essay about of love

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.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

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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Of Love by Francis Bacon Summary

Of love by francis bacon literary analysis, more from francis bacon.

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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Of Love by Francis Bacon: A Summary and Line by Line Explanation

This blog post covers everything you need to know about Bacon’s view on love. It includes a summary, line by line explanation, discussion of its theme, and answers to a few FAQs, all explained in simple language.

Table of Contents

Of Love Summary

Francis Bacon’s essay “Of Love” primarily discusses adverse impacts of passionate love on human behavior and life. In contrast to its idealized portrayal in theatrical plays, intense love in real life is often harmful and leads to suffering. It can allure, in its powerful grip, anyone, even those who are usually wise.

Another significant consequence of love is a lover loses touch with reality and starts thinking irrationally. This state can significantly affect his judgment.

Moreover, love can lead to the loss of both fortune and knowledge. For instance, Paris was so captivated by Helen that ignored the gifts of wealth and wisdom for the sake of his passionate love.

Line by Line Explanation

Love on stage and in real life.

“THE stage is more beholding to love, than the life of man. For as to the stage, love is ever matter of comedies, and now and then of tragedies; but in life it doth much mischief; sometimes like a siren, sometimes like a fury. You may observe, that amongst all the great and worthy persons (whereof the memory remaineth, either ancient or recent) there is not one, that hath been transported to the mad degree of love: which shows that great spirits, and great business, do keep out this weak passion.”

The stage depicts the theme of love more than actual experiences in life. Plays tend to focus on love as a central theme far more than experiences in everyday life.

Bacon wrote this essay in the Elizabethan era. Being an essayist of that period, he likely refers to Elizabethan plays. Bacon observes that many playwrights of his time glorified love and often gave undue importance to it.

For example, plays such as “Romeo and Juliet”, “The Merchant of Venice”, “Twelfth Night”, “Endymion present love in a light-hearted manner. They end in happiness, like marriages or reunions.

According to Bacon, this is a misrepresentation of love on stage. What the playwrights often ignore is to show the darker aspects of love in their plays. They seldom depict love as having serious and sorrowful consequences.

Amorous love in real life is not always a source of happiness. It often causes more trouble and distress in a person’s life than benefitting him.

To explain the destructive power of love, Bacon compares passionate love to a siren and fury. A siren’s enchanting song and voice lures sailors and distracts them on their way. Similarly, love draws individuals away from their duties, potentially leading them to ruin.

Because of its destructive nature, notable individuals, either from the past or present, have never let it overpower them. They have always kept “this weak passion” (Bacon 88) aside from their work in their ambitions or intellectual pursuits.

For instance, Nikola Tesla and Elon Musk have not allowed this emotion to overwhelm them. As a result, they have become extraordinary in their respective fields.

In contrast, an average person who has surrendered himself to erotic love might have ended up mediocre.

The difference between successful and unsuccessful men lies in how much priority they give to love.

Love is a Powerful Emotion

“You must except, nevertheless, Marcus Antonius, the half partner of the empire of Rome, and Appius Claudius, the decemvir and lawgiver; whereof the former was indeed a voluptuous man, and inordinate; but the latter was an austere and wise man: and therefore it seems (though rarely) that love can find entrance, not only into an open heart, but also into a heart well fortified, if watch be not well kept. It is a poor saying of Epicurus, Satis magnum alter alteri theatrum sumus; as if man, made for the contemplation of heaven, and all noble objects, should do nothing but kneel before a little idol, and make himself a subject, though not of the mouth (as beasts are), yet of the eye; which was given him for higher purposes.”

Love is such a strong emotion that, if not controlled, it can affect both amorous and sagacious individuals’ lives. To explain, Bacon cites examples from history. Both Mark Antony and Appius Claudius were both high-ranking men in ancient Rome.

Mark Antony was a Roman General. He fell in love with Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt, and married her.

Marrying Cleopatra became a cause of downfall for Mark Antony. He distributed Roman territories to her children, which was seen as a betrayal of Roman interests.

Octavian emphasized his alliance with Cleopatra to turn public opinion against Antony. He portrayed Antony as a traitor to Rome, influenced by a foreign queen, which helped justify his declaration of war.

In the end, his defeat at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC marked the end of Antony’s political and military career.

Claudius was an austere Roman senator and a leading decemvir in 451 B.C. Rome.

However, Claudius lusted after the daughter of a commoner, Virginia. (Pitcher 88n3) and he wanted to enslave her by using his power. To save Virginia from the clutch of Claudius, her father had to kill her.

It caused an uproar in Rome and Claudius’ downfall.

This comparison highlights that anyone can succumb to passionate love, regardless of one’s personality. Whether one is passionate like Antony or wise like Claudius, this powerful force can impact anyone if it is allowed to grow unchecked.

If a man with high ambitions focuses on this weak passion, it will overpower him. He is not supposed to indulge himself in such a pleasure.

Therefore, Bacon criticizes a statement of the Greek philosopher Epicurus; “Satis magnum alter alteri theatrum sumus” (Bacon 88). It means “each of us is enough of an audience for the other” (Pitcher 88n4).

This implies that the mere presence of another person should be enough to satisfy our need for engagement. The statement emphasizes personal relationships and simple pleasures are sufficient for a fulfilling life.

Bacon viewed Epicurus’s statement as underestimating other aspects of a fulfilling life. He believes that Epicurus’s philosophy focuses too much on personal relationships, which restricts human potential.

If all men meant for contemplating the universe or pursuing ambitious endeavors were to focus solely on love, they would give undue importance to this passion.

Even if a man in love is not driven by instinct like an animal, he is captivated by his lover’s appearance. It is a misuse of his gift of sight. Instead of using his sight, metaphorically, insight, for higher purposes, he indulges in petty pleasures.

Deceptive Nature of Love

“It is a strange thing, to note the excess of this passion, and how it braves the nature, and value of things, by this; that the speaking in a perpetual hyperbole, is comely in nothing but in love. Neither is it merely in the phrase; for whereas it hath been well said, that the arch-flatterer, with whom all the petty flatterers have intelligence, is a man’s self; certainly the lover is more. For there was never proud man thought so absurdly well of himself, as the lover doth of the person loved; and therefore it was well said, That it is impossible to love, and to be wise.”

Bacon finds it peculiar how love’s intensity can defy the nature of reality. Love can distort a person’s perception, keeping reality at bay from the lover.

He says hyperbolic speech in love is often deemed acceptable, but not in other aspects of life.

We can explain this phenomenon with the help of the halo effect. The attractiveness or a characteristic of one forms an overall positive perception in the lover’s mind.

As a result, one forms biased opinions about the other. It often leads to endless exaggerated compliments.

Bacon refers to a saying that the greatest flatterer is oneself, highlighting how people often deceive themselves more than others. Yet, a person in love becomes an even greater flatterer towards his beloved than towards himself.

Conversely, a wise and self-content man does not hold himself in as high regard as a passionate lover. The halo effect influences cognitive capacity. Consequently, it overvalues the loved one irrationally.

In this context, Bacon cites a line from Publilius Syrus’ Sententiae , 15,

Because of the irrational tendency, it is impossible to love and act rationally at the same time.

One-sided Passionate Love

“Neither doth this weakness appear to others only, and not to the party loved; but to the loved most of all, except the love be reciproque. For it is a true rule, that love is ever rewarded, either with the reciproque, or with an inward and secret contempt. By how much the more, men ought to beware of this passion, which loseth not only other things, but itself!”

The weaknesses of being blindly in love are not apparent either to others or to the person who is only partially loved. However, this weakness is visible to the one being loved, especially when the love is not mutual.

Bacon states that love is always answered in one of two possibilities. Either the loved one will reciprocate to the feelings or develop hidden contempt for the other as the lover’s advanced progress.

Therefore, Bacon cautions that people should be wary of this emotion. It is detrimental to one’s well-being but also to the passion of love.

This can occur because the intensity of unreciprocated love may lead to its own demise. This happens either through the erosion of the affection itself or through the harm it causes, making it unsustainable.

Love is the Child of Folly

“As for the other losses, the poet’s relation doth well figure them: that he that preferred Helena, quitted the gifts of Juno and Pallas. For whosoever esteemeth too much of amorous affection, quitteth both riches and wisdom. This passion hath his floods, in very times of weakness; which are great prosperity, and great adversity; though this latter hath been less observed: both which times kindle love, and make it more fervent, and therefore show it to be the child of folly.”

While discussing losses, Bacon cites a story from classical mythology. In this story, Paris, the Trojan prince, chooses Venus’s offer of the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen. He rejects the offers of power, wealth, and wisdom from goddesses Juno and Pallas (Athena).

Paris’s decision to abduct Helen from her husband sparked a war between the Trojans and Spartans. Ultimately, this led to his own death and the eventual destruction of Troy.

Thus, Bacon emphasizes that placing an excessive value on romantic love can lead to the depletion of both wealth and wisdom.

Bacon observes that love often arises in times of both prosperity and adversity. In prosperity, a man may become vulnerable to passionate feelings. It may lead him to senseless actions.

Similarly, in adversity, he might seek passion to escape from reality. However, love during hardship is an occasional experience.

Since love tends to intensify during these times, it underscores the notion that love is a product of foolishness rather than reason or wisdom.

Balancing Love and Goals

“They do best, who if they cannot but admit love, yet make it keep quarters; and sever it wholly from their serious affairs, and actions, of life; for if it check once with business, it troubleth men’s fortunes, and maketh men, that they can no ways be true to their own ends.”

Some men fall in love but do not act irrationally. They manage their feelings carefully, even if they cannot avoid falling in love. They ensure that love remains controlled.

To control, they always keep love separate from their goals or responsibilities. They know very well that if their desire and serious matters are mingled, it could lead to financial losses and compromise their ability to stay true to their objectives.

For instance, many successful people are not great lovers in the traditional sense. While they may have experienced love, they never allow it to impact their work. Instead, they adeptly balance these aspects of their lives.

Love as an Escape Route

“I know not how, but martial men are given to love: I think, it is but as they are given to wine; for perils commonly ask to be paid in pleasures.”

Bacon says that martial men have a tendency to fall in love. He compares their attraction to women with their fondness for wine. It suggests that the pleasures of love or wine alleviate their harsh lives.

The risks in their profession may drive soldiers to seek emotional solace in romantic love. Just as they might turn to wine for escape or relief, love offers a similar respite from the stark realities of military life.

Different Types of Love

“There is in man’s nature, a secret inclination and motion, towards love of others, which if it be not spent upon some one or a few, doth naturally spread itself towards many, and maketh men become humane and charitable; as it is seen sometime in friars. Nuptial love maketh mankind; friendly love perfecteth it; but wanton love corrupteth, and embaseth it.”

Apart from such sensual love, Bacon also mentions other types of love: altruistic love, nuptial love, and friendly love.

Altruistic Love: Bacon notices that humans have an inherent tendency to extend their love beyond a single individual, encompassing all humanity. Altruistic love, often seen in religious figures, is a selfless love concerned with the well-being of others.

This type of love fosters humanity and charity, as opposed to selfishness and flattery.

Nuptial Love: This love pertains to marriage. Marital love plays a vital role in the continuation of the human race. Bacon expresses a similar view about nuptial love in “ Of Marriage and Single Life ”.

He says, “wife and children are a kind of discipline of humanity” (82).

Friendly Love: It is related to friendship bonds. This type of love enhances humanity’s moral and social virtues, contributing to its perfection and enrichment.

Wanton Love: In contrast to other types, amorous love is superficial and degrades one’s life. Passionate love may be fleeting, but its effects can be enduring.

Though Bacon mentions these types of love, he does not delve deep into them. He discusses primarily passionate love and its detrimental effects.

Of Love Video Explanation

What does Francis Bacon say about love?

Bacon describes love as a powerful and potentially harmful emotion. He highlights that the dramatists do not show the dark side of love in theatrical plays. He argues that even historical figures of great renown could not escape love’s overwhelming impact. Love impairs one’s grasp on reality and reasoning. It makes rational thought challenging for those in love.

What are the three different kinds of love that Bacon talks of in his essay?

Bacon discusses four types of love in his essay: altruistic love, nuptial love, friendly love, and wanton love.

What does Bacon call a man who is gripped by the passion of love?

Bacon describes a person overcome by passionate love as irrational. Such individuals become overly emotional and struggle to distinguish between reality and logic. They fool themselves, excessively idolizing the person they love to the point of foolishness.

Bacon, Francis. “Of Love.” Francis Bacon: The Essays , edited by John Pitcher, Penguin Books, 1985, pp. 88, 89.

Badian, E. “Mark Antony: Roman triumvir.” Britannica , 28 Jul. 2022, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mark-Antony-Roman-triumvir

Cherry, Kendra. “Why the Halo Effect Influences How We Perceive Others.” verywellmind , 19 Jul. 2020. https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-halo-effect-2795906

I'm a PhD research scholar & MPhil degree holder from DU, Assam and also a budding blogger. I have cracked CBSE NET (July 2018), NE-SLET (July 2018), and UGC-NTA-NET (June 2019).

Critical analysis of love essay

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Essay on Love | Love Essay for Students and Children in English

February 7, 2024 by Prasanna

Essay on Love: Love has many meanings. It can mean being affectionate towards a person, and the affection reciprocated. Love is a set of emotions that we experience. Love could also mean beliefs or behaviors that show your affection towards someone. Love is a feeling that everybody yearns. It makes them feel happy and vital.

Love can be for many things, family, partners, pets, nature, and even for oneself. Honesty, care, and trust accompany love. As humans, we depend on one and other, and though we may be different, love binds us all together and making the world a much better place.

You can read more Essay Writing about articles, events, people, sports, technology many more.

Long and Short Essays On Love for Students and Kids in English

We have given one long essay on love of 400-500 words and one short essay on love of 200 words. The long essay on love is for students of classes 7,8,9, and 10 and competitive exam aspirants. Short Essay on Love is suitable for students of Classes 1,2,3,4,5 and 6.

Long Essay on Love 500 Words in English

Love is the many emotions that we experienced when affection and care showed to us. It is not just romance. Love can mean many things and can vary from person to person. Honesty, care, and trust constitute love. Everyone wants to be loved. It gives them happiness and makes them feel like they matter. We love for many things, and the love we think varies throughout our lives.

Our first experience of love is at birth. The bond that we form with our parents is one of the purest. Parents love us from the moment we are born, and this love only grows stronger. They care for us and help us improve. A child always needs the warmth and love of their parents. As we grow older, we learn to become more independent and do not need our parents as much. However, they are always there when we need them, and they will ever love us. As they grow older, they need our help and attention. Moving on with our lives and forgetting about them affects them, and they feel lonely. We need to be there for them the same way they were with us.

Siblings may not always get along and fight constantly, but the love between them is the strongest. Despite all the insults and arguments, they will always defend us and keep us safe. The love between them is unspoken but still felt; the expression of love is not the way we think it to be. Though siblings may not say, “I love you,” we know that they do. Grandparents shower their love for their grandkids. They also want to spend time with them and create memories, and they are there for us no matter what. They always want to see their grandchildren happy.

Love is the base for romantic relationships; two partners who care and love each other. They trust each other and try to work out their differences when they fight. Friendships also have the essence of love. Though it may not be romantic, friends still love us. They care for us, make us happy, and care about us. Friendships based on popularity and status does not last long.

Friendships require trust and someone who you can open to without thinking twice. You make the best memories and have the most fun. Most of all, a friend is someone you can count on; that is love. Sometimes, these relationships may not work out. Rather than feeling wrong and shameful, we must cherish the moments we had and not hate anybody. Love can be towards nature: appreciating what Earth has given us and protecting them with care.

Loving yourself is the most important. When someone acts differently from what others perceive as normal, they are often left out.

We must learn to accept who we are and the way we look. Once we accept ourselves, we can truly love. Love is not just about other people, but it is also about loving ourselves first. Love is also accepting others for who they are, not what we expect them to be.

Short Essay On Love 200 Words in English

Love is a wide range of emotions we feel. When we trust someone and show affection towards them, it is love.

Parents shower us with love since birth. They take care of us and make sure that we are always happy. As we grow older, they teach us many values, most of all, how to love someone. They love us even when we lead our own lives and do not depend on them much. The love between parents and their children is pure. Grandparents love their grandchildren. They tell us their childhood stories and will do anything to make their grandchildren smile.

We show love for our siblings. Though siblings fight, they always love each other. Love can also be for our friends, who play with us and we have loads of fun. They are still there for us, no matter what. Love can happen between two people who care about each other and happy. Love can also be for our environment when we care for plants and animals by protecting our environment.

Love makes us happy and makes us feel like we matter. Showing affection helps a person feel better. Love is the basis of any relationship we have in life. We must learn to love ourselves and the people around us.

10 Lines on the Topic Essay on Love in English

The ten lines are helpful for competitive exam aspirants and while making speeches.

Love is the many emotions that we experience affection and care.
Honesty, responsibility, and trust constitute love.
It is a feeling that everybody years for as it makes them feel happy and vital.
Our first experience of love is at birth. The bond that we form with our parents is one of the purest.
Parents teach us important values and make us independent. We need to be there for them the same way they were with us.
The love between siblings is an unspoken one but always felt. Despite the fights and arguments, they defend us and make us feel safe.
Grandparents shower their love for their grandkids. They also want to spend time with them and make sure that they are always smiling.
Love is the base for romantic relationships; two partners who care and love each other. They work out their differences when they quarrel and trust each other immensely.
Friendships also have the essence of love. Friendships require trust and someone who you can open to without thinking twice.
We must learn to accept who we are and the way we look. Once we accept ourselves, we can truly love.

FAQ’s On Essay on Love

Question 1. How can we define love?

Answer: Love is the many emotions that we experience affection and care. It is not just romance. Love can mean many things and can vary from person to person. Honesty, care, and trust constitute love.

Question 2. Does love only involve romance?

Answer: Love is not just about romance. Love can be for our parents, siblings, friends, nature, and oneself.

Question 3. How does love play a role in friendship?

Answer: Though it may not be romantic, friends still love us. They care for us, make us happy, and care about us. Friendships require trust and someone who is always there for you. You make the best memories and have the most fun.

Question 4. How can we love ourselves?

Answer: We must learn to accept who we are and the way we look. Once we accept ourselves, we can truly love. Love is not just about other people, but it is also about loving ourselves first.

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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 .

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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).

Essays About Love: What true love looks like?

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 .

Essays About Love: Determine if all relationships should experience a break-up

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 !

Francis Bacon

What is the main theme of Francis Bacon's essay "Of Love"?

Quick answer:

Frances Bacon's essay "Of Love" explores the nature of love. He uses various metaphors to discuss whether love and its consequences are good or bad for people. He examines the all-consuming power that love possesses over people and how love can have either positive or negative influences on people, depending on which type of love it is.

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In his essay "Of Love," Francis Bacon seeks to examine love as a philosopher and even as a scientist, attempting to pin down the nature of what love is and to divide the phenomenon into different types. He begins by complaining that the type of romantic and dramatic literature which usually takes love as its subject portrays the emotion unrealistically, since it is frequently regarded in this context as a source of comedy. In fact, love often does a great deal of harm, though the wisest people throughout history have always managed to avoid its more destructive excesses.

Bacon then gives the examples of Mark Antony and Appius Claudius as contrasting personalities who both fell in love, making the point that

love can find entrance, not only into an open heart, but also into a heart well fortified, if watch be not well kept.

However, his main concern is to attempt a taxonomic classification of love and to show how certain types of love inexorably lead to folly, while others are ennobling. He disparages a highly romantic attitude, reminding the reader that Paris rejected the gifts of both Pallas (Minerva) and Juno in his infatuation for Helen.

Bacon ends with the observation:

Nuptial love maketh mankind; friendly love perfecteth it; but wanton love corrupteth, and embaseth it.

The negative tone of the essay in pointing out the dangers of love comes from the fact that the author spends much more time on what he calls "wanton love" than on the other two varieties combined.

Cite this page as follows:

Cavendish-Jones, Colin. "What is the main theme of Francis Bacon's essay "Of Love"?" edited by eNotes Editorial, 29 Nov. 2020, https://www.enotes.com/topics/francis-bacon/questions/what-is-francis-bacon-s-essay-of-love-about-279851.

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In this essay, Bacon examines the overall negative results of love, particularly a love arising out of lust and carnal desires. From the beginning, he states that the way love is often portrayed in theater is misleading. While it is frequently recognized as being comedic and light, the actuality is that love often brings great "mischief."

Bacon admonishes men who engage in an uninhibited love. He claims that these men make themselves insignificant by using high flattery. Such efforts devalue one's own sense of self and are unbecoming. Bacon concludes that it is "impossible to love, and to be wise."

Love that is not reciprocated also lessens a man's character, according to Bacon. He states that men who attempt to flatter women will face one of two outcomes: either the woman will reciprocate those feelings or she will hold "contempt" toward him for engaging in unsolicited efforts to woo her. If rejected, a man faces deflated self-esteem and feelings of self-doubt.

Bacon maintains that men who engage too passionately in "amorous affection" abandon their own wisdom. Additionally, they are likely to forsake their acquired wealth as they seek out the sensual pleasures which women can offer. They are much more likely to engage in unrestrained acts of passion during times of "great prosperity" than they are when facing "great adversity." As men pursue their own sensual pleasures, they often abandon their business, health, and wealth.

He concludes by examining the particular influences of both love and wine on men who engage in fighting (such as warriors). These men seem to look toward the pleasures of life, as women and alcohol can offer, to alleviate the "perils" they often endure.

In closing, Bacon acknowledges the benefits of marriage, as this kind of love "maketh mankind." Additionally, friendly love makes life more perfect. Conversely, sexual promiscuity embarrasses both the true nature of love and the man who seeks such pleasures.

Hansen, Julianne. "What is the main theme of Francis Bacon's essay "Of Love"?" edited by eNotes Editorial, 28 Nov. 2020, https://www.enotes.com/topics/francis-bacon/questions/what-is-francis-bacon-s-essay-of-love-about-279851.

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Frances Bacon's essay "Of Love", as the title suggests, is about the nature of love. The essay, consisting of a single, moderate-length paragraph, is exploratory rather than argumentative and analytical. It is addressed to a well-educated audience familiar with Greek and Latin culture.

Bacon considers whether love itself is good or bad for people. He suggests that the metaphor of the Judgement of Paris is a useful way of thinking about love, that when one chooses Aphrodite (the goddess of love) one abandons pursuit of Athena (the goddess of wisdom) and Hera (representing power or civic duty in this case).

He next falls back on the traditional distinction of carnal versus other types of love, and suggests that while being subject to sensual desire is a bad thing, some types of love, such as charity (love for all people in the Christian sense), friendship, and love within the family are positive influences on people.

Wofford, Lynnette. "What is the main theme of Francis Bacon's essay "Of Love"?" edited by eNotes Editorial, 18 Oct. 2016, https://www.enotes.com/topics/francis-bacon/questions/what-is-francis-bacon-s-essay-of-love-about-279851.

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Frances Bacon's essay "Of Love" details questions and answers regarding the very complicated concept of love. The essay begins by comparing love to the stage. According to Bacon, love mirrors the stage because it is filled with comedy, tragedy , mischief, and fury. Like the plays produced on the stage, love is multidimensional.

Bacon goes on to state that love makes people act in very different ways. People, consumed by love, will find themselves filled with "great spirits" and "weak passion(s)."

Perhaps the most thought provoking statement that Bacon makes in the essay is "That it is impossible to love, and to be wise." This could force one to think that to be in love makes them stupid.

Bacon goes on to present the different aspects of love.

There is in man’s nature, a secret inclination and motion, towards love of others, which if it be not spent upon some one or a few, doth naturally spread itself towards many, and maketh men become humane and charitable; as it is seen sometime in friars. Nuptial love maketh mankind; friendly love perfecteth it; but wanton love corrupteth, and embaseth it.

Here, Bacon readily admits that love possesses a power which no man can control. Regardless of the will to give love, love will, itself, spread out among those around him.

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Stowers, Lorna. "What is the main theme of Francis Bacon's essay "Of Love"?" edited by eNotes Editorial, 24 Sep. 2011, https://www.enotes.com/topics/francis-bacon/questions/what-is-francis-bacon-s-essay-of-love-about-279851.

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

1. Preliminary Distinctions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Love as Valuing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Emotion Views

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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School Education /

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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How to Write an Essay About Love: Tips and Topic Ideas

If you’ve ever found yourself in a new romantic relationship, you probably know that there are three tiny words that can make or break it all: “I love you.”

Those three little words can wreak havoc on anyone.

Should you say, “I love you”? What if the person doesn’t love you back? What do you do if someone says “I love you”? Do you have to say the same? What if you’re in the friend zone and you want to tell the other person? Should you?

Will those simple words create a lifelong love affair, or will they ruin the friendship forever?

So many agonizing questions. So many emotions.

Thankfully, you don’t have to deal with any of that right now. Your only task is to write about love, not actually worry about the messy process of being in love.

Though writing about love can be just as messy (and sometimes just as painful) as being in love, I’m here to ease the pain by providing a few tips on how to write an essay about love.

I’ve also included topic ideas to get you started with an awesome essay (which will hopefully ensure you don’t end up broken-hearted when you get your essay back).

Tips for Writing an Essay About Love

If you’re writing an essay about love, it can be easy to just write gushing, flowery prose about someone you love, but these types of papers can turn into a long, rambling, cheesy mess.

To avoid this pitfall, follow the two important tips below.

Don’t be too sappy or too bitter

If you’re in love, everything can seem dreamy. It can feel like walking on air, like floating with the clouds, as sweet as strawberry cotton candy.

If you’ve just fallen out of love (or if someone has just fallen out of love with you ), it can be quite the opposite. It’s more like wallowing in a muddy pit of self-pity, like you’re enveloped in despair, like you’ll never climb out of the abyss that is your broken heart.

Yeah. It can be pretty melodramatic.

But you’ll sound more than a little sappy or bitter if you write about love in this way.

So how can you write about love if you don’t write about every gut-wrenching feeling you’ve ever had? Try looking at things a little more objectively .

No matter how awesome your new love is, no one is perfect. Include, or even focus on, something a little less sappy and a little less positive, like how your love’s habit of always checking Instagram at lunch drives you insane.

Writing about these characteristics makes your love a little more human and your relationship a little more realistic.

If you absolutely can’t write about your love (or former love) without spilling out every emotion, you might consider another angle for your essay about love.

Write about something other than romantic love

If your assignment states that you absolutely must write about romantic love, well then you must. But if your assignment guidelines are a little more open, then consider writing about another type of love.

Think back to when you were a child and how much you loved your teddy bear, truck, or blanket. Think about how you loved a superhero so much that you actually wanted to become that superhero.

Did your favorite toy help you through some tough childhood days? Did your superhero teach you something or even help shape you as an adult?

Consider the love you have for your parents, grandparents, siblings, or friends. Sure, sometimes these relationships can be love-hate relationships, but they certainly impact you and shape your views on the world.

And of course, what about the love you have for your pets? Pets are often considered family members (and, let’s face it, are sometimes even more lovable than actual family members).

The point here is that the topic of love is wide-reaching, so look for unique ways to approach the subject.

Stuck? Can’t think of anything original? Keep reading for a few topic ideas organized by essay type.

Click To Tweet

Topic Ideas for an Essay About Love

This list includes three different essay types and topic ideas for each type of essay. Keep in mind that many of these topics can work for a number of different types of papers, so feel free to rework the ideas to fit your assignment.

If you’re in need of even more inspiration, I’ve also linked to a few example papers.

Argumentative/persuasive essay topic ideas

When writing an argumentative essay or persuasive essay , your goal is to convince your audience . You might convince them through use of personal examples or use evidence from sources (depending on assignment requirements).

Here are a few topics to consider:

Is love a real emotion or merely a chemical reaction?
Are people happier when they’re in love?
Is being in love worth the trials and tribulations that come with it?
Can arranged marriages ultimately become love marriages?
Do teen romances affect future romantic relationships?

Descriptive essay topic ideas

Descriptive essays, of course, describe something or someone. Descriptive essays usually don’t focus on visuals alone, though. They include additional senses, and if you’re describing a person , you’ll likely describe personality and character traits.

Read How to Write a Descriptive Essay That Is Expressive and What Is Descriptive Writing, and How Can It Improve Your Essay? to learn more about writing a great descriptive essay.

Here are few options for things you could describe:

The love of your life: Move beyond physical description. Consider describing traits like her generosity, her kindness, or her quirky sense of humor.
What it feels like to be in love.
Your ideal love: Does your ideal love meet a specific physical description? Should your ideal love have specific personality characteristics? Are there traits that he or she should definitely not possess?
Your first love : Here, you might consider writing about how much you loved a toy as a child, the time you were in love with a celebrity, or your actual first crush or relationship.
How you viewed love as a child: You might consider how media influenced your views or how your parents’ relationship affected your views or your own relationships.

Literary analysis essay topic ideas

When you write a literary analysis , you need to do more than write about the plot . You need to take apart the literature and analyze it, bit by bit, to see what it all means.

In need of a quick refresher on writing an effective literary analysis? Check out How to Write a Literary Analysis That Works and 15 Literary Terms You Need to Know to Write Better Essays .

Here are a few topic ideas:

Explain various types of love portrayed in Romeo and Juliet.
Compare and contrast how different characters experience love. (See the example essay Women’s Experiences of Love in Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Wuthering Heights to see how one writer tackles the topic.)
Analyze the Romantic Era and love poetry .
Examine both love and jealousy in Othello.
Analyze love in dystopian literature .

Bonus tip: If you’re writing a compare and contrast essay , you might compare your love to someone in literature or compare your relationship to a famous literary couple.

An Everlasting Love

I’m sure there are at least of few of you who haven’t exactly fallen in love with writing essays and don’t love spending hours crafting the perfect phrase .

If you don’t, that’s quite all right.

Check out 5 Hacks to Make Writing an Essay Way More Fun . Hopefully, these tips will help get you through essay writing, so you can at least love the grade you get on your assignment.

Finished your essay but still aren’t in love with the finished product? Send your paper to the editors at Kibin . We love words, writing, and most of all, helping students craft the best essays possible.

Psst... 98% of Kibin users report better grades! Get inspiration from over 500,000 example essays .

About the Author

Susan M. Inez is a professor of English and writing goddess based out of the Northeast. In addition to a BA in English Education, an MA in Composition, and an MS in Education, Susan has 20 years of experience teaching courses on composition, writing in the professions, literature, and more. She also served as co-director of a campus writing center for 2 years.

topic ideas

Can One Really Define Love? Essay

To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
As a template for you assignment

What is love? It seems to be as baffling as the question “What is the meaning of life?” Liking and attraction seem to be of lesser degree when compared to love yet attraction is also closely associated with friendship. These are three concepts that mean lot of things to different people.

When it comes to love, one will encounter countless lines that attempt to define it. We all have heard that love is blind. Love is what makes the world go round. Love is all there is. Novels, poems, short stories and songs, all kinds of literature have immortalized love. Why? Plato said it right: At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet. Since the beginning of time, love has been there to propel people who fall in it to do crazy – or at least extraordinary things. Those who stumble into it go into a trance, seeing everything or everyone who stands against it as a threat to their happiness.

The dictionary says that love is the passionate devotion to another being but its essence must not be entirely confined to its lexical meaning. The New Testament alone exemplifies three types of love. The romantic, sexual love or eros , the love of friendship or phileo , and the unconditional love of the Divine or agape . While the first two may come easily for most people, agape does not because it is the unconditional love that is usually ascribed to the Divine. (Boyer, 1999).

Some hold that love is nothing but a physical response to another whom the agent feels physically attracted to. Physical determinists for example, consider love to be an extension of the chemical-biological constituents of the human creature and is explicable according to such processes. Others who consider love to be an aesthetic response hold that love is knowable through the emotional and conscious feeling that it provokes and it cannot be captured in rational or descriptive language but by metaphor or by music. The spiritualist vision of love incorporates mystical as well as traditional romantic notions of love, but rejects the behaviorist or physical determinist’s explanations. (Moseley, 2001).

Love may be defined in any way imaginable to man and may differ from one person to another. Hence, although each of us has his own way of looking at love, it can’t nevertheless be denied that love is universal and everyone, anywhere can feel it.

Levels of physical attractiveness can influence people in so many powerful ways. A person’s characteristics based on an individual’s perception of physical attractiveness can either add to one’s status or stigmatize them. Males and females have different cognitive schemas about the attractiveness of the opposite sex. This is because one’s gender determines the how the person will view their own attractiveness and how that person will view another one’s physical attractiveness. There are several theories that apply to physical attraction and one of this is the reinforcement theory. This means that when a person is paired with a stimulus that elicits a positive effect or reward, the result is increased liking of that person. One can begin to like a physically attractive person because he is pleasing to look at which is your own personal reward. Meanwhile, the attractive person also gets the benefits of being attractive because once a positive reward is associated with an individual; your liking of them will increase.

There are actually three factors that influence attraction. One of this is proximity. It seems that people tend to like those that are closer to them By this we mean, of greater proximity rather than those far from them. This is because if people are close to each other, they often see each other. Perhaps because they are able to nurture relationships with each other. It is difficult for people to cultivate relationships when they are far apart. (Social Psychology, Interpersonal Relations).

One other factor is physical attractiveness. According to Robert B Cialdini, an influential psychologist, physical attractiveness is an important component in degree of influence. He stipulates that physically attractive people have a huge social advantage in our culture. They are better liked, more persuasive, more frequently helped, and seen as possessing better personality traits and intellectual capabilities (Cialdini 1984). This is what some experts call the halo effect. This happens when positive characteristics of a person, spell the way a person is viewed by others (Henricks, Chris, et. al, 1998). There is the notion that people who are above average in physical attractiveness is also above average in other aspects as well.

Sometimes this can be a disadvantage too. The physically attractive people may think that things are being done for them just because they look good rather than their innate attributes. (Social Psychology, Interpersonal Relations).The third factor in attraction is similarity. People who are similar in tastes and likes tend to attract each other. When they find that they have a lot of commonalities, they tend to go together. It is like the saying that says, “birds of the same feather, flock together.” People are interested in establishing relationships with others who are similar to themselves. In this connection, if the goal of attraction is partnership, and apart of this partnership is sharing life with someone else, then it is wise to choose a partner with similar background and interests. The person who is similar with another one in terms of interests, then, there would be less problems since there is a meeting of minds. They will want to do the same activities and share the same hobbies as you do. (Social Psychology, Interpersonal Relations).

One way to get someone to like you is to like them. This action is called a reciprocity norm. This means that whatever is done to you should be done in return. The value of indebtedness comes into play here. When someone does something for us, often we feel indebted to that person, so the action is often reciprocated. Many great thinkers today find that whatever good feelings you give to others will return back to you. In the context of the reciprocity norm, it means that the way to get someone to like us is to like them first. What you give will come back to you a hundredfold.

Sternberg has a theory of love, which involves 3 dimensions: passion, intimacy, and commitment. He suggests that the combination of these dimensions can be used to classify different types of love or mutually good feelings. So, Sternberg is suggesting that not all loving relationships are created equal. I might suggest that true love – the love that creates a special and precious relationship between two people – is one that would have all 3 of Sternberg’s dimensions (Social Psychology, Interpersonal Relations).

Love in its many forms is a way of bringing joy into our lives, and we all treasure the moments of love that we know and have known. Loving is a way of giving, both to the person receiving and the one giving. Through loving, a person becomes closer to himself as he shares himself to another one and opens the way for sharing. The meaning of love is limitless because love is relative from person to person. How one would see it would be different from how another would. Love teaches us in different ways. It remains a mystery, a puzzle that must be left to work out on its own – or better yet, just left to retain its mystique.

Works-Cited List

Boyer, Janet. “What Is Love?” 1999. Web.

Moseley, Alex. “ Philosophy of Love ”. From The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2001. Web.

“Social Psychology, Interpersonal Relations,” 2008. Web.

Love as a Multi-Faceted Concept
Learner Difference and Learner Needs
Reciprocity in the Capitalist Workforce
Human Nature Aspects Producing Our Love of Cars
Jealousy as a Specific Emotion
Courage vs. Recklessness and Thrill-Seeking
Happiness: Health, Marriage, and Success
Death and Grief in “Tuesdays With Morrie” and “Dakota 38”
Chicago (A-D)
Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2021, September 29). Can One Really Define Love? https://ivypanda.com/essays/what-is-love/

"Can One Really Define Love?" IvyPanda , 29 Sept. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/what-is-love/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'Can One Really Define Love'. 29 September.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Can One Really Define Love?" September 29, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/what-is-love/.

1. IvyPanda . "Can One Really Define Love?" September 29, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/what-is-love/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Can One Really Define Love?" September 29, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/what-is-love/.

Essay on Love

Students are often asked to write an essay on Love in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Love

Understanding love.

Love is a powerful emotion, felt by all creatures. It’s a bond that connects us, making us care deeply for others. From family to friends, we experience love in different forms.

Types of Love

There are many types of love. We love our family unconditionally, our friends deeply, and our pets loyally. This shows love’s versatility.

The Power of Love

Love can bring happiness, comfort, and warmth. It can heal wounds and bring peace. The power of love is truly magical.

Love’s Challenges

Love isn’t always easy. It can bring pain and heartache. But overcoming these challenges strengthens love.

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250 Words Essay on Love

The essence of love.

Love, a universal sentiment, is a complex and multidimensional concept that has been the subject of countless discourses and studies. It is a powerful emotion, a binding force that transcends physicality and enters the realm of the spiritual.

The Multifaceted Nature of Love

Love is not monolithic; it is multifaceted and varies in intensity and expression. It can be romantic, platonic, familial, or self-love. Each type is vital and contributes to our overall well-being. Romantic love, for instance, is often characterized by passion and intimacy. Platonic love, on the other hand, is grounded in intellectual connection and shared interests.

The Transformative Power of Love

Love has the power to transform individuals and societies. It fosters empathy, kindness, and understanding, breaking down barriers and promoting unity. Love can heal wounds, mend broken hearts, and inspire acts of selflessness and sacrifice. It is the catalyst for human growth and the foundation of our humanity.

Despite its beauty, love is not without challenges. It can lead to heartbreak, disappointment, and despair. However, these trials are part of the journey of love, teaching us resilience and the value of vulnerability.

The Enduring Mystery of Love

In conclusion, love is a multifaceted, transformative, and enduring emotion that shapes our lives in profound and intricate ways. It is the essence of our humanity, a testament to our capacity for empathy, compassion, and connection.

500 Words Essay on Love

The concept of love.

Love, a four-letter word that encapsulates a plethora of emotions, is a universal concept that transcends all barriers. It is a deeply personal and subjective experience, yet it also serves as a communal bond that ties societies together. The complexity of love is such that it can be viewed from various perspectives, including biological, psychological, and philosophical.

Biological Perspective of Love

Psychological perspective of love, philosophical perspective of love.

Philosophically, love is often viewed as an existential need. It is seen as a path to self-discovery and personal growth. The philosopher Plato suggested that love is the pursuit of the whole, a quest for completeness. This idea is echoed in the concept of ‘soulmates’ prevalent in popular culture. Yet, love is not solely about finding the ‘missing piece’; it is also about selflessly caring for another, seeking their happiness, and accepting them unconditionally.

Love as a Social Construct

Conclusion: the complexity and importance of love.

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What is love?

Associate professor in Social Psychology / Relationship Science, Deakin University

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From songs and poems to novels and movies, romantic love is one of the most enduring subjects for artworks through the ages. But what about the science?

Historical, cultural and even evolutionary evidence suggests love existed during ancient times and across many parts of the world. Romantic love has been found to exist in 147 of 166 cultures looked at in one study.

The complexity of love has much to do with how people experience it differently and how it can change over time.

Read more: Friday essay: finding spaces for love

Like, love, or ‘in love’?

Psychological research over the past 50 years has investigated the differences between liking someone, loving someone and being “in love”.

Liking is described as having positive thoughts and feelings towards someone and finding that person’s company rewarding. We often also experience warmth and closeness towards the people we like. In some instances we choose to be emotionally intimate with these people.

When we love someone we experience the same positive thoughts and experiences as when we like a person. But we also experience a deep sense of care and commitment towards that person.

Being “ in love ” includes all the above but also involves feelings of sexual arousal and attraction. However, research into people’s own views of love suggests that not all love is the same.

Passionate vs companionate love

Romantic love consists of two types: passionate and companionate love. Most romantic relationships, whether they be heterosexual or same sex , involve both these parts.

Passionate love is what people typically consider being “in love”. It includes feelings of passion and an intense longing for someone, to the point they might obsessively think about wanting to be in their arms.

The second part is known as companionate love . It’s not felt as intensely, but it’s complex and connects feelings of emotional intimacy and commitment with a deep attachment toward the romantic partner.

How does love change over time?

Research looking at changes in romantic love over time typically finds that although passionate love starts high, it declines over the course of a relationship.

There are various reasons for this.

As partners learn more about each other and become more confident in the long-term future of the relationship, routines develop. The opportunities to experience novelty and excitement can also decline, as can the frequency of sexual activity . This can cause passionate love to subside.

Although a reduction in passionate love is not experienced by all couples, various studies report approximately 20-40% of couples experience this downturn. Of couples who have been married in excess of ten years, the steepest downturn is most likely to occur over the second decade .

Life events and transitions can also make it challenging to experience passion. People have competing responsibilities which affect their energy and limit the opportunities to foster passion. Parenthood is an example of this.

Read more: Love by design: when science meets sex, lust, attraction and attachment

In contrast, companionate love is typically found to increase over time.

Although research finds most romantic relationships consist of both passionate and companionate love, it’s the absence or reductions in companionate love, moreso than passionate love, that can negatively affect the longevity of a romantic relationship.

But what’s the point of love?

Love is an emotion that keeps people bonded and committed to one another. From an evolutionary psychology perspective, love evolved to keep the parents of children together long enough for them to survive and reach sexual maturity .

Read more: What is this thing called love?

The period of childhood is much longer for humans than other species. As offspring rely on adults for many years to survive and to develop the skills and abilities needed for successful living, love is especially important for humans.

Without love, it’s difficult to see how the human species could have evolved .

A biological foundation too

Not only is there an evolutionary foundation to love, love is rooted in biology. Neurophysiological studies into romantic love show that people who are in the throes of passionate love experience increased activation in brain regions associated with reward and pleasure.

Read more: Love lockdown: the pandemic has put pressure on many relationships, but here's how to tell if yours will survive

In fact, the brain regions activated are the same as those activated by cocaine.

These regions release chemicals such as oxytocin, vasopressin and dopamine, which produce feelings of happiness and euphoria that are also linked to sexual arousal and excitement.

Interestingly, these brain regions are not activated when thinking about non-romantic relationships such as friends. These findings tell us that liking someone is not the same as being in love with someone.

What’s your love style?

Research has found three primary styles of love. First coined by psychologist John Lee , the love styles are eros, ludus and storge. These styles include people’s beliefs and attitudes about love and act as a guide for how to approach romantic relationships.

This style of love refers to erotic love and is focused on physical attraction and engaging in sex, the quick development of strong and passionate feelings for another and intense intimacy.

This style involves being emotionally distant and often involves “game-playing”. It’s not surprising people who endorse this love style are unlikely to commit, feel comfortable ending relationships and often start a new relationship before ending the current one.

Storge is often regarded as a more mature form of love. Priority is given to having a relationship with a person who has similar interests, affection is openly expressed and there is less emphasis on physical attractiveness. People high on storge love are trusting of others and are not needy or dependent on others.

Or is a mixture more your style?

You may see yourself in more than one of these styles.

Evidence suggests some people possess a mixture of the three main love styles; these mixtures were labelled by Lee as mania, pragma and agape.

Read more: Darling, I love you ... from the bottom of my brain

Manic love includes intense feelings for a partner as well as worry about committing to the relationship. Pragmatic love involves making sensible relationship choices in finding a partner who will make a good companion and friend. Agape is a self-sacrificing love that is driven by a sense of duty and selflessness.

Why do you love the way you do?

A person’s love style has little to do with their genetics . Rather, it’s associated with the development of personality and a person’s past relationship experiences.

Some studies have found people who are high on dark traits, such as narcissism, psychopathy and machiavellianism, endorse more of a ludus or pragma love style.

Read more: There are six styles of love. Which one best describes you?

People who have an insecure attachment style , involving a high need for validation and preoccupation with relationship partners, endorse more mania love, while those who are uncomfortable with intimacy and closeness do not endorse eros love.

No matter the differences in the way love is experienced, one thing remains common for all: we as humans are social animals who have a deep fascination for it.

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Essay on Love

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Love, an emotion as old as humanity itself, has been a central theme in literature, philosophy, and psychology. It’s a complex and multifaceted feeling, often difficult to articulate. This essay aims to explore the concept of love, its various forms, implications, and expressions, providing a comprehensive understanding for students participating in essay writing competitions.

At its core, love is a profound and intense feeling of deep affection. It’s more than a mere emotion; it’s a force that has the power to transform lives. The ancient Greeks categorized love into several types, including ‘Eros’ (romantic love), ‘Philia’ (friendship), ‘Storge’ (family love), and ‘Agape’ (unconditional love). Each type signifies a different aspect of love, contributing to its complex nature.

The Psychological Perspective

Love, from a psychological standpoint, is a complex interplay of emotions, behaviors, and thoughts. Understanding love through the lens of psychology provides insights into why and how we form deep emotional bonds. Here are key psychological perspectives on love:

Attachment Theory

Secure Attachment : Individuals with secure attachment styles often have healthy, trusting, and long-lasting relationships. They are comfortable with intimacy and independence.
Anxious-Preoccupied Attachment : These individuals often feel insecure in their relationships and may exhibit clinginess and a deep fear of abandonment.
Dismissive-Avoidant Attachment : People with this style tend to maintain emotional distance in relationships, prioritizing independence and self-sufficiency over intimacy.
Fearful-Avoidant Attachment : This style is characterized by a desire for close relationships but a fear of getting hurt, leading to a complex push-and-pull behavior in love.

The Triangular Theory of Love

Developed by psychologist Robert Sternberg, this theory suggests that love comprises three components:

Intimacy : Involving feelings of closeness, connectedness, and bondedness.
Passion : Involves physical attraction and sexual consummation.
Commitment : The decision to remain with another and plans made with that person.

Different combinations of these elements form various types of love, such as romantic love (intimacy + passion), companionate love (intimacy + commitment), and consummate love (intimacy + passion + commitment).

The Biochemical Perspective

Neurotransmitters and Hormones : Love triggers a release of neurotransmitters and hormones like dopamine (associated with pleasure and reward), oxytocin (bonding and attachment), and serotonin (mood regulation).
The Brain in Love : Brain imaging studies show that being in love activates the brain’s reward system, particularly areas associated with motivation, reward, and addiction, explaining the intense focus on the loved one.

The Evolutionary Perspective

Reproductive Success : From an evolutionary perspective, love can be seen as a mechanism to promote mating, reproduction, and the nurturing of offspring.
Survival of the Offspring : The emotional bond between partners and with their children ensures the survival and protection of the offspring, a key aspect of evolutionary success.

Psychological Impact of Love

Mental Health Benefits : Love can have numerous benefits for mental health, including reduced stress and anxiety, and increased happiness and life satisfaction.
Love and Growth : Psychologically, love can foster personal growth, self-discovery, and the development of a more integrated sense of self.

Love in Literature and Art

A Universal Theme : Love has been a predominant theme in literature and art throughout history, portrayed in countless ways, from Shakespeare’s romantic plays to contemporary love songs.
Symbolism and Metaphors : Artists and writers use various symbols and metaphors to depict love, making it a rich subject for interpretation and analysis.

Love’s Social and Cultural Aspects

Cultural Variations : The expression and understanding of love vary significantly across different cultures, influenced by social norms and traditions.
Changing Dynamics : The concept of love has evolved over time, reflecting changes in societal attitudes towards relationships, marriage, and gender roles.

Personal Reflection and Application

Self-Love and Growth : Understanding love begins with self-love. It’s about respecting and accepting oneself, which is fundamental for healthy relationships.
Love as a Source of Inspiration : Love often drives creativity and motivation, inspiring individuals to achieve their goals and overcome challenges.

Love, in its essence, is a powerful and transformative emotion. It’s a universal experience, yet deeply personal. For students engaging in essay writing, delving into the topic of love offers an opportunity to explore a range of emotions, cultural perspectives, and philosophical questions. Whether it’s romantic love, familial love, or self-love, each form enriches our understanding of what it means to have deep, emotional connections. Love, indeed, is the cornerstone of human experience, influencing our actions, thoughts, and the very fabric of society.

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Romantic Symbols of Love and The Meaning Behind Them

Romantic symbols vary from culture to culture, here is why

Zuva Seven is a freelance writer and editor focused on the nuanced exploration of mental health, health, and wellness.

Verywell Mind / Stocksy

What Is Love?
The Most Widely Known Romantic Symbols
Cupid, the Harp, the Love Heart and the Root of Their Meaning as Romantic Symbols
How Did Romantic Symbols Come To Exist?

What the Unconscious Mind and Collective Unconscious Say About Romantic Symbolism

How Psychologists View Romantic Symbols Today

Let’s do a short experiment. Take a second and think about the first word that comes into your mind after reading these 5 words: heart, cupid, swans, rose, and doves. What did you think about?

Now, it would be improper to generalize, but the vast majority of people would likely see those above words and think of “love”, “ romance ” or even “ Valentine’s Day ”. The connotations of those words and their meaning when combined together are so ingrained within us that some would even assume that it is innate. But it’s not. Which begs the question: what is the root of their meaning?

Many psychologists and researchers of past and present have spent time proposing various theories on the meaning of love , its value, its saying power, its effect on our minds, and the genesis of romantic symbols. As a result, this article will explore a wide variety of classic symbols of love in order to discuss the root of their meaning, their history, and why they persist.

What Is Love?

The topic of “love” has unified the fascinations of individuals, philosophers, poets, scientists, writers, and even historians since the beginning of time. From the earliest civilizations to the modern era, people have used the tools at their disposal to better understand love’s significance and nature.

Love can be defined as the “desire to enter, maintain, or expand a close, connected, and ongoing relationship with another person”. But it can also be understood to be a set of emotions and behaviors that are characterized by engendering passion, intimacy , and commitment. It also results in expressions of care, closeness, and attraction. As well as many negative emotions such as jealousy, envy, and cause violence.

Nevertheless, love is a powerful concept that is viewed as a fundamental element of human existence, a unifying force, an essential attribute of everyday life, and our psychological drive.

The Most Widely Known Romantic Symbols

Romantic symbols can therefore be understood to be artificial signs (or signifiers) of love. These symbols are chosen and used to express love and in some cases used as evidence of “true love”.

Romantic symbols will vary from culture to culture, however, the most revered symbols tend to remain universal. Some examples of these include:

The rose or other flowers
Claddaugh ring
Infinity symbol

Some romantic symbols have been a part of the cultural language for centuries (such as the heart, cupid, or Celtic love knot). While some, like the diamond, are more modern additions.

Nevertheless, romantic symbols as a whole become signifiers of love through being imbued with so much meaning they become sacred. So much so that for some, these romantic symbols end up being regarded as the concept of love itself and a means for people to grasp its meaning.

Cupid, the Harp, the Love Heart and the Root of Their Meaning as Romantic Symbols

As mentioned above, some romantic symbols have been positioned as such for many years. Here are some of their histories and meanings.

Cupid can be understood to be the Roman counterpart of the Greek God Eros. He was one of the oldest gods in the pantheon, making his historic symbolism quite ancient.

“Eros, in fact, was a key part of the ancient Greek creation mythology, meaning that he was there almost at the beginning of time and before the Olympians,” says Dr. Brian Tierney, PHD, RCST, and The Somatic Doctor .

“Eros carried an arrow that even other gods feared because it could make them do very embarrassing things if they were shot by it, like falling head-over-heels with humans,” he finishes.

But how did Eros turn into the Cupid of modern times?

“As the Roman world became more Christianised, the images of Cupid and Eros started to resemble that of a cherub, to suit the new religion’s aesthetic, and Christianity’s fondness for purity over eroticism,” says Inbaal Honigman , celebrity psychic and spirituality expert.

“While Eros represented passionate love and fertility, the Romans transformed him into Cupid (Cupido in Latin), a mischievous, bow-wielding cherub. This puckish depiction highlighted romantic love’s unpredictability and ability to strike suddenly, catching us off guard,” says Dr. Daniel Glazer, Bsc, DclinPsy, and co-founder of US Therapy Rooms .

Daniel Glazer, Bsc, DclinPsy

While Eros represented passionate love and fertility, the Romans transformed him into Cupid (Cupido in Latin), a mischievous, bow-wielding cherub.

“Over time, Cupid further evolved into the popular image of a nude, winged infant representing desire’s innocence alongside its considerable power,” adds Glazer. As a result, later depictions of Cupid or Eros tended to show him as a playful infant, which is closely associated with Valentine’s day.

“It’s interesting to think about how a god of that magnitude got squished into a cute little cherub, but never forget that this symbol still carries an arrow that can make and break worlds,” says Tierney.

“The harp is an ancient instrument, and its antiquity speaks already to a dimension of its symbolism: a powerful music ‘lost’ in the mists of time that is found in romantic love ,” says Tierney.

As a symbol of love, it has existed in many different cultures, representing slightly different types of love. “For example, David plays the harp in the Bible, to soothe King Saul, making the harp a symbol of friendly love”, says Honigman. “In Celtic culture, the harp represents a ladder between heaven and earth, as a bridge for love.” “In Northern Europe, the harp’s strings represent the ascent to love’s higher levels,” she finishes.

As a result, music and love have always been connected, and the sounds of a harp are perfect for romantic music — with some mythos stating its music is enchanted. “[It is believed that] the harp inebriates the listener with overwhelming emotions of longing for mystical union with a partner, where the pain of mundane existence is left behind,” adds Tierney.

The Love Heart

The love heart is perhaps the most famous romantic symbol there is and due to its popularity, it holds a vast array of symbolism that has gone through many transformations over the ages.

The origins of its shape and the reasons it became known as the heart is not known and has been in contention, though an approximation has been given. “The ubiquitous heart symbol dates back over 1,500 years to ancient coins minted in the Syrian-Palestinian region. Scholars believe the stylized shape originated from an artistic depiction of the seed pod from a plant like the silphium, which was prized for its birth control and aphrodisiac properties,” says Glazer.

“The connection between these seedpods, fertility, and carnal desire created an early visual metaphor that evolved into our modern heart iconography. A 3rd-century Roman coin even portrayed a representation of Venus, the goddess of love, holding what appears to be a heart-shaped object,” he adds. Thus, despite its disputed origins, it has held a diverse history as a symbol.

“It has symbolized a variety of elements including courage, love, wholeness, intelligence, beauty, and even life itself,” says Tierney. “Its association with blood as a symbol of life itself probably traces back to some of the earliest sacrificial rites that were performed in religious practices long before the Indus Valley civilization,” he adds.

The heart has four chambers and as a carrier of the symbolism of the number four, the heart represents wholeness. What each region means is subject to debate, but contenders include the four cardinal virtues...or Plato’s goodness, truth, beauty, and justice.

These days, it is usually used to symbolize the romantic elements of love or “eros” love and it is discussed synonymously with this type of love all over the world. It is also a foundational feature of Valentine’s Day celebrations.

How Did Romantic Symbols Come To Exist?

Now that the history of romantic symbols and the roots of their meaning have been explored, it’s important to work out why they persist.

To do this, it is important to explore the history of the mind and why it works the way it does. Therefore, let’s introduce the two biggest contributors to theorizations about the mind, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.

Freud and the Unconscious Mind

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis . He was born in 1856 and he dedicated his life to changing the way people and medical practitioners thought and treated mental health conditions. As a result of his revolutionary works, and theories; he is often referred to as the “father of modern psychology”. But he is also known as a controversial figure.

One of Freud’s most enduring theories is the unconscious mind . In this work, he theorized that there are three levels of the mind: the preconscious, conscious , and unconscious . He believed that people’s behavior and personality were formed from the interaction between conflicting psychological forces that operated at these three different levels of awareness.

He likened these levels of the mind to an iceberg, with the top level being what is visible, the second level being visible, yet, under the water, and the last (yet bulk of the iceberg) being unseen, beneath it all. Thus, the preconscious mind could be understood as consisting of things that could be brought into the conscious mind. The second level, the conscious mind, contained all the memories, thoughts, feelings, and wishes people were aware of. Whereas the unconscious mind was likened to a reservoir of emotions, thoughts, and memories that lay outside of awareness.

At the time, this theory was quite revolutionary as it ran counter to previous beliefs about the mind. Behaviorism — a learning theory that states that all behaviors are acquired through conditioning that occurs through interaction with the environment — was the dominant school of thought in psychology. And behaviorist theorizations either denied the existence of the mind, due to the belief that for something to be real, it needs to be seen and observed. Or ignored it altogether, due to the belief that only observable behavior should be studied — with emotions, cognition, and mood being too subjective.

Freud’s work, therefore, re-legitimized the study of mental processes in scientific human psychology and it still informs ideas about the unconscious mind to this very day.

Jung and the Collective Unconscious

Carl Jung , on the other hand, was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology. He was born in 1875 and he worked with Freud in much of his early work, even affirming many of Freud’s teachings. However, as time went on their principles of psychology split and Jung founded the school of analytical psychology, developed the concept of the collective unconscious , Jungian archetypes , as well as introverted and extroverted personalities.

According to Jung, the collective unconscious was a segment of the deepest part of the unconscious mind that wasn’t shaped by personal experience but rather genetically inherited.

This part of the unconscious contains the inherited accumulation of primitive human experiences in the form of images or archetypes. These archetypes manifested themselves in myths, religion, dreams , and other cultural phenomena.

He believed that while the collective unconscious may have been the least accessible part of the unconscious mind, it still held a large role in shaping humanity. To further this, he likened the collective unconscious to a reservoir that stored all the knowledge and experiences of the human species. As a result, he believed the collective unconscious was responsible for various ingrained beliefs and modes of behavior, such as sexual behavior, spirituality, phobias, and instincts around life and death.

Like Freud, Jung believed that the unconscious mind played a significant role in affecting people’s conscious behavior. However, unlike him, Jung believed that collective unconsciousness modified these behaviors at a fundamental level.

Therefore, it can be ascertained that a Jungian view of romantic symbolism would state that the persistence of romantic symbols is due to them being a part of the collective unconsciousness. From here the inherited accumulation of love would form archetypes that are manifested symbolically. Thus, a Jungian view would attribute the universality of romantic symbols and their diverse historical transformations as evidence of this.

And as a result, they would claim that the reason people feel more romantic when thinking of romantic symbols is due to their meaning being the inherited accumulation of past human experiences. "They represent romantic truth archetypes that exist beyond any single individual," says Glazer.

Enduring romantic symbols hold power because they viscerally connect us to humankind’s collective emotional journey and the shared unconscious experiences around love that span cultures and epochs.

When it comes to dreams, both psychologists believed that dreams made the unconscious visible to the conscious mind and worked as a means of revealing human behavior. However, Freud viewed suppressed sexual desire as the main cause of psychological problems and dreams as the manifestation of this.

"From a Freudian lens, our powerful unconscious associations with these romantic emblems, rooted in sexuality and biology, help explain their enduring resonance. Even if we’re not consciously aware of it, archetypal symbols like hearts and winged cherubs stir primal feelings around courtship, desire, and intimacy. They serve as visual embodiments of our most instinctual emotional and physical yearnings," says Glazer.

Therefore, a Freudian view of romantic symbolism would state that romantic symbols occur due to the mind using symbols to represent powerful ideas. Thus, this view of symbols states that repressed urges and fears found in the unconscious mind are expressed in symbolic form in dreams. From here, these dreams would impact conscious behavior and lead to their expression in physicality.

As suppressed sexual desire is a trait found in all people, the permanence of romantic symbols and their universality is explained through this.

How Psychologists View Romantic Symbols Today

It is important to note that while modern psychology has certainly moved on from Freud and Jung’s theorizations, there is some evidence that suggests that the mind forms natural associations between specific symbols and the concepts they represent. However, more research is needed in order to work out if there truly is an “archetypal memory advantage.”

Nevertheless, it is evident that romantic symbols represent meaningful ideas, which cause powerful responses in people. “These symbols reflect the enormously powerful intensities in humans regarding love and will continue to carry meaning because love is a force that deeply shapes how people relate to relationships and the world,” says Tierney.

That said, while romantic symbols indeed hold sacred meaning, it is important not to confuse them with love itself. After all, symbols are mutable and evolve into different meanings across time periods and history. “Modern symbols refer mainly to the romantic aspects of love that are not held in balance with the more difficult aspects required to sustain love over time,” he finishes.

Therefore, it is vital to remember that symbols are just that, symbols.

Reis, H. T., & Aron, A. (2008). Love: What Is It, Why Does It Matter, and How Does It Operate? Perspectives on Psychological Science , 3 (1), 80–86. DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-6916.2008.00065.x

Hsin, Yi-Yeh. (2021). Loves me or loves me not? Passing through the forest of love symbols and unveiling its social nature. International Journal of Psychological Studies , 13 (2), 73. DOI: 10.5539/ijps.v13n2p73

Britannica. Sigmund Freud: Austrian psychoanalyst .

Yeung, A. W. K. (2021). Is the influence of Freud declining in psychology and psychiatry? A bibliometric analysis. Frontiers in Psychology , 12 , 631516. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.631516

Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences . Conscious, Preconscious, and Unconscious .

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Behaviorism .

Bargh, J. A. (2019). The modern unconscious. World Psychiatry , 18 (2), 225–226. DOI: 10.1002/wps.20625

Britannica. Carl Jung: Swiss psychologist .

American Psychological Association. Collective unconscious .

Falzeder, E. (2012). Freud and jung, freudians and jungians. Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche , 6 (3), 24–43. DOI: 10.1525/jung.2012.6.3.24

Sotirova-Kohli, M., Opwis, K., Roesler, C., Smith, S. M., Rosen, D. H., Vaid, J., & Djonov, V. (2013). Symbol/Meaning paired-associate recall: an “archetypal memory” advantage?. Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) , 3 (4), 541–561. DOI: 10.3390/bs3040541

By Zuva Seven Zuva Seven is a freelance writer, editor, and founder of An Injustice!—an intersectional publication based on Medium—who writes along the intersections of race, sexuality, mental health, and politics. She has a Diploma in Health Sciences from the University of Leeds and has written for several publications, including Business Insider, Refinery29, Black Ballad, Huffington Post, Stylist, ZORA, Greatist, and many more.

Entertainment
The Chilling Story Behind the Documentary <i>Tell Them You Love Me</i>

The Chilling Story Behind the Documentary Tell Them You Love Me

Rutgers University professor Anna Stubblefield, 46, of West Orange, is led in to Superior Court for her sentencing, in Newark, N.J., on Jan. 15, 2016.

Tell Them You Love Me, a documentary now streaming on Netflix from director Nick August-Perna, does not include a single interview with its main subject. The film is about the white, abled former professor Anna Stubblefield, who was accused of sexually assaulting Derrick Johnson, a nonspeaking Black man with cerebral palsy whom she says she taught to communicate via a method called facilitated communication (FC).

Johnson isn’t interviewed in the film, because his family has always understood that his diagnosed intellectual disability and lack of motor control meant he would never be able to communicate. At least, almost always—except for the period from 2009 to 2011, when they believed Johnson was communicating via FC, facilitated by Stubblefield.

The question of Johnson’s ability to communicate, and what he would have to say if he could, is at the core of Tell Them You Love Me. It’s a question refracted through the lenses of autonomy, ability, ableism, and race, and the film knows better than to try to offer an easy answer. August-Perna’s light touch as a filmmaker also does not offer an easy answer to the question posed by the court case it eventually depicts, of whether what happened between Anna and Derrick was sexual assault. The court, for its part, decided the answer was “yes”: Stubblefield was sentenced to two 12-year terms , to be served concurrently. She was released after two years when her initial conviction was overturned, and pled down to a lesser sentence.

Using interviews with Stubblefield and Johnson’s family members, FC expert Howard Shane, disabled anthropologist and professor Devva Kasnitz, and Anna Stubblefield herself, Tell Them You Love Me recounts the events that unfolded between spring of 2009, and the present day.

How Anna Stubblefield came into Derrick Johnson’s life

Before Stubblefield met Derrick Johnson, she met his brother, John. John Johnson was a PhD student at Rutgers University in 2009 when he signed up for Anna’s class on philosophy and disability studies. It was there that John learned about FC, from a video Anna showed depicting Sue Rubin , a woman who had been diagnosed with autism and an intellectual disability, learning to use the method to communicate and going on to become a scholar and activist. In FC, a person has their hand or arm physically supported by a facilitator as they point to letters on a page or keyboard, spelling out words. It’s designed for those who are unable to communicate via conventional methods due to a lack of speech and motor control. Watching Sue, John says he was reminded of his brother.

Derrick had experienced multiple seizures as an infant, and had subsequently been diagnosed with cerebral palsy and hydrocephalus. Medical records from Derrick’s infancy describe him as having “severe mental retardation” (language now obsolete in the healthcare field because it’s imprecise and stigmatizing). At one point in 2010, a message typed by Derrick and Anna via FC described Derrick as “...confined in my life [...] in a body that is not able to move the way that i would like.”

He attended a day program that helped him learn to walk, as well as his family’s day-to-day activities, from church services to beach trips. John says it was always clear to him that Derrick was “there”—smiling when he was happy, expressing frustration when he wasn’t, generally engaging with life. But he had never had any formal education.

John approached Stubblefield after class and asked to learn more about FC, imagining the possibilities it might hold for Derrick. Stubblefield, who grew up around FC because her mother used it in the work she did as a psychologist and aide for disabled people, offered to facilitate for Derrick herself. After she spoke with Derrick’s mother, Daisy Johnson, it was decided that Stubblefield would teach Derrick facilitated communication.

“She was gonna move mountains, and I accepted her at her word,” Daisy says in the documentary.

Why Derrick Johnson’s family reported Anna Stubblefield to the police

As he continued working with Stubblefield, Derrick appeared to be progressing rapidly. Although both Daisy and John tried to learn to facilitate for him as well, their efforts always proved fruitless. Nevertheless, Derrick seemed more and more interested in writing, reading, and learning. He enrolled in an African American Literature course, with Stubblefield facilitating, and a different facilitator helping with his essays. He also attended FC conferences where Stubblefield shared statements that he had written.

“It was like the porch lights went on,” says Daisy. “I felt very excited about it.”

As John approached the end of his PhD, there was something heartening about seeing Derrick seem to follow in his footsteps: “[I’m a] Black scholar, my baby brother who was developmentally disabled could be a Black scholar. I felt great.”

It makes sense that Derrick’s family would want this for him. It makes sense that any person would want this—the ability to make their needs and desires known—for themselves. But the needs and desires Derrick was allegedly sharing via FC became a source of contention between Stubblefield and the Johnsons.

During a car trip, Stubblefield said Derrick preferred classical music to the gospel station Daisy was playing. She told them he liked red wine better than beer, wanted to be a vegetarian, and hoped to move out of his mother’s house. John couldn’t help but note how much more aligned these preferences felt with Stubblefield’s identity as a white woman, than with the brother he knew and the larger context of their Black family.

Then, Stubblefield told John and Daisy she and Derrick were in love, that she was going to leave her husband for him, and that they had a sexual relationship. Confused, angry, and afraid for Derrick’s safety, the Johnsons reported Anna to the police. Prosecutors began investigating the allegations, and in 2013, Anna was charged with two counts of first degree aggravated sexual assault. The court ruled that no evidence related to FC would be considered, because the process was not recognized by science.

Stubblefield was convicted in October of 2015. Though she has since been released, she has not seen Derrick since 2011. Derrick still lives with Daisy and spends time with John and the rest of his family often. He no longer uses facilitated communication.

Facilitated communication in context

Proponents of FC insist it falls under the wider umbrella of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) methods, which the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) defines as “all of the ways that someone communicates besides talking.” ASHA has denounced FC , calling it “pseudoscientific” and “harmful.” There have been multiple cases of sexual abuse allegations made through facilitated communication which were later ruled false, as well as multiple instances of facilitators engaging in sexual activity with those they were facilitating for, claiming it was consensual. A significant number of studies debunk FC, seeming to show that facilitators are influencing the output deliberately or, more often, through the ideomotor effect (the same subconscious phenomenon that makes it seem like Ouija boards truly channel spirits).

The key difference between FC and AAC, underscoring the reasons FC is considered fraudulent, is the direct physical guidance the facilitator exerts while serving as a conduit for communication. There is simply too much potential for, and evidence of, interference.

It’s important to note that many nonspeaking or partially speaking disabled people use analog and digital letter boards and keyboards to communicate. Some, like autistic disability advocate Jordyn Zimmerman , spent years unable to communicate because they’d received intellectual disability diagnoses that made caretakers assume they had nothing to say. Nonspeaking people have long been subject to neglect and abuse, both as attempts to get them to speak, as as a consequence of the belief that if they’re incapable of speech they must be incapable of meaningful thought. As is often the case when it comes to adaptive technologies, gaining access to AAC can be life-changing.

Part of understanding the issues raised in Tell Them You Love Me is acknowledging how many people have been denied the right to communicate based on the ableist presumption that they couldn't. To abled people, it may seem like that Derrick Johnson could never have communicated or experienced sexual desire simply because he's visibly disabled. But just as Anna almost certainly, if inadvertently, superseded Derrick’s supposed voice with her own, abled viewers of Tell Them You Love Me could superimpose over the story a range of preconceived notions about disability, communication, and sex.

“It is a longstanding and unfortunate truth that disabled people are often seen as undesirable and even as unable to experience desire, love or care in the way that all individuals do. As disabled people we understand how false that notion is and how harmful it can be,” says journalist and disability rights advocate Keah Brown in an LA Times review of Alice Wong’s anthology “Disability Intimacy,” which further explores this topic.

Even if FC did tap into previously unrealized capacity for communication, the inherent potential for abuse is enough to call consent into question. How do you refuse anything, up to and including sex, when the person asking has a vested interest and control over your very ability to say “no”?

Ableism bolsters legislation that prioritizes helping disabled and chronically ill people die over helping them live. It leads to coerced and forced sterilization of disabled and chronically ill people, which a group of women with sickle cell anemia spoke out about just last month. It’s part of the impetus behind what disability rights activist Stella Young first called “inspiration porn,” which portrays disabled people as not merely “just as good” as everyone else but better —as though only by inspiring the rest of us can they justify their existence .

In an individualistic, standard-obsessed society, we struggle to believe that a life that requires profound reliance on others or deviates significantly from what’s considered “normal” is worthwhile and valuable. Often this devaluation makes disabled people and those who care about them vulnerable to being taken advantage of by people who claim to offer “fixes”—to catastrophic effects.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Family — Love

Essays on Love

Hook examples for love essays, anecdotal hook.

Love, as I have come to understand, is more than a feeling; it's a force that has shaped the course of my life. Join me on a journey through the depths and complexities of this powerful emotion.

Question Hook

What is the true nature of love? Is it an unexplainable chemistry between two people or a profound connection that transcends words? Exploring the concept of love opens the door to a world of wonder.

Quotation Hook

""Love is an endless act of forgiveness. Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom."" These words from Maya Angelou remind us of the transformative power of love and forgiveness in our lives.

Types of Love Hook

Love wears many faces, from romantic love to platonic, familial, and self-love. Delve into the different types of love and their unique qualities that define our human experience.

Love and Relationships Hook

What is the secret to a lasting and meaningful relationship? Explore the dynamics of love in the context of relationships and the role it plays in our connections with others.

The Science of Love Hook

Peek into the fascinating world of neurochemistry and psychology to uncover the science behind love. How do our brains and bodies respond to this extraordinary emotion?

Love's Impact on Art and Culture Hook

Throughout history, love has inspired countless works of art, music, and literature. Analyze the profound influence of love on our cultural expressions and creative endeavors.

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A Letter from The Girl Who Loves You

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More From Forbes

How not to write your college essay.

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If you are looking for the “secret formula” for writing a “winning” college essay, you have come to the wrong place. The reality is there is no silver bullet or strategy to write your way to an acceptance. There is not one topic or approach that will guarantee a favorable outcome.

At the end of the day, every admission office just wants to know more about you, what you value, and what excites you. They want to hear about your experiences through your own words and in your own voice. As you set out to write your essay, you will no doubt get input (both sought-after and unsolicited) on what to write. But how about what NOT to write? There are avoidable blunders that applicants frequently make in drafting their essays. I asked college admission leaders, who have read thousands of submissions, to share their thoughts.

Don’t Go In There

There is wide consensus on this first one, so before you call on your Jedi mind tricks or predictive analytics, listen to the voices of a diverse range of admission deans. Peter Hagan, executive director of admissions at Syracuse University, sums it up best, saying, “I would recommend that students try not to get inside of our heads. He adds, “Too often the focus is on what they think we want.”

Andy Strickler, dean of admission and financial aid at Connecticut College agrees, warning, “Do NOT get caught in the trap of trying to figure out what is going to impress the admission committee. You have NO idea who is going to read your essay and what is going to connect with them. So, don't try to guess that.” Victoria Romero, vice president for enrollment, at Scripps College adds, “Do not write about something you don’t care about.” She says, “I think students try to figure out what an admission officer wants to read, and the reality is the reader begins every next essay with no expectations about the content THEY want to read.” Chrystal Russell, dean of admission at Hampden-Sydney College, agrees, saying, “If you're not interested in writing it, we will not be interested when reading it.” Jay Jacobs, vice provost for enrollment management at the University of Vermont elaborates, advising. “Don’t try to make yourself sound any different than you are.” He says, “The number one goal for admission officers is to better understand the applicant, what they like to do, what they want to do, where they spend the majority of their time, and what makes them tick. If a student stays genuine to that, it will shine through and make an engaging and successful essay.”

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Don’t Be Artificial

The headlines about college admission are dominated by stories about artificial intelligence and the college essay. Let’s set some ground rules–to allow ChatGPT or some other tool to do your work is not only unethical, it is also unintelligent. The only worse mistake you could make is to let another human write your essay for you. Instead of preoccupying yourself with whether or not colleges are using AI detection software (most are not), spend your time focused on how best to express yourself authentically. Rick Clark is the executive director of strategic student success at Georgia Institute of Technology, one of the first institutions to clearly outline their AI policy for applicants. He says, “Much of a college application is devoted to lines, boxes, and numbers. Essays and supplements are the one place to establish connection, personality, and distinction. AI, in its current state, is terrible at all three.” He adds, “My hope is that students will use ChatGPT or other tools for brainstorming and to get started, but then move quickly into crafting an essay that will provide insight and value.”

Don’t Overdo It

Michael Stefanowicz, vice president for enrollment management at Landmark College says, “You can only cover so much detail about yourself in an admission essay, and a lot of students feel pressure to tell their life story or choose their most defining experience to date as an essay topic. Admission professionals know that you’re sharing just one part of your lived experience in the essay.” He adds, “Some of the favorite essays I’ve read have been episodic, reflecting on the way you’ve found meaning in a seemingly ordinary experience, advice you’ve lived out, a mistake you’ve learned from, or a special tradition in your life.” Gary Ross, vice president for admission and financial aid at Colgate University adds, “More than a few applicants each year craft essays that talk about the frustration and struggles they have experienced in identifying a topic for their college application essay. Presenting your college application essay as a smorgasbord of topics that ultimately landed on the cutting room floor does not give us much insight into an applicant.”

Don’t Believe In Magic

Jason Nevinger, senior director of admission at the University of Rochester warns, “Be skeptical of anyone or any company telling you, ‘This is the essay that got me into _____.’ There is no magic topic, approach, sentence structure, or prose that got any student into any institution ever.” Social media is littered with advertisements promising strategic essay help. Don’t waste your time, energy, or money trying to emulate a certain style, topic, or tone. Liz Cheron is chief executive officer for the Coalition for College and former assistant vice president of enrollment & dean of admissions at Northeastern University. She agrees with Nevinger, saying “Don't put pressure on yourself to find the perfect, slam dunk topic. The vast majority of college essays do exactly what they're supposed to do–they are well-written and tell the admission officer more about the student in that student's voice–and that can take many different forms.”

Don’t Over Recycle

Beatrice Atkinson-Myers, associate director of global recruitment at the University of California at Santa Cruz tells students, “Do not use the same response for each university; research and craft your essay to match the program at the university you are interested in studying. Don't waste time telling me things I can read elsewhere in your application. Use your essay to give the admissions officer insights into your motivations, interests, and thinking. Don't make your essay the kitchen sink, focus on one or two examples which demonstrate your depth and creativity.” Her UC colleague, Jim Rawlins, associate vice chancellor of enrollment management at the University of California at San Diego agrees, saying “Answer the question. Not doing so is the surest way we can tell you are simply giving us a snippet of something you actually wrote for a different purpose.”

Don’t Overedit

Emily Roper-Doten, vice president for undergraduate admissions and financial assistance at Clark University warns against “Too many editors!” She says, “Pick a couple of trusted folks to be your sounding board when considering topics and as readers once you have drafts. You don’t want too many voices in your essay to drown you out!” Scripps’ Romero agrees, suggesting, “Ask a good friend, someone you trust and knows you well, to read your essays.” She adds, “The goal is for the admission committee to get to know a little about you and who better to help you create that framework, than a good friend. This may not work for all students because of content but helps them understand it’s important to be themselves.” Whitney Soule, vice provost and dean of admissions at The University of Pennsylvania adds, “Avoid well-meaning editorial interference that might seem to polish your writing but actually takes your own personal ‘shine’ right out of the message.” She says, “As readers, we connect to applicants through their genuine tone and style. Considering editorial advice for flow and message is OK but hold on to the 'you' for what you want to say and how you want to say it.”

Don’t Get Showy

Palmer Muntz, senior regional admissions counselor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks cautions applicants, “Don’t be fancier than you are. You don’t need to put on airs.” He adds, “Yes, proofread your work for grammar and spelling, but be natural. Craft something you’d want to read yourself, which probably means keeping your paragraphs short, using familiar words, and writing in an active voice.” Connecticut College’s Strickler agrees, warning, “Don't try to be someone you are not. If you are not funny, don't try to write a funny essay. If you are not an intellectual, trying to write an intellectual essay is a bad idea.”

Anthony Jones, the vice president of enrollment management at Loyola University New Orleans offers a unique metaphor for thinking about the essay. He says, “In the new world of the hyper-fast college admission process, it's become easy to overlook the essential meaning of the college application. It's meant to reveal Y...O...U, the real you, not some phony digital avatar. Think of the essay as the essence of that voice but in analog. Like the completeness and authenticity captured in a vinyl record, the few lines you're given to explain your view should be a slow walk through unrestrained expression chock full of unapologetic nuances, crevices of emotion, and exactness about how you feel in the moment. Then, and only then, can you give the admissions officer an experience that makes them want to tune in and listen for more.”

Don’t Be A Downer

James Nondorf, vice president and dean of admissions and financial aid at The University of Chicago says, “Don’t be negative about other people, be appreciative of those who have supported you, and be excited about who you are and what you will bring to our campus!” He adds, “While admissions offices want smart students for our classrooms, we also want kind-hearted, caring, and joyous students who will add to our campus communities too.”

Don’t Pattern Match

Alan Ramirez is the dean of admission and financial aid at Sewanee, The University of the South. He explains, “A big concern I have is when students find themselves comparing their writing to other students or past applicants and transform their writing to be more like those individuals as a way to better their chances of offering a more-compelling essay.” He emphasizes that the result is that the “essay is no longer authentic nor the best representation of themselves and the whole point of the essay is lost. Their distinctive voice and viewpoint contribute to the range of voices in the incoming class, enhancing the diversity of perspectives we aim to achieve.” Ramirez simple tells students, “Be yourself, that’s what we want to see, plus there's no one else who can do it better than you!”

Don’t Feel Tied To A Topic

Jessica Ricker is the vice president for enrollment and dean of admissions and financial aid at Skidmore College. She says, “Sometimes students feel they must tell a story of grief or hardship, and then end up reliving that during the essay-writing process in ways that are emotionally detrimental. I encourage students to choose a topic they can reflect upon positively but recommend that if they choose a more challenging experience to write about, they avoid belaboring the details and instead focus on the outcome of that journey.” She adds, "They simply need to name it, frame its impact, and then help us as the reader understand how it has shaped their lens on life and their approach moving forward.”

Landmark College’s Stefanowicz adds, “A lot of students worry about how personal to get in sharing a part of their identity like your race or heritage (recalling last year’s Supreme Court case about race-conscious admissions), a learning difference or other disability, your religious values, LGBTQ identity…the list goes on.” He emphasizes, “This is always your choice, and your essay doesn’t have to be about a defining identity. But I encourage you to be fully yourself as you present yourself to colleges—because the college admission process is about finding a school where your whole self is welcome and you find a setting to flourish!”

Don’t Be Redundant

Hillen Grason Jr., dean of admission at Franklin & Marshall College, advises, “Don't repeat academic or co-curricular information that is easily identifiable within other parts of your application unless the topic is a core tenant of you as an individual.” He adds, “Use your essay, and other parts of your application, wisely. Your essay is the best way to convey who your authentic self is to the schools you apply. If you navigated a situation that led to a dip in your grades or co-curricular involvement, leverage the ‘additional information’ section of the application.

Thomas Marr is a regional manager of admissions for the Americas at The University of St Andrews in Scotland and points out that “Not all international schools use the main college essay as part of their assessment when reviewing student applications.” He says, “At the University of St Andrews, we focus on the supplemental essay and students should avoid the mistake of making the supplemental a repeat of their other essay. The supplemental (called the Personal Statement if using the UCAS application process) is to show the extent of their passion and enthusiasm for the subject/s to which they are applying and we expect about 75% of the content to cover this. They can use the remaining space to mention their interests outside of the classroom. Some students confuse passion for the school with passion for their subject; do not fall into that trap.”

A Few Final Don’ts

Don’t delay. Every college applicant I have ever worked with has wished they had started earlier. You can best avoid the pitfalls above if you give yourself the time and space to write a thoughtful essay and welcome feedback openly but cautiously. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself to be perfect . Do your best, share your voice, and stay true to who you are.

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Lindsey Vonn on Losing Her Mom to ALS: ‘Never Waste a Chance to Say I Love You’

The world-renowned alpine skier opens up for the first time about her mother’s death two years ago.

To be a successful athlete, you have to be good at compartmentalizing. You put pressure, expectation, and injury—all these things—into a box. Then you lock it up, and focus on what’s right in front of you. That’s also what I did after my mom was diagnosed with ALS in August 2021. When we were together, nothing else mattered. I was focused only on her. And when I wasn’t with her, I tried to be happy, find balance, and not stay in a depressive state. Some will probably say that compartmentalizing isn’t healthy, but for me it was the only way to survive.

None of us expected her to die as quickly as she did. One year later, she was gone. Grief is something that you learn to live with, but it doesn’t go away. My mom’s texts are still in my phone, and sometimes I go back through the inspirational quotes she sent to our group family chat. I also kept her journals and her books, including her Bible. Whenever I had a race, she’d read a certain passage and then write down on the page how I placed. Things like that are really special to me now.

My mom lost her own mother when she was 16, and she always used to say, “I talk to her, and when I’m gone, I want you to talk to me as if I’m still here.” So I do. Sometimes I’ll sit outside and talk to her. I think she’s there with me, and that helps.

It’s only when you see how quickly things slip away that you realize anything can happen at any moment. I now use every opportunity that I have to live my life to the fullest. I never waste a second. I keep perspective of how lucky I am.

My mom had been experiencing symptoms for a while. Because of a stroke she had while giving birth to me, she always had trouble with balance—but she was starting to fall more frequently. She fell down the stairs and broke her arm. On another occasion, she broke her hip. I was in Los Angeles when a doctor called to let us know she had ALS. My family and I weren’t expecting that news. We were in shock.

To be honest, I didn’t realize that the diagnosis was a death sentence. My initial thoughts were: What are our solutions? What treatments can she do? What medications are there? What’s the course of action? But then the doctor explained that there is no solution and there really is no medication that works.

It took us a while to figure out what to do next. We sat down and made a plan of all the things that my mom wanted to do before things would get physically impossible. Unfortunately, she was already in pretty bad shape and we didn’t end up doing many of them. I mean, she wanted to go skydiving!

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At first, the disease’s progression seemed relatively slow. Her balance was bad, but she was still walking. Swimming was the one physical activity she loved that she could still do. She swam almost every day. But it got to the point where she could no longer swim, because she felt like she was going to drown, which scared her.

By Thanksgiving, mom was using a wheelchair 75 percent of the time and it was becoming increasingly hard for her to do anything at all. She choked on her food and almost died several times, before undergoing surgery to get a permanent feeding tube. The surgery itself almost killed her, too, and she spent weeks recovering in the hospital.

She went into a 24-hour care unit, and from there, it was a quick decline. She couldn’t swallow or have anything in her mouth, not even a sip of water. She was eating protein shakes through her feeding tube three times a day, but still losing a ton of weight. She needed to sleep with a breathing machine, which she hated.

I wanted to take care of my mom and give her everything she wanted, but it was hard to manage. My role as the oldest child was to support her, but also to support my siblings and financially support the entire situation. The one thing that my mom didn’t want was for her illness to be a burden on anyone or for it to take away from anyone’s life.

Sometimes she pushed us away, because she didn’t want us to wait on her all the time. My mom was determined, smart, and an incredibly positive person, who was always looking out for others. She was one of those people that cared about everyone else above herself.

I tried to balance everything for the sake of my own mental health. My mom didn’t want me to miss any trips or opportunities that came up. Sometimes I look back and wonder, Should I have seen my mom and not gone on that trip ? But she pushed me to go.

I see people in similar situations, who are struggling or who don’t want to do anything for themselves, and it ends up being unhealthy for everyone. ALS tests you in more ways than I could ever have imagined. It’s hard to take the time for yourself, but if you let it consume you, it takes as much from you as it does from your loved one.

It’s okay to just sit in the emotion. That has also helped me. I try not to cry publicly too often, but when I’m home, I let myself cry and I don’t try to stop. I could be crying for a long time or for a minute, but acknowledging that I’m feeling a certain way helps me. Compartmentalizing to get through the day is one thing, but there also has to be time to unload your emotions. Those two things go hand in hand—the survival component and the actual grieving part of it.

If you let it consume you, it takes as much from you as it does from your loved one.”

In August 2022, we got a call from my mom’s hospice worker: She was struggling to catch her breath. When you have ALS, all of your muscles stop doing their job. The only solution to keep her alive at that point was with a breathing tube, and she didn’t want that. We’d had a couple of scares, but after that call I had a feeling that I had to get to her. Four hours after I arrived, my mom died. I still have nightmares about her final breath.

In the immediate aftermath of her passing, I felt relieved in some ways. At least she wasn’t in pain anymore. It had been so hard to watch her struggle every day. But after the funeral and those first few weeks, you realize that you don’t have a mother to call when you need help. I thought I’d asked her all the questions I wanted, but there’s always more. I was lonely.

Initially, my mom didn’t want anyone to know about her illness besides the people closest to her. But when she started to decline, she told me, “I want you to use your platform to bring awareness. Hopefully what I’m going through, no one else will have to go through.”

Obviously I can’t stop ALS, but I can follow my mom’s wishes, and that’s what I’m doing. It’s not easy being in the public eye and losing someone. Sometimes I feel like I just want everyone to know who my mom was and how amazing she was. I’ll post on Instagram, but then I think, No one wants to hear you crying . Sometimes I feel like maybe I’m sharing too much, or that no one wants to hear what I have to say, but I’m overwhelmingly emotionally drawn to telling my mom’s story and telling everyone how much I miss her.

I’ve always had a different outlook because of my mom’s stroke, and since she died I’ve relied on that perspective even more. Whenever I got hurt skiing, I would ask myself, If my mom can be as positive as she is, who am I to complain?

What I’ve learned is to never waste a chance to say I love you. Don’t waste a chance to give someone a hug. Don’t wait for an opportunity. Go do it. Go explore. Go live. Go try. All I can do is do what my mom did and just keep trying with a smile on my face. When I have children one day, I hope all the lessons I’ve learned in my life will come together. And hopefully I can raise good kids that my mom will be proud of.

Katie C Reilly is a freelance writer based in Oakland, CA. Her writing primarily focuses on women's health, mental health and parenting and has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times Magazine, Parents Magazine and Newsweek, among other publications.

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Derrick Johnson Now: Where Is Netflix's 'Tell Them You Love Me' Doc Subject Today?

Derrick Johnson in Tell Them You Love Me

After learning of the sexual assault against Derrick Johnson in Netflix's new Tell Them You Love Me documentary, many wonder where the victim and subject of the film is today.

Tell Them You Love Me was officially released on Netflix on June 14, allowing subscribers to see firsthand the sexual assault allegations against Rutgers University-Newark professor Anna Stubblefield after she engaged in a relationship with student Derrick Johnson, who has cerebral palsy.

The documentary followed the entire case, beginning with Johnson and Stubblefield's meeting in 2009 and ending with Stubblefield's conviction.

What Happened To Tell Them You Love Me's Derrick Johnson?

Derrick and Daisy Johnson in Tell Them You Love Me

Derrick Johnson, who suffers from cerebral palsy and is unable to talk or walk, met Rutgers University-Newark philosophy professor Anna Stubblefield in 2009 thanks to Johnson's brother, John. His brother was, at the time, a student of Stubblefield's.

Stubblefield learned of Derrick's condition through John, offering to help him with his communication skills.

After spending time with Stubblefield, Derrick Johnson eventually learned to communicate through a keyboard and computer screen and was even able to take a college class.

Stubblefield claimed that, after the two spent time together, they developed a consensual sexual relationship.

However, Johnson's mother, Daisy, a single mom and provider for Derrick, claimed that Derrick could not consent to a sexual relationship. She said he could not have used the keyboard to communicate unless Stubblefield manipulated his hands and controlled what he typed.

At one point, Stubblefield told Derrick's mother and brother that the two were in love and that Derrick's interests aligned much more with hers than his family's.

She claimed that she would leave her husband and allow Derrick to move in with her, and that is when the Johnsons finally reported Stubblefield to authorities.

After an investigation, Stubblefield was charged with two counts of aggravated sexual assault. The Rutgers professor was then put on trial, found guilty by a jury of both counts, and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

However, she was released after two years after her original conviction was overturned, leading Stubblefield to plead down to a lesser sentence.

Where Is Derrick Johnson Now?

According to The Telegraph , Derrick Johnson now lives with his mother, Daisy. He attends adult day care where he participates in different communication exercises but not the same method that was reportedly taught to him by Stubblefield.

Tell Them You Love Me director Nick August-Perna described Johnson as "full of energy" and someone "who smiles a lot:"

"[He is someone who is] full of energy, who loves his food, who smiles a lot and who is able to both accept love and offer it."

As if Daisy Johnson's bravery in standing up and speaking out for her son didn't make her admirable enough, she was recently recognized for her 50 years of service to NJ Transit, where she has worked since she was only 17.

It is also important to mention how much of a trailblazer Daisy has been in the workplace.

To elaborate, Daisy was once fired for taking maternity leave. So she took Transport of New Jersey (a variation of NJ Transit) to court in an arbitration case and won, ensuring that women (especially black women) could take maternity leave and not have to worry about being let go or fired for doing so.

When Daisy was recognized for her 50 years of service, her son, John, gave a heartfelt speech about his mother to the board members, talking about Derrick as well.

As shared by NJ.com , he explained that it is "fitting that [his] mom has been" helping others for 50 years "reach their destinations" since she continuously helps Derrick reach his own:

"It’s fitting that my mom has been in this business 50 years, helping people reach their destinations."

It was also explained how it was difficult for Daisy at times to make sure Derrick received proper care while also trying to work herself. Sometimes, the school bus would arrive late to pick Derrick up, causing her to be late for work.

However, fortunately, one of Daisy's supervisors understood her situation and allowed her more time to get to work.

Speaking of John, it is also important for people to realize his accomplishments.

For example, he is now an assistant professor of history at St. Peter's University and has a Ph.D. from Rutgers University-Newark.

The university where John currently works is in Irving, New Jersey, which is close to Irving where Daisy and Derrick live, meaning that he gets to spend time with his family.

Tell Them You Love Me is available to stream on Netflix.

Read more about other Netflix documentaries:

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Guest Essay

Biden’s Love for His Son Is Beautiful — and It Hits Home for Me

President Biden hugging his son Hunter, seen from the rear.

By David Sheff

Mr. Sheff is the author of “Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction.”

When my son Nic was born, I was like other parents who hope that their children will be healthy and happy. But when Nic became addicted to heroin and methamphetamine as a teenager, my dreams shifted. I wanted him to get clean and stay clean. As his drug problem escalated — he used potentially lethal drugs in dangerous combinations for a decade — my hope for him became very simple: just to survive.

He did, and my gratitude for his life is at the heart of our relationship now. He is here. The past, the fallout, are all secondary.

I’ve been thinking about another father of a son with a severe substance-use disorder; a son who survived and is now in recovery. Americans have strong opinions about President Biden and his son Hunter, and that’s understandable: The president is asking us to consider him for re-election, and Hunter was recently found guilty of three felony counts of lying on a federal firearms application in 2018. It is a father-son relationship unlike any that American voters have grappled with.

But much of the discourse around Joe and Hunter Biden seems so wrongheaded to me. That’s because it reflects a profound misunderstanding of the relationship many parents have with children with substance-use disorders.

Hunter has been referred to as a “ headache ” for his father. Some commentary suggests he is paying a “ political price ” for Hunter’s problems; the father is “ too deferential ” to the son.

In the political arena, all this is fair game. But when Americans consider President Biden’s thoughts and feelings toward his son, they should not assume he is dwelling on whether their interests are in conflict or what a political headache Hunter is. Hunter hasn’t made it easy for his father — but people with substance-use disorders don’t generally make it easy for their loved ones. That doesn’t mean parents of children in addiction see them only in those terms.

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