to them.” Or “love is simply being nice or courteous.” If we are careless, we will unwillingly embrace one or more of these culturally prevalent misconceptions and read them into the Bible wherever we come across the word love. Consequently, I can think I’m obeying God by doing what in my mind is loving my neighbor. But if my notion of what it means to love is foreign to God’s, then in actuality I’m not really obeying His command, regardless of how good my intentions might be. Bowing to God in obeying His command to love my neighbor entails submitting to His description of what love is. He has not left us to define that for ourselves.

“Bowing to God in obeying His command to love my neighbor entails submitting to his description of what love is. He has not left us to define that for ourselves.”

It is not as though God has given us a blank check and said, “I’ve signed it; you fill in whatever amount you want.” No, He calls us to love, and He has revealed to us the variety of forms that true love takes. When many people claim that all religions basically teach the same thing, one of the things they will cite is that various religions have teaching about loving others or some variant of what we call the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. While it is certainly true that the command to love others is common to a number of religious systems, it’s mistaken to assume that all religious systems hold a common understanding of the nature of love.

There is something unique about the Christian conceptualization of love, and it’s important for us to recognize that. If we are committed to following Jesus, if we say that we are His disciples, a question that we should frequently ask ourselves and one another is, “How closely does my understanding of what it means to love correspond to what Jesus taught and modeled about love?”

Jesus’ understanding of love was dependent upon a comprehensive view of the nature of reality—what is real, what is true. It emanated from knowledge about God and people. Jesus’ concept of love is part of a very specific picture of the way things are or, in language that students hear at Cairn very frequently, a particular worldview.

It’s not enough to just use the same word that the Scriptures use and therefore conclude that we’re talking about the same thing that the Scriptures are when they use the word “love.” No, we have to inquire whether we are operating with the same worldview as that of the Bible and understanding love in that context.

What you really believe about the nature of the world greatly influences how you live in it. Another way of putting that would be to say what I am firmly convinced of concerning the nature and structure of reality directs the course of my life and relationships.

Given this, I would like to look at three biblically derived presuppositions about love, things that the Bible says are essential to the nature of love. I will then explore the question, “Is this really how we think about love?”

Presupposition 1: Biblical love presupposes the existence of a real, objective goodness.

Biblical love presupposes there is a true and real goodness that is not dependent upon what I think or what I feel but has an existence that is completely independent of me. Obviously, that goodness is an expression of the real God. Biblically speaking, love cannot be separated from holiness and truth. We see this in a number of places in the Scriptures. For example, when Paul is describing love in 1 Corinthians 13, he says that it “does not rejoice at wrongdoing”—and you would expect him to say it rejoices at righteousness. But what he says is, “but it rejoices with the truth.” Truth, righteousness, and love—biblically speaking—are inseparable. When Paul is writing to Titus, and he’s explaining to him the various qualifications someone who is aspiring to be an elder should possess, he says this: “For an overseer, as God’s steward, must be above reproach. He must not be arrogant or quick tempered or a drunkard or violent or greedy for a gain, but hospitable, a lover of good , self-controlled, upright, holy, and disciplined” (1:7–8, italics mine). That presupposes that there is a true goodness that we are to conform to.

“Truth, righteousness, and love—biblically speaking—are inseparable.”

When he writes his second letter to Timothy, he warns Timothy that in the last days there will be increasing corruption among his people: “But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty, for people will be l overs of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God” (2 Tim. 3:1–4, italics mine). It is interesting that love permeates that passage: what it is that people are going to love and what it is that they are not going to love. Notice that he says, “not loving good” and “lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.” He is not thinking that goodness has any existence independent of God. But he is saying that there is a standard of what is really good that, as we conform to it, is actually profitable for us and beneficial to us and fosters flourishing, well-being, and thriving.

The reason that this has become such an area of interest to me is because over the years that I have taught, I have been increasingly alarmed by the skepticism that I have seen amongst even professing Christians as to whether or not there is actually an objective standard of goodness. They entertain the idea that goodness is simply in the eye of the beholder—goodness as I deem it to be. We call this moral relativism. Relativism denies that there is any such thing as objective, knowable, real goodness. This is hostile to and incompatible with biblical love. If there is no real good, no knowable design for optimal human flourishing, then there is no real love; there can only be indifference. Moral relativism is adversarial to biblical love. It is destructive to it. Biblical love presupposes the existence of real, objective, knowable goodness, and it seeks to influence others toward it and by it. To love biblically is to seek, to move one toward and to move one by the goodness that God has revealed.

“It is incoherent to affirm the biblical command to love your neighbor while denying the Bible’s insistence that there is a divinely revealed moral structure to reality that is intended to foster our flourishing as we conform to it.”

It is incoherent to affirm the biblical command to love your neighbor while denying the Bible’s insistence that there is a divinely revealed moral structure to reality that is intended to foster our flourishing as we conform to it and submit to it. If there really is a true and objective goodness that exists outside of us—and if our thriving as human beings depends upon us knowing and conforming to that—then it simply isn’t loving to encourage people to live as they please or to rely on themselves as the standard of what is good. We might say concerning this point that biblical love presupposes the existence of an objective and absolute authority as well, because that goodness has an authority. In Matthew 22:37–40 and Romans 13:8–10, Jesus and Paul are speaking about the divine, authoritative commands to love. Love and law (in terms of God’s authoritative instruction) are intertwined. The command to love one’s neighbor as oneself is part of God’s law, and God is the authority who establishes what love looks like.

Presupposition 2: Biblical love presupposes that there is something of greater value than my immediate comfort, convenience, or pleasure.

Years ago, I read a book co-authored by the late Christian psychologist Larry Crabb and Dan Allender called Encouragement: The Key to Caring . In it, they say the following: “It is most natural to maintain a commitment to our own interpersonal comfort, a commitment that creates a feeling of uneasiness whenever we are tempted to risk authentic involvement in someone else’s life. Most of us are simply afraid to threaten our sense of comfortable well-being.” In Loving God’s Way , a book that describes the various “one anothers” of the New Testament, author Gary DeLashmutt notes:

“Our culture has largely rejected the legitimacy of moral absolutes and therefore equates moral correction with unloving intolerance. According to today’s secular climate, we are capable of healthy moral self-direction, and external moral correction renders us dysfunctional. Admonition is therefore unnecessary and even harmful. Unfortunately, many Christians have assimilated this mentality to a remarkable degree. They view encouragement as mandatory to spiritual growth, but admonition is tragically absent from their view of love.”

Think about it: If there is a true, objective goodness that is necessary for you to really thrive, it is not inherently mean of me to seek to move you toward it and to involve myself in your life to some degree if I think you’re diverging from it. We can think about this with respect to evangelism. We can think about this with respect to Christian living and mutual discipleship. Do people abuse this? Of course, but let’s not allow the pendulum to swing so far to the other end that we entertain a view of love that is not biblical. Any conception of love that precludes, that does away with the idea of any kind of moral correction, or that automatically equates such with hatred or hostility is unbiblical.

The author of Proverbs says “Better is open rebuke, then hidden love. Faithful are the wounds of a friend. Profuse are the kisses of an enemy” (27:5–6). There are people who will never do you any harm in terms of never emotionally causing any sting. They will flatter you to death, but do not think that is necessarily an indication of love. Someone who is a faithful friend will sting you at times—not out of hostility, but because they care about you and want God’s good for you. The author of Ecclesiastes says, “it is better for a man to hear the rebuke of the wise, then to hear the song of fools” (7:5).

Presupposition 3: Biblical love presupposes God-trusting courage.

The more I delve into what the Bible has to say about real love, the more I have to conclude that a good deal of what passes for love, even in my own life, is actually self-indulgence in disguise. A lot of what is called “love” is motivated more by self-protection than by genuine concern for the true well-being of others. Might it be that I want to believe definitions of love that require the least of me, those that minimize the possibility of being rejected? If love means never making someone experience discomfort, then I don’t have to worry about experiencing their potential rage. If love is simply being nice and never seeking to move someone closer to what is truly good by questioning or correcting them, then I remove the risk of being misunderstood, or worse, ridiculed or even despised.

“A lot of what is called ‘love’ is motivated more by self-protection than by genuine concern for the true well-being of others.”

What’s more, I can write off anyone who might be seeking to love me by offering faithful wounds as a legalist or a judgmental hater. We are often so afraid of being called a “hater” that we fail to love each other in biblical ways. If our hearts are captivated by those fears, we will not love each other as we ought. And we are living in a culture that incessantly feeds those fears through such things as social media. We are living in a culture that is constantly telling us that what matters most is that you do not get “canceled.” And to the degree that I buy that, I am going to reject God’s call to love.

In Crabb and Allender’s book, they note that there is a paradox to love. They say that “to love a person, I must be willing to lose my relationship with him. Dependently holding on to anyone or anything but God is, in its final form, idolatry. Idolatry is at root a fear of the wrong God.”

As Christians, we know ultimately what love is by the person of Jesus Christ. The Apostle John wrote “In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10). Jesus acknowledged that there is a real good, and He was willing to go to great lengths in order to bring us to it. And He did so, as the Scriptures tell us, by entrusting Himself continually to Him who judges righteously.

There was a God-dependent boldness and courage that led Him to love as He did. “He committed no sin,” Peter writes, “neither was deceit found in His mouth. When He was reviled, He did not revile in return. When He suffered, He did not threaten, but continued entrusting Himself to Him who judges justly. He Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By His wounds you have been healed, for you were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls” (1 Pet. 2:22–25).

It is my hope that we will, individually and collectively, frequently ask the question that I mentioned earlier: “How closely does my conception of love approximate that of Jesus?” Doing so is an integral part of our being conformed more to His likeness.

Dr. Keith Plummer is the dean of the School of Divinity. He can be reached at [email protected]

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Romeo and Juliet: an Example of 'True' Love

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Published: Apr 29, 2022

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Works Cited:

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• Cohen, S. M., & Berman, D. M. (2015). Career paths and perceptions of pediatric residency graduates who have completed combined residency programs. Journal of Graduate Medical Education, 7(4), 592-598.
• Duderstadt, K. G., Gorrin-Rivas, M. J., & Evans, D. V. (2015). Preparation for a career in pediatrics: Current students and their mentors. Academic Pediatrics, 15(3), 233-238.
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• World Health Organization. (2021). Child and adolescent health.

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Is There Really True Love?

To find true love, focus on giving, not receiving..

Posted December 23, 2017 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

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Is there an emotional bond that deserves to be called true love? Is true love possible? In their 1986 hit song, the Judds sang: “Grandpa, take me back to yesterday ... Did lovers really fall in love to stay and stand beside each other come what may?”

The lyrics reflect the declining stability of marital relationships over four decades. Although the U.S. divorce rate declined slightly three years in a row from 2013 to 2016, typical marriages still have only about a 50% chance of lasting. For years, marriage rates declined, in part because young adults have waited longer to get married. Many say that they don’t intend to ever get married.

The belief that love is true when it lasts is not an outdated concept. In her 2015 song, True Love , Ariana Grande describes how her relationship grew into true love from kisses to a commitment to last forever. But how can a person know that a relationship will last forever? Lovers don’t expect that even a genuine relationship will consist only of passionate positive emotions. In 1960, Buddy Holly’s song, True Love Ways , was released posthumously. Written as a wedding gift for his wife, Holly’s song predicted: “Sometimes we’ll sigh; sometimes we’ll cry ... Throughout the days our true love ways will bring us joys to share with those who really care.”

Looking back on his marriage in his song, Remember When , Alan Jackson recounts the ups and downs over the years: “There was joy, there was hurt ... We came together, fell apart and broke each other’s hearts.” Despite it all, Jackson anticipated: “We won’t be sad, we’ll be glad for all the life we’ve had.”

Do conflicting emotions characterize or define true love? In her 2012 song, True Love , pop artist Pink expresses the mixed emotions of her relationship: “Sometimes I hate every single stupid word you say ... At the same time, I wanna hug you.” In fact, Pink explains: “I really hate you so much, I think it must be true love,” because “nothing else can break my heart like true love ... And no one else can break my heart like you.” Despite hurt and heartbreak, Pink identifies her feelings as true love because “without you I’m incomplete.”

In his song, All of Me , dedicated to his fiancée, John Legend also admits to complex emotions: “You’re my downfall, you’re my muse. My worst distraction, my rhythm and blues.” But ultimately completeness is the core of his relationship: “You’re my end and my beginning. Even when I lose I’m winning, ‘cause I give you all of me and you give me all of you.” Do we know a love is true when we don’t feel complete without our lover?

Research suggests that people share a common image of what it means to be loved. Key characteristics of knowing someone loves you include: support without expectation of anything in return, compassion in difficult times, quality time together, being told you are loved, feeling special and appreciated, and being forgiven for something you did wrong. By contrast, people agree that we don’t feel loved when someone is possessive or tries to control us.

But what does it mean to love with a pure or true love? Research has documented a number of different types of love: eros or romantic, ludus or game-playing, storge or friendship , pragma or logical, mania or possessive, and agape or altruistic . Physical attraction and intimacy are central to eros, permissiveness and variety of partners characterize ludus, companionship and stability are the foundation of storge, and compatibility in social and personal characteristics is the core of pragma. Mania is obsessive, dependent, jealous and intensely emotional, whereas agape is altruistic, all-giving, and selfless with no expectation of love in return.

How we love others can vary for different relationships and in various situations. But does one style of loving represent what we envision as true love? While each style illustrates our yearning to find the right person who will satisfy our need to be loved, one—agape—reveals our capacity for what might come closest to pure love. Rather than being concerned with how a relationship benefits us, agape is focused on the best interests of the one we love. It is the love that puts the other first. Researchers identify this style as one in which a person tries to always help their lover through difficult times, sacrifice their own wishes to let their lover achieve theirs, endure all for the sake of their lover, and suffer in place of their lover.

This love is expressed in Freddy Fender’s hit recording of Before the Next Teardrop Falls : “If he brings you happiness , then I wish you all the best. It’s your happiness that matters most of all.” Beyond the emotional, the essence of this selfless love is behavioral commitment: “But if he ever breaks your heart, if the teardrops ever start, I’ll be there before the next teardrop falls.”

The benefits of agape have been highlighted by research. Selfless caring is associated with deep love, intimate communication, relationship satisfaction, loyalty and commitment. Couples in agape relationships are likely to deal more effectively with stress by supporting each other and by dealing with problems jointly, promoting their sense of “ we-ness .” Employing healthy coping strategies can deepen commitment and strengthen satisfaction with the relationship.

But are there costs to loving in such a selfless way? What are the psychological consequences of altruistic love? One would anticipate that the strong commitment and deep bond would mean great emotional pain if the relationship fails. As expected, research suggests that the end of such a rich committed relationship can result in feelings of profound loss and sadness. The more rewarding the love, the greater loss. Taking the risk of one day having to pay such a price is inherent in the essential nature of agape as all-giving and selfless.

Is it realistic to think that we can love in such an all-giving, non-demanding way? Research suggests that this style is rarely, if ever, fully actualized. It might well be the ideal we can hope for and strive toward. In searching for true love, we need to redirect our focus and energy from receiving to giving. Research shows that those who practice other-directed love are less likely to ever have to pay the hefty price. Perhaps there is such a thing as true love, and perhaps it can last.

Cooper, L. R., & Kurstin, G. (2012). True love [Recorded by Pink (Lily Rose Cooper)]. On The Truth About Love [CD]. New York, NY: RCA Records.

Galinha, I. C., Oishi, S., Pereira, C. R., Wirtz, D., & Esteves, F. (2014). Adult attachment, love styles, relationship experiences and subjective well-being: Cross-cultural and gender comparison between Americans, Portuguese, and Mozambicans. Social Indicators Research , 119 , 823-852.

Grande, A. (2015). True Love. On Christmas & Chill [Digital Release on iTunes]. Republic Records.

Hammock, G., & Richardson, D. S. (2011). Love attitudes and relationship experience. The Journal of Social Psychology , 151 , 608-624.

Heaven, P. C. L., Da Silva, T., Carey, C., & Holen, J. (2004). Loving styles: Relationships with personality and attachment styles. European Journal of Personality , 18 , 103-113.

Hendrick, C., & Hendrick, S. (1986). A theory and method of love. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 50 , 392-402.

Holly, B., & Petty, N. (1960). True love ways [Recorded by B. Holly]. On The Buddy Holly Story , Volume 2 [Vinyl]. New York, NY: Coral Records.

Jackson, A. (2003). Remember when. On Greatest Hits Volume II [CD]. New York, NY: Arista Records.

Keith, V., & Peters, B. (1974). Before the next teardrop falls [Recorded by F. Fender]. On Before the Next Teardrop Falls [Vinyl]. Nashville, TN: Dot Records.

Legend, J. (2013). All of me. On Love in the Future [CD]. New York, NY: GOOD Music.

O’Hara, J. (1986). Grandpa, tell me ‘bout the good ol’ days [Recorded by The Judds]. On Rockin’ with the Rhythm [CD]. New York, NY: RCA Records.

Oravecz, Z., Muth, C., & Vandekerckhove, J. (2016). Do people agree on what makes one feel loved? A cognitive psychometric approach to the consensus on felt love. PLOS ONE . DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0152803

Sharma, S., & Ahuja, K. K. (2014). Does love last forever? Understanding an elusive phenomenon among dating and married couples. Journal of Psychosocial Research , 9 , 153-162.

Vedes, A., Hilpert, P., Nussbeck, F. W., Randall, A. K., Bodenmann, G., & Lind, W. R. (2016). Love styles, coping, and relationship satisfaction: A dyadic approach. Personal Relationships , 23 , 84-97.

Krystine Batcho, Ph.D. , is a professor at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York.

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Before You Write a Love Essay, Read This to Get Examples

The day will come when you can’t escape the fate of all students: You will have to write a what is love essay.

No worries:

Here you’ll find tons of love essay topics and examples. No time to read everything? Scroll down to get a free PDF with original samples.

Definition: Essay on Love

First, let’s define what is love essay?

The most common topics are:

• Definition of love
• What is love?
• Meaning of love

Why limit yourself to these hackneyed, general themes? Below, I’ll show how to make your paper on love original yet relevant to the prompt you get from teachers.

Love Essay Topics: 20 Ideas to Choose for Your Paper

Your essay on love and relationship doesn’t have to be super official and unemotional. It’s ok to share reflections and personal opinions when writing about romance.

Often, students get a general task to write an essay on love. It means they can choose a theme and a title for their paper. If that’s your case,  feel free to try any of these love essay topics:

• Exploring the impact of love on individuals and relationships.
• Love in the digital age: Navigating romance in a tech world.
• Is there any essence and significance in unconditional love?
• Love as a universal language: Connecting hearts across cultures.
• Biochemistry of love: Exploring the process.
• Love vs. passion vs. obsession.
• How love helps cope with heartbreak and grief.
• The art of loving. How we breed intimacy and trust.
• The science behind attraction and attachment.
• How love and relationships shape our identity and help with self-discovery.
• Love and vulnerability: How to embrace emotional openness.
• Romance is more complex than most think: Passion, intimacy, and commitment explained.
• Love as empathy: Building sympathetic connections in a cruel world.
• Evolution of love. How people described it throughout history.
• The role of love in mental and emotional well-being.
• Love as a tool to look and find purpose in life.
• Welcoming diversity in relations through love and acceptance.
• Love vs. friendship: The intersection of platonic and romantic bonds.
• The choices we make and challenges we overcome for those we love.
• Love and forgiveness: How its power heals wounds and strengthens bonds.

Love Essay Examples: Choose Your Sample for Inspiration

Essays about love are usually standard, 5-paragraph papers students write in college:

• One paragraph is for an introduction, with a hook and a thesis statement
• Three are for a body, with arguments or descriptions
• One last passage is for a conclusion, with a thesis restatement and final thoughts

Below are the ready-made samples to consider. They’ll help you see what an essay about love with an introduction, body, and conclusion looks like.

What is love essay: 250 words

Lao Tzu once said, “Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength while loving someone deeply gives you courage.” Indeed, love can transform individuals, relationships, and our world.

A word of immense depth and countless interpretations, love has always fascinated philosophers, poets, and ordinary individuals. This  emotion breaks boundaries and has a super power to change lives. But what is love, actually?

It’s a force we feel in countless ways. It is the warm embrace of a parent, filled with care and unwavering support. It is the gentle touch of a lover, sparking a flame that ignites passion and desire. Love is the kind words of a friend, offering solace and understanding in times of need. It is the selfless acts of compassion and empathy that bind humanity together.

Love is not confined to romantic relationships alone. It is found in the family bonds, the connections we forge with friends, and even the compassion we extend to strangers. Love is a thread that weaves through the fabric of our lives, enriching and nourishing our souls.

However, love is not without its complexities. It can be both euphoric and agonizing, uplifting and devastating. Love requires vulnerability, trust, and the willingness to embrace joy and pain. It is a delicate balance between passion and compassion, independence and interdependence.

Finally, the essence of love may be elusive to define with mere words. It is an experience that surpasses language and logic, encompassing a spectrum of emotions and actions. Love is a profound connection that unites us all, reminding us of our shared humanity and the capacity for boundless compassion.

What is love essay: 500 words

A 500-word essay on why I love you

Trying to encapsulate why I love you in a mere 500 words is impossible. My love for you goes beyond the confines of language, transcending words and dwelling in the realm of emotions, connections, and shared experiences. Nevertheless, I shall endeavor to express the depth and breadth of my affection for you.

First and foremost, I love you for who you are. You possess a unique blend of qualities and characteristics that captivate my heart and mind. Your kindness and compassion touch the lives of those around you, and I am grateful to be the recipient of your unwavering care and understanding. Your intelligence and wit constantly challenge me to grow and learn, stimulating my mind and enriching our conversations. You have a beautiful spirit that radiates warmth and joy, and I am drawn to your vibrant energy.

I love the way you make me feel. When I am with you, I feel a sense of comfort and security that allows me to be my true self. Your presence envelops me in a cocoon of love and acceptance, where I can express my thoughts, fears, and dreams without fear of judgment. Your support and encouragement inspire me to pursue my passions and overcome obstacles. With you by my side, I feel empowered to face the world, knowing I have a partner who believes in me.

I love the memories we have created together. From the laughter-filled moments of shared adventures to the quiet and intimate conversations, every memory is etched in my heart. Whether exploring new places, indulging in our favorite activities, or simply enjoying each other’s company in comfortable silence, each experience reinforces our bond. Our shared memories serve as a foundation for our relationship, a testament to the depth of our connection and the love that binds us.

I love your quirks and imperfections. Your true essence shines through these unique aspects! Your little traits make me smile and remind me of the beautiful individual you are. I love how you wrinkle your nose when you laugh, become lost in thought when reading a book, and even sing off-key in the shower. These imperfections make you human, relatable, and utterly lovable.

I love the future we envision together. We support each other’s goals, cheering one another on as we navigate the path toward our dreams. The thought of building a life together, creating a home filled with love and shared experiences, fills my heart with anticipation and excitement. The future we imagine is one that I am eager to explore with you by my side.

In conclusion, the reasons why I love you are as vast and varied as the universe itself. It is a love that defies logic and surpasses the limitations of language. From the depths of my being, I love you for the person you are, the way you make me feel, the memories we cherish, your quirks and imperfections, and the future we envision together. My love for you is boundless, unconditional, and everlasting.

A 5-paragraph essay about love

I’ve gathered all the samples (and a few bonus ones) in one PDF. It’s free to download. So, you can keep it at hand when the time comes to write a love essay.

Ready to Write Your Essay About Love?

Now that you know the definition of a love essay and have many topic ideas, it’s time to write your A-worthy paper! Here go the steps:

• Check all the examples of what is love essay from this post.
• Choose the topic and angle that fits your prompt best.
• Write your original and inspiring story.

Any questions left? Our writers are all ears. Please don’t hesitate to ask!

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The sexual sublime: The revision of love in Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights"

This thesis is an exploration of Bronte's radical re-conceptualization of love in Wuthering Heights, which I term "the sexual sublime." Through her use of the sexual sublime Bronte achieves a number of important feminist goals. Throughout my thesis, I address Bronte's feminism via her revision of love in a variety of ways. First, I examine a series of feminist critics and explore how their analyses tend to neglect a Brontean strand of feminism. Second, I explain Bronte's re-conception of love---the sexual sublime---and show how it differs from a standard Victorian idea of love. Third, I suggest a relationship between Jungian theory on development and marriage and the sexually sublime elements in Bronte's novel. Focusing specifically on Jung's theory of individuation, and on his archetypes of the shadow and animus, I demonstrate how Jung's studies in psychoanalysis help elucidate Bronte's notion of the sexual sublime in Wuthering Heights. Finally, I delve into Bronte's metaphoric use of Nature and how that enables her to not only stratify characters and pairs in terms of their inherent and fundamental nature (sexually and otherwise) but also how she uses images of Nature in her text to outline the catastrophic repercussions of abandoning one's true nature or self.

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• Literary studies
• British and Irish literature

Essays About Love: 20 Intriguing Ideas for Students

Love can make a fascinating essay topic, but sometimes finding the perfect topic idea is challenging. Here are 20 of the best essays about love.

Writers have often explored the subject of love and what it means throughout history. In his book Essays in Love , Alain de Botton creates an in-depth essay on what love looks like, exploring a fictional couple’s relationship while highlighting many facts about love. This book shows how much there is to say about love as it beautifully merges non-fiction with fiction work.

The New York Times  published an entire column dedicated to essays on modern love, and many prize-winning reporters often contribute to the collection. With so many published works available, the subject of love has much to be explored.

If you are going to write an essay about love and its effects, you will need a winning topic idea. Here are the top 20 topic ideas for essays about love. These topics will give you plenty to think about and explore as you take a stab at the subject that has stumped philosophers, writers, and poets since the dawn of time.

For help with your essays, check out our round-up of the best essay checkers .

1. Outline the Definition of Love

2. describe your favorite love story, 3. what true love looks like, 4. discuss how human beings are hard-wired for love, 5. explore the different types of love, 6. determine the true meaning of love, 7. discuss the power of love, 8. do soul mates exist, 9. determine if all relationships should experience a break-up, 10. does love at first sight exist, 11. explore love between parents and children, 12. discuss the disadvantages of love, 13. ask if love is blind, 14. discuss the chemical changes that love causes, 15. outline the ethics of love, 16. the inevitability of heartbreak, 17. the role of love in a particular genre of literature, 18. is love freeing or oppressing, 19. does love make people do foolish things, 20. explore the theme of love from your favorite book or movie.

Defining love may not be as easy as you think. While it seems simple, love is an abstract concept with multiple potential meanings. Exploring these meanings and then creating your own definition of love can make an engaging essay topic.

To do this, first, consider the various conventional definitions of love. Then, compare and contrast them until you come up with your own definition of love.

One essay about love you could tackle is describing and analyzing a favorite love story. This story could be from a fiction tale or real life. It could even be your love story.

As you analyze and explain the love story, talk about the highs and lows of love. Showcase the hard and great parts of this love story, then end the essay by talking about what real love looks like (outside the flowers and chocolates).

This essay will explore what true love looks like. With this essay idea, you could contrast true love with the romantic love often shown in movies. This contrast would help the reader see how true love looks in real life.

An essay about what true love looks like could allow you to explore this kind of love in many different facets. It would allow you to discuss whether or not someone is, in fact, in true love. You could demonstrate why saying “I love you” is not enough through the essay.

There seems to be something ingrained in human nature to seek love. This fact could make an interesting essay on love and its meaning, allowing you to explore why this might be and how it plays out in human relationships.

Because humans seem to gravitate toward committed relationships, you could argue that we are hard-wired for love. But, again, this is an essay option that has room for growth as you develop your thoughts.

There are many different types of love. For example, while you can have romantic love between a couple, you may also have family love among family members and love between friends. Each of these types of love has a different expression, which could lend itself well to an interesting essay topic.

Writing an essay that compares and contrasts the different types of love would allow you to delve more deeply into the concept of love and what makes up a loving relationship.

What does love mean? This question is not as easy to answer as you might think. However, this essay topic could give you quite a bit of room to develop your ideas about love.

While exploring this essay topic, you may discover that love means different things to different people. For some, love is about how someone makes another person feel. To others, it is about actions performed. By exploring this in an essay, you can attempt to define love for your readers.

What can love make people do? This question could lend itself well to an essay topic. The power of love is quite intense, and it can make people do things they never thought they could or would do.

With this love essay, you could look at historical examples of love, fiction stories about love relationships, or your own life story and what love had the power to do. Then, at the end of your essay, you can determine how powerful love is.

The idea of a soul mate is someone who you are destined to be with and love above all others. This essay topic would allow you to explore whether or not each individual has a soul mate.

If you determine that they do, you could further discuss how you would identify that soul mate. How can you tell when you have found “the one” right for you? Expanding on this idea could create a very interesting and unique essay.

Break-ups seem inevitable, and strong relationships often come back together afterward. Yet are break-ups truly inevitable? Or are they necessary to create a strong bond? This idea could turn into a fascinating essay topic if you look at both sides of the argument.

On the one hand, you could argue that the break-up experience shows you whether or not your relationship can weather difficult times. On the other hand, you could argue that breaking up damages the trust you’re working to build. Regardless of your conclusion, you can build a solid essay off of this topic idea.

Love, at first sight is a common theme in romance stories, but is it possible? Explore this idea in your essay. You will likely find that love, at first sight, is nothing more than infatuation, not genuine love.

Yet you may discover that sometimes, love, at first sight, does happen. So, determine in your essay how you can differentiate between love and infatuation if it happens to you. Then, conclude with your take on love at first sight and if you think it is possible.

The love between a parent and child is much different than the love between a pair of lovers. This type of love is one-sided, with care and self-sacrifice on the parent’s side. However, the child’s love is often unconditional.

Exploring this dynamic, especially when contrasting parental love with romantic love, provides a compelling essay topic. You would have the opportunity to define this type of love and explore what it looks like in day-to-day life.

Most people want to fall in love and enjoy a loving relationship, but does love have a downside? In an essay, you can explore the disadvantages of love and show how even one of life’s greatest gifts is not without its challenges.

This essay would require you to dig deep and find the potential downsides of love. However, if you give it a little thought, you should be able to discuss several. Finally, end the essay by telling the reader whether or not love is worth it despite the many challenges.

Love is blind is a popular phrase that indicates love allows someone not to see another person’s faults. But is love blind, or is it simply a metaphor that indicates the ability to overlook issues when love is at the helm.

If you think more deeply about this quote, you will probably determine that love is not blind. Rather, love for someone can overshadow their character flaws and shortcomings. When love is strong, these things fall by the wayside. Discuss this in your essay, and draw your own conclusion to decide if love is blind.

When someone falls in love, their body feels specific hormonal and chemical changes. These changes make it easier to want to spend time with the person. Yet they can be fascinating to study, and you could ask whether or not love is just chemical reactions or something more.

Grab a science book or two and see if you can explore these physiological changes from love. From the additional sweating to the flushing of the face, you will find quite a few chemical changes that happen when someone is in love.

Love feels like a positive emotion that does not have many ethical concerns, but this is not true. Several ethical questions come from the world of love. Exploring these would make for an interesting and thoughtful essay.

For example, you could discuss if it is ethically acceptable to love an object or even oneself or love other people. You could discuss if it is appropriate to enter into a physical relationship if there is no love present or if love needs to come first. There are many questions to explore with this love essay.

If you choose to love someone, is heartbreak inevitable? This question could create a lengthy essay. However, some would argue that it is because either your object of affection will eventually leave you through a break-up or death.

Yet do these actions have to cause heartbreak, or are they simply part of the process? Again, this question lends itself well to an essay because it has many aspects and opinions to explore.

Literature is full of stories of love. You could choose a genre, like mythology or science fiction, and explore the role of love in that particular genre. With this essay topic, you may find many instances where love is a vital central theme of the work.

Keep in mind that in some genres, like myths, love becomes a driving force in the plot, while in others, like historical fiction, it may simply be a background part of the story. Therefore, the type of literature you choose for this essay would significantly impact the way your essay develops.

Most people want to fall in love, but is love freeing or oppressing? The answer may depend on who your loved ones are. Love should free individuals to authentically be who they are, not tie them into something they are not.

Yet there is a side of love that can be viewed as oppressive, deepening on your viewpoint. For example, you should stay committed to just that individual when you are in a committed relationship with someone else. Is this freeing or oppressive? Gather opinions through research and compare the answers for a compelling essay.

You can easily find stories of people that did foolish things for love. These stories could translate into interesting and engaging essays. You could conclude the answer to whether or not love makes people do foolish things.

Your answer will depend on your research, but chances are you will find that, yes, love makes people foolish at times. Then you could use your essay to discuss whether or not it is still reasonable to think that falling in love is a good thing, although it makes people act foolishly at times.

Most fiction works have love in them in some way. This may not be romantic love, but you will likely find characters who love something or someone.

Use that fact to create an essay. Pick your favorite story, either through film or written works, and explore what love looks like in that work. Discuss the character development, storyline, and themes and show how love is used to create compelling storylines.

If you are interested in learning more, check out our essay writing tips !

Bryan Collins is the owner of Become a Writer Today. He's an author from Ireland who helps writers build authority and earn a living from their creative work. He's also a former Forbes columnist and his work has appeared in publications like Lifehacker and Fast Company.

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14 Modern Literary Passages That Beautifully Describe Every Part Of Love

• https://thoughtcatalog.com/?p=653218

1. “‘I am,’ he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. ‘I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.’”

– The Fault In Our Stars , John Green

2. “People are like cities: We all have alleys and gardens and secret rooftops and places where daisies sprout between the sidewalk cracks, but most of the time all we let each other see is is a postcard glimpse of a skyline or a polished square. Love lets you find those hidden places in another person, even the ones they didn’t know were there, even the ones they wouldn’t have thought to call beautiful themselves.”

– Wild Awake , Hilary T. Smith

3. “No relationship is perfect, ever. There are always some ways you have to bend, to compromise, to give something up in order to gain something greater … The love we have for each other is bigger than these small differences. And that’s the key. It’s like a big pie chart, and the love in a relationship has to be the biggest piece. Love can make up for a lot.”

— This Lullaby , Sarah Dessen

4. “I will love you forever; whatever happens. Till I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead, I’ll drift about forever, all my atoms, till I find you again… I’ll be looking for you, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again, we’ll cling together so tight that nothing and no one’ll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you… We’ll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams… And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they won’t just be able to take one, they’ll have to take two, one of you and one of me.”

— The Amber Spyglass , Phillip Pullman

5. “I love you also means I love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else.”

— Everything Is Illuminated , Jonathan Safran Foer

6. “All his life he would hold this moment as exemplary of what love was. It was not wanting anything more, nor was it expecting people to exceed what they had just accomplished; it was simply feeling so complete.”

– A Widow For One Year , John Irving

7. “Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.”

– The History Of Love , Nicole Krauss

8. “His examination revealed that he had no fever, no pain anywhere, and that his only concrete feeling was an urgent desire to die. All that was needed was shrewd questioning…to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera.”

— Love in the Time of Cholera , Gabriel García Márquez

9. “Love: a single word, a wispy thing, a word no bigger or longer than an edge. That’s what it is: an edge; a razor. It draws up through the center of your life, cutting everything in two. Before and after. The rest of the world falls away on either side.”

– Delirium , Lauren Oliver

10. “Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open.”

— Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire , J.K. Rowling

11. “Passion makes a person stop eating, sleeping, working, feeling at peace. A lot of people are frightened because, when it appears, it demolishes all the old things it finds in its path.

No one wants their life thrown into chaos. That is why a lot of people keep that threat under control, and are somehow capable of sustaining a house or a structure that is already rotten. They are the engineers of the superseded.

Other people think exactly the opposite: they surrender themselves without a second thought, hoping to find in passion the solutions to all their problems. They make the other person responsible for their happiness and blame them for their possible unhappiness. They are either euphoric because something marvelous has happened or depressed because something unexpected has just ruined everything.

Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it – which of these two attitudes is the least destructive?

I don’t know.”

― Eleven Minutes , Paulo Coelho

12. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

– The Velveteen Rabbit , Margery Williams

13. “A love story is not about those who lose their heart but about those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing— not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past.”

— The English Patient , Michael Ondaatje

14. “When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”

Liz was born, raised, and schooled in the Chicago area. Every year, she is sure the Cubs will win the World Series, and one of these years, she’ll be right.

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Essay on Love:- Sample Essays for Students in 100, 200 and 300 words

• Updated on  
• Feb 2, 2024

Can a person live without love? Is it the essence of survival? Why do we fall for someone? What is the meaning of love?  Love is one of the most important feelings in human life. Humans are social animals and we have lived for centuries with this way of life where we take confidence in asking another person how our clothes fit us, or how we look. Those who love us, give us the most honest opinions and make our happiness paramount which means love is found in joy, fulfilment and a sense of purpose.

Also Read: 99+ Psychology Facts About Human Behaviour You Would Find Interesting

Table of Contents

• 1 Essay on Love in 100 words
• 2 Essay on Love in 200 words
• 3 Essay on Love in 300 words

Essay on Love in 100 words

Love is the very essence of the human life. Without love, the world would become cold and bleak. God has gifted us different kinds of emotions and love is one the most beautiful of them all. It is an emotion that each of us has experienced at some point in our lives. When someone shows us their love, it makes us feel complete and special. It is like a divine energy that nourishes us throughout our lives. Love has a lot of positive aspects. It provides a foundation on which an individual builds, relishes, and nurtures. Furthermore, this intense feeling shows us how to deepen our emotions. We can say that giving love is a way of worshipping God.

Also Read:- Heart-Touching Mother’s Day 2023 Quotes

Essay on Love in 200 words

Love is a feeling of strong affection and bonding towards an individual. The very concept of love might become an unimaginable thing and also it may happen to each person in a particular way. 

Love comprises feelings, attitudes, and emotions. The feeling is more than just a physical attraction, emotional connection, and a soulful bond. The very basic meaning of love is to feel more than just liking someone. Expressing the same is a wonderful experience. Love is one of the most basic human needs. Everyone wants to feel loved. It is something that completes an individual and brings peace to them.

Love is important for the mind as well as for the body. The more connected you are, the healthier you will be especially emotionally. It is true that love even eradicates depression. It is that much powerful. It is one of the best antidepressants. Life without love would be unimaginable.

Love is something that ends conflicts, brings light into one’s life, gives hope, and makes life worth living. It brings warmth that is needed to nurture life and an individual too. Without love, the world would become a cold and bleak place for everyone. Love builds and heals.

Also Read:-   Speech on Love is More Powerful Than Hate

Essay on Love in 300 words

Love consists of a set of emotions, behaviors, and beliefs with strong feelings of affection. A person might say that they love their dog. The very concept of love is different for each individual as it may happen to each person in a particular way. We can say that it is more than just liking someone, it is an emotional attachment. 

Though love is important in every way still, let us have a look how this intense feeling relates to our bodies as well as to our relations:

1. Hormone of Love

Love helps our body to produce oxytocin, the feel-good hormone and is probably one of the best antidepressants. It makes any individual healthier especially emotionally.

2. Basic Necessity

Love is one of the most basic human needs. Expressing it to others benefits both, the person who delivers it as well as the recipient. One of the ways it can be shown to close ones is as contact comfort. Several experiments show that the babies who were not given contact comfort, especially during the first six months, grow up to be psychologically damaged. 

3. Makes Relations Healthy

In a relationship, Love is the binding element that keeps it strong and makes it grow. The individuals in love, are much more emotionally connected making them connected on a soulful level. The comfort in that is unparalleled. 

Love is the very essence of existence. Life without love is not worthy of being lived. Before we are even aware, love is showered on us each day by our mothers, fathers, siblings, etc. It is a unique gift that helps us shape our lives. Without it, the society would perish. Love motivates us in the darkest times, helps us to overcome negativity and gives us purpose in our lives with new perspectives. It is greater than anything else in life.

Also Read: Speech on Mother Daughter Relationship for School Students

Love is the very essence of the human life. Without love, the world would become cold and bleak. God has gifted us several different kinds of emotions and love is one the most beautiful of them all. It is one such emotion that each of us has experienced at some point in our lives. When someone shows us their love, it makes us feel complete, it makes us feel special. Like a divine energy, love nourishes us throughout our lives. It has a lot of positive aspects such as it provides a foundation on which an individual builds, relishes, nurtures, and heals, it shows us how to deepen our emotions. We can say that giving love is a way of worshipping god.

Love is a feeling of strong affection and bonding towards an individual. The very concept of love might become an unimaginable thing and also it may happen to each person in a particular way.

Love is the very essence of existence. Life without love is not worthy to be lived. Before we are even aware, love is showered on us each day by our mothers, fathers, siblings, etc. It is a unique gift that helps us shape our lives. Without it, the society would perish. Love gives us the motivation we need even in the darkest of times, it helps us overcome negativity and gives us purpose in our life and new perspectives. It is greater than anything else in life.

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This brings us to the end of our blog on Essay on Love. Hope you find this information useful. For more information on such informative topics for your school, visit our essay writing and follow Leverage Edu.

Deepansh Gautam

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Essay on Love for Students and Children

500+ words essay on love.

Love is the most significant thing in human’s life. Each science and every single literature masterwork will tell you about it. Humans are also social animals. We lived for centuries with this way of life, we were depended on one another to tell us how our clothes fit us, how our body is whether healthy or emaciated. All these we get the honest opinions of those who love us, those who care for us and makes our happiness paramount.

What is Love?

Love is a set of emotions, behaviors, and beliefs with strong feelings of affection. So, for example, a person might say he or she loves his or her dog, loves freedom, or loves God. The concept of love may become an unimaginable thing and also it may happen to each person in a particular way.

Love has a variety of feelings, emotions, and attitude. For someone love is more than just being interested physically in another one, rather it is an emotional attachment. We can say love is more of a feeling that a person feels for another person. Therefore, the basic meaning of love is to feel more than liking towards someone.

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Need of Love

We know that the desire to love and care for others is a hard-wired and deep-hearted because the fulfillment of this wish increases the happiness level. Expressing love for others benefits not just the recipient of affection, but also the person who delivers it. The need to be loved can be considered as one of our most basic and fundamental needs.

One of the forms that this need can take is contact comfort. It is the desire to be held and touched. So there are many experiments showing that babies who are not having contact comfort, especially during the first six months, grow up to be psychologically damaged.

Significance of Love

Love is as critical for the mind and body of a human being as oxygen. Therefore, the more connected you are, the healthier you will be physically as well as emotionally. It is also true that the less love you have, the level of depression will be more in your life. So, we can say that love is probably the best antidepressant.

It is also a fact that the most depressed people don’t love themselves and they do not feel loved by others. They also become self-focused and hence making themselves less attractive to others.

Society and Love

It is a scientific fact that society functions better when there is a certain sense of community. Compassion and love are the glue for society. Hence without it, there is no feeling of togetherness for further evolution and progress. Love , compassion, trust and caring we can say that these are the building blocks of relationships and society.

Relationship and Love

A relationship is comprised of many things such as friendship , sexual attraction , intellectual compatibility, and finally love. Love is the binding element that keeps a relationship strong and solid. But how do you know if you are in love in true sense? Here are some symptoms that the emotion you are feeling is healthy, life-enhancing love.

Love is the Greatest Wealth in Life

Love is the greatest wealth in life because we buy things we love for our happiness. For example, we build our dream house and purchase a favorite car to attract love. Being loved in a remote environment is a better experience than been hated even in the most advanced environment.

Love or Money

Love should be given more importance than money as love is always everlasting. Money is important to live, but having a true companion you can always trust should come before that. If you love each other, you will both work hard to help each other live an amazing life together.

Love has been a vital reason we do most things in our life. Before we could know ourselves, we got showered by it from our close relatives like mothers , fathers , siblings, etc. Thus love is a unique gift for shaping us and our life. Therefore, we can say that love is a basic need of life. It plays a vital role in our life, society, and relation. It gives us energy and motivation in a difficult time. Finally, we can say that it is greater than any other thing in life.

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Thesis Statement About Love

Love thesis statement: perfection always betrays our prudence and even our interest.

Mutual love is the most beautiful that can be felt, when there is a bond so formed, so beautiful, so complicit. That you feel that nothing in the world can corrupt that affective bond. Everything works well; it goes on track in your own way, in your way of seeing life. When you’re in love everything seems nicer, you’re happy, nothing bothers you, and you do not even care about the problems, sometimes in a different way “with love”. Everyday life seems more wonderful in fact everything goes spectacular. “Love is long-suffering, it is benign; love has no envy, love is not boastful, it is not puffed up; He does not do anything wrong, he does not seek his own, he does not get irritated, he does not hold a grudge.

Infamous! How can you believe that this way of thinking is correct? Humans are not machines, not plastic, they have feelings, love, hate, sadness and they are governed day by day with them. Why would you ever believe in the man who was unfaithful? Loss of self-esteem: your woman’s ego is trampled, you feel ugly, nothing fits you, you fight with everyone for stupidity, this guy mentally and emotionally ruined you, you start to see problems in you … when it’s not like that.

Page Contents

Thesis statement about love: Love and property

If indeed love is experienced outside of property then people are imprisoned for love.

The improper of the experience of love is its public and community condition; that is, a particular form of intervention on the community violated in the materiality of its territory.

People are guilty of this, above all.

And for such a crime, there is no jurisprudence or law; only a reaffirmation of the universal rights: property as a foundation and property as a social relation. As long as this is assumed as a given thing, every loving expression will be condemned and materially punished.

People stressed the very fabric of the political apparatus of Jujuy to publicly re-establish the ethics of the inappropriate. It gave rise to scenes of public embraces between injured parties and festive experiences outside the private sphere.

Loving is outside of property.

Thesis about love: Love and iconoclasm

If indeed love produces iconoclasm then people are prey for love.

Iconoclasm is presented as a type of register that produces imbalances on the recount of the sensitive. People inscribed the images of the violated of the province on the terrain of the prohibited, on the prohibition of its condition.

The public irruption of this love experience in Jujuy could only occur at the cost of producing intolerable gestures as a way of undoing the sediment images of neatness. To demolish that and to summon the communitarian manifestation of expressions of divertimento and affection between the displaced ones, turned out to be an impossible postcard in the eyes of the ruling businessmen.

People have recovered a portrait of celebration that was historically confined to the back of the neat room. The drive to enroll in the terrain of mountainous civility has been a flagrant crime and a form of plebeian violence: the cursed gesture of insinuating celebratory equity.

Thematic statement examples for love: Love and the archive

If it could not be erased it is because its instructive character is deeper than its grace. Its walls and images today become historical documents, in the registration of signings and nomenclatures, in marks of truth.

A file that, even destroyed, shows a scene acquired rights – exceptionally exceptional – detached from the welfare and donative practice. It illuminates a movement within the limits of what is possible, in its frames of social intelligibility. It illuminates the modes of an affective expression and the daily forms of attachment in precariousness.

A damaged landscape can become an official file especially when you never had one before. Granting that entity is a political gesture that allows us to assume that traditionally relegated expressions of the public scene can effectively be institutionalized.

Theme statements about love: Love and hermeneutics

Love is declared, it is public. And it is also ambivalent since its expression never appears alone but through the emergence of a superposition of affections: shame, pain, pleasure.

To declare is to take the floor and introduce it in an interpretation register. An affective hermeneutics. From there, another story can then be written whose parameters are not fully governed by the criteria of neatness.

The Alto Feeder and the pools, the schools, the recreation and meeting spaces are inscribed as a record of the history of the violated subjects in Jujuy. They give an account of an interpretation of the materiality of the present and construct a prism through which to look at the political, social and cultural processes of the past.

It is an experiential hermeneutics that transcends mere community. That’s why it becomes dangerous: because it pretends to become official and to dispute other ways of interpreting things.

Pope at Corpus Christi Mass: ‘War-torn world needs aroma of bread of love’

By Devin Watkins

“God does not abandon us but always seeks, waits for, and accompanies us, even to the point of placing Himself, helpless, into our hands”.

Pope Francis offered that certainty in his homily at Mass in the Basilica of St. John Lateran, as the Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, known as Corpus Christi Sunday.

The Mass concluded with a Eucharistic procession to the Basilica of St. Mary Major.

Eucharistic attitude teaches appreciation

In his homily at Mass, the Holy Father focused on the Eucharistic bread and spoke about the three themes of “thanksgiving, rememberance, and presence.”

Bread, he noted, is a food of daily life, through which brought Himself intimately close to us.

The Eucharist, added Pope Francis, teaches us to be thankful for God’s many gifts in our lives, by properly using our talents and skills.

“This is our mission to give thanks” asked the Pope. “While we could add even many more ways to give thanks, these are important ‘Eucharistic’ attitudes since they teach us to appreciate the value of what we do and offer.”

True freedom in service

Pope Francis turned to the importance of remembering Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection.

In giving us His Body and Blood, Jesus taught us to give ourselves as an offering to people in need and those around us.

“There are some who say that true freedom means thinking only about ourselves, enjoying life doing whatever we want without regard for others,” said the Pope. “This is not freedom but a hidden slavery.”

True freedom, he said, is found when we bend down to serve others, “motivated solely by love.”

Streets filled with bread of love

Reflecting on the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the Pope pointed out that God never abandons us but rather waits for us to accept Him in the form of Bread.

“His real presence also invites us to be close to our brothers and sisters wherever love calls us,” said Pope Francis.

Our world, he added, desperately needs the Bread of the Eucharist, so that streets filled with rubble and the destruction of war may return to peaceful places filled with the smell of freshly baked bread.

“We urgently need to bring back to our world the good, fresh aroma of the bread of love, to continue tirelessly to hope and rebuild what hatred destroys,” he said.

Inviting others to follow Christ

In conclusion, Pope Francis said the Eucharistic Procession from St. John Lateran to St. Mary Major is not a flashy expression of faith.

“We are not doing this to show off,” he concluded, “or to flaunt our faith, but to invite everyone to participate, in the Bread of the Eucharist, in the new life that Jesus has given us.”

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Andrew Walker Shares His Terrifying Face-Off with 'Feisty Bees' While Filming His Latest Hallmark Movie (Exclusive)

'For Love and Honey' premieres June 1 on Hallmark Channel

Amanda Edwards/Getty 

Hallmark Channel 's latest movie, For Love and Honey , has a whole lot of buzz — literally — and some of it even landed on star Andrew Walker 's face!

In the movie, which was filmed on location in Malta, Walker plays an American archeology professor who follows a lead to the Mediterranean island, where he meets Eva, a local beekeeper played by Margaret Clunie. They soon discover that the spot where a beehive is hiding may hold the clues to a local archaeological mystery.

"It's unlike any Hallmark movie I've done," says Walker, 44, who has starred in more than 25 movies for the network. "It's the closest thing to Indiana Jones meets a Hallmark movie. It's adventure all the way, fast-paced, we're on the road constantly, it's a treasure hunt. Also, then you add in the landscapes and the history."

Hallmark Media/ Dominic Catania

Still, if you mess with bees, you might get the stinger (that is the phrase, right?) — and the bees in Malta, according to Walker, "are known to be feisty bees. They transplant these bees into different countries, especially Canada, because they can withstand the cold. They're very, very frisky, very fiery little bees."

He learned that the hard way on his first day on the film when he, his wife Cassandra, Clunie and some of the producers went to an apiary to meet with the woman who was to be the beekeeper on set and to see the hives.

"We all have our bee suits on, and they're showing us the honey and the bees and everything, and I decided I'm going to take my phone out of my suit and record this," Walker recalls. "I back up and turn my back, open up the zipper to my suit and of course, a bee flies into my suit. 

"I'm not too worried—I've been stung in the past—but I was like okay, it's just one bee, I'll try to blow it out. So I opened my suit a little bit wider and I start blowing to try to get the bee out and two more bees fly into my suit. So I got three bees in my suit at this point."

It gets worse: "Now they're flying all over my head," he continues. "They go into my hoodie and at this point I tell the beekeeper like, 'Hey, I got three bees in my suit.' We go down to the car where there's no bees and I take my suit off, and one bee is stuck in my hood and it stings me in the chin."

Luckily, Walker sports a beard for the movie, so fans won't see a welt (or makeup attempting to hide one). 

"From what I hear, people pay top dollar for these things these days," jokes Walker, who has launched a skincare company called SkinMason . "I really got my money's worth that day."

Read on for more from Walker about For Love and Honey — as well as a hint at the future of his Curious Caterer mystery movies.

PEOPLE: How was filming in Malta? Had you ever been there before?

ANDREW WALKER: Never. I heard about it through Lacey Chabert , but it wasn't on my radar at all. She and Will Kemp shot their movie there, Dancing Detective . I was like, "One day, maybe I'll go there." But now that I've been, I couldn't imagine not visiting. It is an absolute gem of a place. They shot all the King's Landing stuff there from Game of Thrones , so it's castles and cliff edges looking out into the Mediterranean. This movie takes you all over Malta. We shot at basically every corner of that island.

You did A Safari Romance last year — you've been pretty lucky with the location movies lately.

I've been very, very lucky. I feel like I put my time in. I shot six movies in Winnipeg before I was given Safari !

This is Margaret Clunie's first Hallmark movie. Aside from the fact that she's British and appeared in a few episodes of the Star Wars series Andor , what do fans need to know about her?

She is incredible. Hopefully you'll be seeing a lot more of her in these Hallmark movies. I love the staple of incredible females that work for Hallmark, but it was so nice to see a new name coming in. These British actors, they're all classically trained. She is so adaptable and captivating, and she was ready to play. We were weathering all kinds of different weather patterns. We had lots of wind, her hair was all over the place, we had hot days, we had cold, cold mornings. She's such a talented actress and I just feel really fortunate that we were able to nab her up for this.

Tell me about SkinMason. How did that come about?

The bane of my end of my day is washing my face, taking soap and water or some sort of cleanser, having to wet my face and then do some sort of routine. That's too many steps. My wife always yells at me for using too much of her $200 serums, so I thought, "This is great because I'm the consumer." [My partner and friend, Dr. Hussein Kanji, and I] took a year and a half and met with different formulators, and we came across this serum and mild acid exfoliating pad formula. These pads have a special peptide... Both formulas are patented, and the peptide actually eliminates a bacteria that forms acne.

Basically, it's just a two-step system and it's super simple. Our two pillars are simplicity and efficacy, and we've had some really great success. I've been using it now for almost a year, and it's been great. And we officially launch in June.

The PEOPLE Puzzler crossword is here! How quickly can you solve it? Play now !

Hallmark Media/ Allister Foster

Is there anything you can share about your next Curious Caterer movie with Nikki DeLoach?

I haven't read the script yet. I know we're shooting another Curious Caterer. I know we're shooting potentially a few more because of the [viewership] numbers on this last one. Every one, for that matter. It's been such a dream — and Nikki manifested this all. It's been a wild ride and I just feel so privileged and grateful that I'm able to do this with her, with arguably one of the best, kindest human beings I know.

And what about the Three Wise Men and a Baby sequel, Three Wiser Men and a Boy ?

This one is going to be — yes, I'll say it — I think this one is going to be better than the first one.

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer​​, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories. 

For Love and Honey premieres on Saturday, June 1 at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Hallmark Channel.

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Yes, love America

Teach your children to love America | Column, May 28

Thank you to columnist Peggy Noonan. She may not have intended it, but she framed the perfect dichotomy for the upcoming presidential election. Yes, there is a minority on the far left and far right that denigrate the morality of America past and present. The vast majority of us, however, love and respect our great, but imperfect, country.

So yes, let’s teach our children to love America but by being honest about our greatness and our past and present mistakes and shortcomings. That is best done by the examples we set and the choices we make.

The most important election in American history is upon us. Teach your children the values that you love about America by voting for the candidate who engenders them. Do you love and respect the U.S. Constitution, the rule of law, the separation of powers, the judicial system and all of our foundational institutions, the fallen American soldiers who defended your democracy, the rights of all Americans and democracy versus authoritarianism? Who best engenders those values?

Class is in session. Teach your children well.

Rod Dalton , St Petersburg

‘Warts and all’

I disagree with columnist Peggy Noonan’s assertion that we live in an age in which children are instructed “that America is and always was a dark and scheming place. …” I don’t know anyone who teaches their children to hate America, but I have seen politicians try to paint anyone who sees both the good and bad parts of American history as someone who hates America.

Noonan advocates teaching children from the “Manual of Patriotism” that was published in 1900. Instead of teaching a sanitized version of history, we should teach actual American history, warts and all. Children should learn about the ideals of justice and equality that are written about so eloquently in our Declaration of Independence. They should also learn that our experiment in democracy was born with the original sin of slavery.

Children should learn that although slavery was abolished, the rights of Black Americans were eroded to a thin shell by Jim Crow laws and about the lynchings in the South, the great migration to the North and the limited housing and job prospects encountered due to racial discrimination.

I can think of no better way of making young people cynical and apathetic than purging our history of anything “that might make someone uncomfortable.” People should feel uncomfortable about some of our history. That doesn’t mean we hate America. Every country is imperfect. We are lucky to live in America where we can take action to make it better and try to approach the ideals expressed by the country’s founders.

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Robert Trehy , St. Petersburg

More flood control

2 takeaways from this week’s Spotlight Tampa Bay forum on climate change | March 24

Thanks to the Tampa Bay Times and sponsors for holding the recent Spotlight forum on climate change, especially how it is affecting Tampa Bay. It was good to hear directly from Mayors Jane Castor and Kenneth Welch as well as Nobel Prize winner Terry Root, marine scientist Gary Mitchum and Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council Resiliency Director Cara Woods Serra. The discussion was both concerning and hopeful. Hopeful especially with respect to what local cities have already done to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including growing our tree canopy and promoting zero-emission construction. Concerning because of the work yet to be done.

Castor particularly noted that in Tampa long-term planning has been “slow-going” and that current policy does not go far enough to protect future development from sea-level rise. Welch spoke to the growing need to shift development away from coastal high-hazard areas.

Some important climate mitigation measures are underway such as the recently approved $760 million 20-year Stormwater Master Plan in St. Petersburg. Also, studies in St. Petersburg are now getting underway to address storm surge. Hopefully we will not experience another Idalia-like hurricane, or worse, until these urgently needed projects are in place. Much good work is being done to plan for recovery and rebuilding from a major storm. But prevention and mitigation are the best and least costly policies in the long run.

Will Michaels, St. Petersburg

A missed opportunity

The Tampa Bay Times’ recent Spotlight Tampa Bay Forum on climate change missed an opportunity to include things that have real climate benefits while improving the quality of peoples’ lives — active transportation, human-powered mobility such as walking and biking, and micromobility including the use of small electric vehicles like scooters and golf carts.

While transportation issues were prominently discussed, most of that involved talking about cars and mass transit. Nobel Prize winner Terry L. Root asked audience members to promise to buy electric cars. I wondered why she didn’t urge people to think about modal choices trip-by-trip, or perhaps advancing toward car-light living, reducing cars per household.

With many trips in our area being 3 miles or less, why not talk about the progress made toward connected and safe networks for walking, biking and shared micromobility? Or cite examples of services and amenities that inspire mode shift, for example: St. Petersburg’s Localtopia provides free bicycle valet services, which this year avoided more than 1,000 car-miles in a single day. The Tampa Bay Lightning also provides bike valet service for home games, and it’s often filled to maximum capacity. Car lovers may not envision using active transportation, but many of them might consider it if the routes are safe, pleasant and amenity-rich.

Providing opportunities for active transportation won’t solve all our climate challenges, but they will help. They are less expensive and quicker to deploy than mass transit and warranted inclusion within an expert panel’s discussion on climate change in Tampa Bay.

Christine Acosta , Tampa

America needs responsible voters

More voting, please | Letter, May 26

In the letter ”More voting, please,” the writer states, “My personal issue is not with noncitizens who might vote, but with citizens who are eligible voters and don’t bother to do so.” Noncitizens do not vote, so she is unquestionably correct not to fret. But the last thing I want is more low-interest voters showing up.

We don’t need voters who regard social media as reliable news sources. (TikTok and Instagram content doesn’t win Pulitzer Prizes for a reason.) We don’t need more voting by the 13% of voters who, polls report, believe President Joe Biden repealed Roe v. Wade, or the more than 50% who reportedly believe this is the worst job market in 50 years rather than the best; or who can’t comprehend that today’s average wages buy more than they did four years ago, even with inflation; or who make public health proclamations beginning with “I’m not a doctor, but...”; or the ones who back governors and legislators whose solution to global warming is purging references to climate change from state documents. That list is just the tiniest sample of vital issues most voters won’t have studied before casting ballots.

I see voting as a privilege. Privileges come with responsibilities. Our national tragedy is too many people using the privilege without any responsibility. We don’t need more voters, just better voters.

Jim Smith, St Petersburg

Garbage collection

Be cautious in raising Tampa’s garbage rates | Editorial, May 29

The opinion expressed in the recent editorial is spot on, especially regarding reducing garbage collection to once a week. If you look down our street on the second day of collection each week, you may see two cans placed out for collection out of 12 homes.

Todd Wickner, Tampa

The right question

The editorial on Tampa’s garbage rates asked “could once-weekly service collect the same volume in a more efficient manner?” For this homeowner, the answer is definitely yes. My collection schedule for garbage is Tuesday and Friday, but I can’t remember the last time I put out my cart more than one day a week. Even then, I usually have two bags at the most. The city should at least try out once-weekly and see how it works before raising our rates.

Joseph Brown , Tampa

Not talking to me

Robert De Niro slams Trump at Biden campaign press conference outside N.Y. courthouse | May 28

Let me start by saying that Robert De Niro has made many great films. That said, I would no more take political advice from him (an actor) than I would take surgical advice from a fast-food worker. The Biden administration, which likes to claim the high road, showed its true colors Tuesday during the staged event across the street from where former President Donald Trump is on trial. The American people in November are going to send a clear message to the Democratic Party that we will no longer tolerate its left-wing agenda that has brought nothing but pain, suffering and embarrassment for the United States and all Americans.

Mark Khan , Wesley Chapel

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Opinion: What if this is our last real election?

If trump isn’t penalized in this election for his antics after the last election, why would he worry about a backlash in a future election.

(Jason Andrew | The New York Times) A pro-Trump mob storms the Capitol building in Washington, Jan. 6, 2021.

Some of the Americans protesting the war in the Gaza Strip have turned on President Joe Biden. They assert that the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is killing huge numbers of civilians, which is true, and that Biden can stop it, which is more doubtful. But how do they deal with the reality that in a second term Donald Trump would be far more pro-Netanyahu and anti-Palestinian than our current president?

The answer I’ve been hearing is that the goal is to send a message: If Gaza costs Biden the election, Democrats will understand that in the next election they will need to rethink their seemingly reflexive support for Israel’s government and commit as a party to the protection of Palestinian rights.

There are many questions one could ask about this argument, but from a certain perspective, the most important one for American voters may well be: What next election?

There’s a very real possibility that if Trump wins in November, it’ll be the last real national election America holds for a very long time. And while there’s room for disagreement here, if you consider that statement to be outrageous hyperbole, you haven’t been paying attention.

Yes, we can and should examine the candidates’ policy platforms and their potential effects, just as if this were a normal presidential election. But this isn’t a normal election; democracy itself is on the ballot. And it would be incredibly unwise not to take that into account.

Start here: Trump refused to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election, making evidence-free claims of fraud in his effort to overturn it. In the past couple of years, various polls have shown that somewhere around two-thirds of the Republican Party has cosigned his election denialism. And several leading party members have refused to say that they’ll accept the election results this year. Why imagine that they’ll become any more respectful toward future elections?

You might say that American institutions would constrain the ability of Trump and whoever follows him to impose permanent one-party rule, which they did — barely — after the 2020 election. But institutions ultimately consist of people, and at this point, many Republicans, up to and including Supreme Court justices, are showing about as much strength in supporting democracy and the rule of law as a wet paper towel.

So, a Trump victory might well bring down the curtain on politics as we know it — he has already floated the idea of a third term, something that’s barred, of course, by the 22nd Amendment. But in any case, among his followers, at least, he has mainstreamed the idea that any presidential election won by Democrats is illegitimate.

I began this column with the leftists who appear willing to help facilitate a Trump victory despite being aware that he would be far worse, even on the issues they claim to care about, than Biden. But don’t forget about those we might call throwback Republicans, those who haven’t completely bought into the MAGA agenda but dislike Biden and believe that Trump would do a better job. They presumably believe that a second Trump term would be like his first term, when he talked populism but mostly followed a standard GOP agenda of tax cuts and attempts to slash the social safety net.

Yet why imagine that a second term would be similar? Trump advisers are talking about radical policies, including mass deportations and stripping the Federal Reserve of independence, that would be highly disruptive even in purely economic terms.

But, you may say, the backlash against such policies would be huge, and Republicans would surely tone them down in fear that radicalism would hurt them badly in the next election.

To which I say: If Trump isn’t penalized in this election for his antics after the last election, why would he worry about a backlash in a future election? Assuming there is one in any real sense.

And then there are the Trump-supporting or Trump-leaning plutocrats, who may be fooling themselves completely.

Some of them may understand that they’re supporting a radical, anti-democratic movement, and are all in favor. Elon Musk, most famously, increasingly appears to have gone full Great Replacement MAGA, but he’s far from alone. So, in that sense, they may be less deceived than many.

But their naivete runs deeper, because they imagine that their wealth and prominence will allow them to flourish, even in a post-democracy America — that they’ll be immune to the purges and persecutions that are such an obvious possibility in the near future. They should at least ponder the experience of the oligarchs who helped Russian President Vladimir Putin gain power and then found themselves at his mercy.

To be clear: I’m not saying that people should muzzle themselves and refrain from criticizing Biden on the merits; he’s a grown-up and can handle it. Part of his job as a democratically elected leader is taking it. But ignoring the possibility that this could be our last real election for a while is shortsighted and self-indulgent.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .

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A Mother's Love, A Daughter's Honor: Cedarville's Heartwarming Commencement Ceremony

by Sarah Mummert, Student Public Relations Writer

In the midst of all the pomp and circumstance of Cedarville University’s commencement  weekend, a special dream came true for Fernanda (Fernie) Hochstedler, a graduate student who was battling a terminal diagnosis at her home in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Although Hochstedler was unable to travel to campus for her commencement ceremony, her daughter, Naomi Hochstedler, walked across the stage to receive her mother’s academic regalia during the annual hooding ceremony on Friday, May 3, from the Cedarville University School of Nursing program. Sixteen days later, on Sunday, May 19, Hochstedler passed away from an advanced form of breast cancer, and her daughter—with her mother's hood--has a lifelong memory of loving her mom well.

Hochstedler, who earned an undergraduate degree in nursing from Cedarville in 2001, began her nursing career shortly after receiving her bachelor’s degree. She worked full time at The Ohio State University Medical Center until the arrival of her second child, when she decided to stay home and focus on her family. 

Soon after making this decision, Hochstedler and her husband Delton moved from London, Ohio, to her home country of Brazil to work with homeless children in 2008.  

Delton Hochstedler, a social worker, began working with children in vulnerable communities, focusing on the developing foster care system, a growing movement in Brazil. Fernie started using her skills as a nurse to help children with medical needs. 

In the midst of her work, Fernie decided to pursue the MSN degree online through Cedarville’s School of Nursing. Her research was centered on childhood cancer—a decision inspired by the journey of their son, Kaleb, whom they had lost to a rare form of childhood cancer in 2020. Her research focused on conditions for the care of childhood cancer in Brazil. 

One year later, Fernie was diagnosed with an easily treatable breast cancer. However, her treatment plan couldn’t slow down or remove the cancer, and her condition worsened as the tumor became resistant to each new form of treatment. 

“I knew that we had to be honest and up front in our new circumstances concerning my illness, just like we were in Kaleb’s journey,” said Fernie one month from her passing. “We never hid anything from the kids. We wanted them to see how even in the dark valley, God will come through and provide in amazing ways. While aware of the seriousness of the situation, we also pointed them to see how the Lord is still good and faithful.” 

In the most tragic of circumstances, the family learned to face hard questions while relying on God. 

During Kaleb’s hospital stays, the Hochstedlers ministered to the healthcare professionals taking care of their son. The doctors had never seen a family walk through end-of-life situations with the grace and peace they saw from this family. 

“Many doctors were bitter toward God due to things they’d seen and experienced, but we have kept in touch with some of them and some are considering God anew,” said Fernie. “In my situation, we are excited to see what God does this time. We’re keeping our ears, eyes and hearts open.” 

Through her journey, Fernie learned the value of gratitude and keeping things joyful. 

“Ultimately, the only one who can walk with us in our pain and stand with us in our loneliness is Jesus.”

- Fernie Hochstedler

“By keeping things lighthearted, I don’t mean I ignore the difficulties,” she said. “It doesn’t happen easily all the time, but I do embrace the challenges, and being able to laugh can make things less intense.” 

But gratitude was truly life-giving for her, including being thankful for the big things, like the people supporting her, and for the little things, like flowers or sunshine. She was also grateful for the opportunity Cedarville afforded her to receive her graduate degree from afar. 

“The nursing professors were super helpful and really bent over backwards for me, especially when I wasn’t doing very well,” said Fernie. “They were really understanding and allowed me to work within my capacity, extending deadlines if needed or offering oral evaluations. I’m so thankful. I couldn’t have achieved this goal without their grace.” 

“Gratitude feels like my window to God,” Fernie shared. “It opens a window in the darkness and keeps you from being engulfed in despair. It makes a true difference in your outlook.” 

In late April, Hochstedler began experiencing liver failure, with her tumor getting out of control once again. A new attempt at traditional chemotherapy proved helpful for a moment, allowing her to balance side effects with time spent among family and friends. 

“Ultimately, the only one who can walk with us in our pain and stand with us in our loneliness is Jesus,” Fernie said with confidence in her faith. 

Fernie lived her life with purpose. In her passing, she leaves a legacy of serving others to those who follow her in the nursing profession. 

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