How Can We Define Love?
How is love different from liking or friendship?
From a philosophical perspective, love has a few characteristics that distinguish it from other relationships. Love is characterised by:
- Exclusivity
- Constancy
- Reciprocity
- Uniqueness, and
- Irrepleaceability of the beloved. (Soble (1990): “The Structure of Love”)
If you like reading about philosophy, here's a free, weekly newsletter with articles just like this one: Send it to me!
We all like things. I might like chocolate cookies, but is that liking proper love? I might even say that I “love” chocolate cookies, but do I really mean that? Do we love a dish or a friend in the same way as we love a lover?
How can we define love in a way that excludes liking and friendships yet captures what is unique to human love?
From a philosophical perspective, love has a few characteristics that distinguish it from other relationships. Love is characterised by:
- Exclusivity
- Constancy
- Reciprocity
- Uniqueness, and
- Irrepleaceability of the beloved. (Soble (1990): “The Structure of Love”)
If you’d like to read more about the fascinating philosophy of love, there is no better book to begin than Soble’s. Please note that this is an affiliate link. If you buy through this link, Daily Philosophy will earn a small commission at no cost to you. Thanks!
Of course, there are many different kinds of love, and this way of defining love would apply only to a particular type of romantic love.
Exclusivity means that one’s love cannot be directed towards multiple objects. This is only true of monogamous romantic love. It is not true of all romantic relationships (there are many examples of groups of three lovers, who state that they feel genuine love towards all members of the trio), and it is certainly also not true of, say, Christian love. Loving one beggar does not exclude the possibility of us loving another beggar too. Quite the opposite: Christian love is explicitly inclusive, and is thought to be best if it excludes no one.
Constancy means that I cannot truly love one person today and another tomorrow. My love, in order to be real love, must stay constant for a while, directed towards the same person. This is not true of my love for chocolate cookies. I can love cookies today and a steak tomorrow, and nobody would doubt my love of cookies just because I also happen to “love” a steak from time to time. This shows that our “love” for cookies and steaks is of a different quality, and is better described as liking rather than loving. When we attempt to define love between human lovers, constancy seems to be one of the necessary qualities.
Reciprocity means that true love has to be mutual. If I madly love someone who doesn’t love me back, then my love is deficient. In the worst case, I’m a stalker or a creep. Reciprocity and constancy are also features of friendships, while exclusivity is typical to romantic love, but is not required for friendships.
Uniqueness means that I must perceive my lover as unique, not only as one person among many. Uniqueness must certainly be part of how we define love. If I say “well, I do love my wife, but I could equally well love that other woman over there instead,” then my love to my wife would be somehow wrong. This can be a theoretical problem since people are generally not terribly unique. Often people resemble each other, not only externally, but also in respect to their ideas, imagination, use of language, humour, aspirations and general aspects of their biography – in short: we’re all more or less similar (at least within one society). So how to explain why I consider my wife to be unique? Still, somehow we must manage that, otherwise our love looks deficient.
And finally, together with the belief in the uniqueness of the beloved goes the belief in their irreplaceability. Since my beloved is unique, I cannot find any other person to fully replace them. I certainly can have another relationship at a later time (perhaps if my first lover leaves me or dies), but I would not consider the second lover to be a full “replacement” for the first one. Rather, I would describe this as an entirely different, second experience, not related to the first and not replacing it.
So that’s how philosophers generally would go about defining love.
What do you think? Do you agree with Soble? Leave a comment!
In this mini-series of posts, we trace the history of the concept of love from Plato and Aristotle through the Christian world to the Desert Fathers.
