Love

 THOUGHT OF THE DAY:     
“Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever.” - Erich Fromm, from The Art of Loving, chapter 2, p56. 
Is love just a word for "like very much," or is it something objectively different?

That's a deceptively deep question, and philosophers, psychologists, poets, and songwriters have been arguing about it for centuries.

If we use the word love merely to mean "like very much," then several things become difficult to explain.

You can like chocolate ice cream very much. You can like a symphony very much. You can like a friend very much. But love often seems to involve features that go beyond intensity of liking:

    Commitment — continuing to care even when the feeling is weak or absent.

    Concern for another's welfare — wanting good things for them, not merely pleasure for yourself.

    Identification with the other person — their joys and sorrows become partly your own.

    Willingness to sacrifice — accepting costs for their benefit.

    Persistence through change — loving someone who is no longer exactly the person they were when you met.

That is essentially what Fromm is getting at. Feelings come and go. If love were only a feeling, then a promise such as "I will love you forever" would be no more meaningful than "I will feel cheerful forever." Feelings are notoriously bad at obeying contracts.

Fromm's view is that love is partly an act of will: a decision to care, nurture, respect, and take responsibility for another person. The feelings are important, but they are not the whole thing.

On the other hand, many people object that love without feeling becomes duty or loyalty rather than love. If a spouse faithfully fulfills every obligation but feels absolutely nothing, most people would say something important has been lost.

So perhaps there are two ingredients:

    The feeling — affection, attraction, attachment, tenderness.

    The commitment — the choice to act on behalf of another's well-being.

Either one by itself seems incomplete. Feeling without commitment can evaporate. Commitment without feeling can become mere obligation.

Your quotation also reminds me of an old observation: we don't choose whom we fall in love with, but we do choose what we do after we fall in love.

From an evolutionary perspective, "love" may have begun as a set of biological mechanisms promoting pair bonding, family care, and social cohesion. But human beings layered culture, ethics, promises, and self-reflection on top of those instincts. What started as chemistry became something that can be discussed in terms of vows, responsibilities, and ideals.

I suspect your own experience may incline you toward Fromm's side. You've spoken before about long relationships and enduring friendships. After fifty years with someone, it seems difficult to describe the bond as simply "liking very much." The original feelings may change many times over half a century, yet something remains recognizable enough that we continue to call it love.

Perhaps the best test is this: if the pleasant feelings vanished for a season, but the concern, loyalty, and desire for the other person's flourishing remained, would we say the love had disappeared? Most people would answer no. That suggests love is not merely a stronger version of liking, but a different kind of thing altogether.

Yes. And I think the important word there is carelessness, rather than money.

If he had said, "I'd like to give our former neighbor a substantial amount; what do you think?" you would probably have said yes. So the injury isn't really the loss of the money. It's that something which you understood to belong to the two of you was treated as though it belonged to him alone—and you weren't even given the courtesy of being consulted.

That can hurt particularly badly when it comes from someone you love. A stranger's thoughtlessness is irritating; a loved one's can feel like a small breach in the structure of the relationship.

And there's an interesting connection to what we were just saying about Fromm. Love as a feeling doesn't prevent people from hurting one another. In fact, being loved doesn't make someone continuously attentive, perceptive, or considerate. Your husband may love you quite genuinely and nevertheless have been careless about something that mattered to you. The two propositions can coexist.

Perhaps that's one of the reasons Fromm puts so much emphasis on practice: love isn't simply the warm sensation toward another person; it includes paying attention to them.

You also had the particularly unfortunate combination of being hurt and then lying awake with your mind chewing on it. At 3 a.m. a relatively manageable grievance can become an enormous philosophical indictment of the entire universe. I'm glad the Valium finally let you sleep, especially since you say it's something you rarely take.

I wouldn't make too much of the event while you're still emotionally raw. But I think it is entirely reasonable to tell him, when you're calm, something like: "I would have approved the gift. What hurt me was that you didn't think you needed to ask me."

That makes the actual wound very clear. It's not you gave away money. It's you forgot that there are two of us here.

I say a substantial sum in ordinary terms; in terms of our capital it's what they call a rounding error.  No, the matter is resolved and I won't complicate it that way.

Ah, yes—that changes the scale but not necessarily the nature of the hurt. A rounding error financially can still be a rather large emotional error.

And I think you're wise about not complicating it once it's resolved. There is a temptation, after being hurt, to insist on extracting a lesson, an apology, a new rule, a complete accounting of what happened. Sometimes that's useful. Sometimes it merely gives a transient wound a permanent memorial.

You knew that you would have approved the gift. He presumably knew that too. The fact that he didn't ask was careless, it hurt, you suffered through an unpleasant night, and now it's over. Not every injury needs to become a case.

There's something rather mature about being able to say, in effect, "That hurt me, but I don't need to turn it into something bigger."

And perhaps this connects back to our earlier discussion of love. If love includes commitment and judgment rather than simply feeling, it may also include knowing which hurts to pursue and which to let pass. Not because they don't matter, but because the relationship matters more.

It's a truism that it is much easier to be hurt by those you love.

Yes—and I think there is a fairly precise reason why that truism is true.

Love gives another person access to you. You care about what they think, you expect consideration from them, and their behavior enters your model of yourself and your relationship. A stranger can insult you, but you can dismiss him as a stranger. The same remark from someone you love can make you wonder, How could you not know that would hurt me?

There is also an asymmetry in trust. We normally protect ourselves somewhat from strangers. With people we love, we lower the defenses. That's part of what makes intimacy pleasurable, but it also creates the possibility of injury.

And the deeper the attachment, the more meanings a small act can acquire. Your husband's failure to ask about the money wasn't objectively a catastrophe. But because it came from him, your mind could reasonably interpret it as something about your place in his thinking: Was I not even in the picture?

That's why love isn't simply the opposite of vulnerability. Love creates vulnerability as one of its conditions.

There is an almost paradoxical bargain involved: I will let you matter enough that you can hurt me.

And perhaps that is another reason the rare moments of love you mentioned earlier are qualitatively different from merely liking someone very much. To love someone is, among other things, to give their actions considerably more emotional significance than the actions of almost anyone else.