(In the following I am talking about “love” towards human beings only, not love of other things (such as music or food or God).)
A pet topic of mine is that the term love is so ambiguous as to be nigh-useless in rational discourse. But whenever I bring up the topic, people tend to dismiss and ignore it. Let us see if Less Wrong will do likewise.
Modern western culture (and maybe also other cultures) is obsessed with the ideal of love. Love is pretty much by definition the best thing in life which everyone should strive for.
The problem is that people don’t agree on what love means.
Everyone will acknowledge that love can mean different things. But my claim is that most people do not truly understand this, even though they think they do. When this is brought up, people will say “oh yes, love can mean different things”, but they will go on to act and talk as though love refers to something well-defined.
I would argue that many people treat love as a semantic stop sign. Love is by definition good and beautiful and virtuous and thus needs no further analysis. I have even heard people say that love is too “big” and too ineffable to analyze or define. In my opinion this is a problem, because people do use the term in “rational” discourse.
One might try to resolve the problem by arguing that there are different “kinds” of love:
Altruism.
Platonic love (eg towards friends or children).
Romantic and/or sexual love.
Romantic and/or sexual infatuation.
This helps a bit, but it still does not resolve the problem. Altruism is relatively well-defined, but the other two are still nebulous concepts.
I think a different approach is better. As I see it, the concept of love is garbled mishmash of at least 3 different things:
Love as giving: The drive to protect someone and do stuff for them. (Altruism is a variant of this.)
Love as craving: The desire to be with or “have” someone (sexually or not).
Love as euphoria: The pleasant feeling/emotion that you may sometimes experience when interacting with someone you “love”.
These 3 things can co-occur and correlate, but they are clearly distinct things, and it is a mistake to shoehorn them into being 3 “aspects” of the same thing.
Love is usually treated as a binary thing: Either you “love” someone or you don’t. This is another misconception that gives rise to bad reasoning. The above 3 things are obviously gradual, not binary, and the same goes for pretty much all attributes that people commonly associate with love.
People will often try to distinguish between “true love” and “not true love”, or between “love”, “lust” and “crushes”. But there is no clear consensus. Most notably, people don’t agree on whether “true love” has a craving component or not.
(One could of course argue that the various “kinds” of love exist on a continuum. Sure. But all sorts of things can be arranged into continua; this does not mean that it is useful to view them as variants of the same thing.)
This appears all over the place in popular culture, old and new. For a slightly older example, look at Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde. It is generally agreed that the story of the opera revolves around love, but the love shown in the opera is obviously a destructive obsession and not at all a good thing. Yet people who describe Tristan and Isolde as being about love will—in the same breath—insist that love is something beautiful and virtuous. (I suspect that Wagner himself was a prime example of what I am complaining about. His work has a clear overarching theme of love, but it remains highly muddled and ambiguous.)
It is also worth noting that love can be used as virtue signalling. People will say things like “I love my wife, but… [complaint]”. In such a context, it is not clear whether the profession of love is supposed to convey any rational meaning.
People use the term love in discussions of relationship and family matters all the time, and that causes misunderstandings and problems. As a consequence, I avoid the term in rational discourse. When I say “I love you” to my wife, I don’t intend this as a statement of fact with any well-defined meaning, but as an emotional signal like a kiss or hug. If anyone asks me “do you love your wife?” I will ask them what exactly they mean by that.
Or am I wrong?
I have argued that love refers to a range of things, some of which are completely unrelated. They exist at opposite ends of a contrived and unnatural continuum.
Or am I wrong? Do all these things which people call love genuinely share something important in common? Is there some “feeling of love” that underlies them all?
From my own inner life I do not recognize a singular “feeling of love”. I recognize several different feelings: Of appreciation, of protectiveness, of longing, of infatuation, of empathy-with-suffering. But not a “feeling of love”.
I have reason to believe that I am a bit of a psychological outlier. I have some degree of chronic anhedonia, and I might have a mild autism spectrum disorder.
Am I the odd one out? Does there exist a clear “feeling of love” that most people recognize?
Alternatively, are people more rational than I give them credit for? Is this confusion all in my head? When people talk about love, is it actually clear to everyone what they are talking about?
Or am I right and most people are confused?
Most people aren’t confused, because they’re not trying to be clear and rational. They are definitely confusing to people who prefer specificity and operationally useful descriptions of experiences.
It is used to mean a very wide range of positive feelings, and should generally be taken as poetry rather than communication. Another framing is that the ambiguity makes it very useful for signaling affection and value, without being particularly binding in specific promises.
Which is NOT to say it isn’t “real”. Affection, caring, enjoyment, and willingness-to-sacrifice-for someone are all things that many individuals experience for other individuals. The exact thresholds and mix of qualia that gets described as “love” varies widely, but the underlying feelings seem near-universal.
Are you saying that most people only use term love as “poetry” and never when they are trying to be clear? I think this is a strong over-generalization.
Of course people are not always trying to be clear, but the concept of love also appears often when people are doing their best to be clear. In my experience, people will often say things like “is that really love?” and “that’s not true love”.
When trying to be clear, people will double down and keep talking about love. They will semi-silently insist on their unspoken intuition about what it means instead of stepping back and trying to clearly define their terms.
This kind of confusion is not unique to love, of course. But IMO it happens much more often than people realize.
I think most people have a different conception of what “trying to be clear” means than I do. They can talk abut true love or what’s “really” love, but the very few who actually try to get an operational definition across usually start by tabooing “love” when trying to communicate specific beliefs and experiences (though still using it in more casual, romantic, or poetic settings).
I recommend this as a technique when trying to draw out clarity from someone as well. Don’t make them define terms, most people aren’t great at the activity of generalizing and re-specifying that language is built on. Instead, ask them do describe what they mean in this context, by asking for statements that do not use “love”.
Note: this rarely leads to kissing. If that’s your goal, I’d advise to delay semantic exploration for another time.
I can’t comment on whether people are confused about what “love” means as I’m not sufficiently deep in love discourse to say. But one thing I’m noticing about your characterizations of love is that they are missing an indexical element to the point of approaching sollipsism.
Romance and sexuality makes for a good example. Consider the following scenarios:
A woman is on a date with a man, which she enjoys until she sees that his home is a dump.
A teenager has a crush on a celebrity, with elaborate daydreams about how cool the celebrity is, not realizing how much of this is a facade created for entertainment.
A man visits a prostitute and feels excited as he causes her to orgasm, not realizing that she fakes it for the business.
In all of these cases, one could say that there is a disconnect between what people think about their object of attraction, versus what that object of attraction really is like.
A Bayesian of parsing this is that their feelings of attraction represents an estimate of how well they fit together, but that this estimate differs from how well they really fit together. The actual fit seems important to think and talk about, and one should probably coin a short word for it—or at least for the coincidence between actual and estimated fit. This could be called “true love”.
You are right, most people are confused.
I’ve spent quite a lot of time on relationship theory. It seems pretty clear that “love” means very different things in different contexts, and that different people interpret it differently. It also seems clear that this causes a lot of problems for people. I’d say that means they are confused. I am neurotypical, to at least a first approximation, and I’m pretty sure that most neurotypical people would benefit by understanding their emotions a good bit better than they do on average.
Yes, context does a lot of work. But when you’re trying to talk or think about your relationships, it’s useful to understand and communicate what type of love you’re talking about with more accuracy than intuition usually provides.
Your breakdown of types of love is a pretty good start. The Greeks had at least their four words for love, but the important subtypes seem more numerous and nuanced than four words account for.
This is also the case with other emotions; it’s hard to understand them, there’s a lot of variety and nuance, but understanding them is pretty worthwhile.
“Love” is just a broad category of feelings. In English, if you need to be specific, there are specifiers, but most of the time context is enough. For instance, if I say, “I love my nephew,” you’re probably not thinking that I have romantic feelings towards him, but you might think that his presence makes me happy or that I’d be willing to sacrifice more for his benefit than typical for humans in general.
Are you going to have a perfect model of my feelings? No. You can never be specific enough for that. But you’ll likely be 9⁄10 right. Usually, that’s good enough.
You seem to have arrived at the classical concept of “the four loves”, referring to the four Greek words commonly translated as “love” in English:
στοργή :: natural, familial affinity
φιλία :: interest/enjoyment as coming from a free & rational agent
ἔρως :: craving for unity with what is “beloved”
ἀγάπη :: “to will the good of the other”
Somewhere I have old notes that link them together in a reasonable way, but I would have to dig that up later, if you would be interested.
Worth noting that English does try to get at these distinctions, but often by using phrases or context:
motherly love, fatherly love, brotherly love, sisterly love, etc.
“I love [X]” where X is clearly a non-person so there’s no real confusion in context
“I love them” vs. “I’m in love with them”
“God/Jesus/etc. loves me” is clear to people who feel this that it’s by analogy to the simple feeling of love, like one feels loved by one’s parent when a small child
I basically reject the premise of the OP that there’s any real confusion when “love” is read on context (except in cases of intentional ambiguity). It’s only lacking context that “love” seems like it’s a confused concept.
I like your “giving / craving / euphoria” classification.
I wonder whether the debates about love are often so confused precisely because in human mind the feelings are not clearly separated. We are prone to the halo effect; for example, if someone is sexually attractive, we might instinctively assume that they are probably also good, smart, etc. (Then some people get burned, and sometimes they overcompensate by making the opposite assumptions.)
But sometimes there are genuine effects of different kind happening all at the same time. For example, I may feel good when I have some kind of (non-sexual) interaction with someone… and at the same time, I may find them sexually attractive (but perhaps I have never communicated this aspect to them, and I have no idea whether they feel the same way about me)… and at the same time, I may feel altruistic towards them. These things happening together have a different flavor than if they happened separately.
So maybe “love” points towards the complex outcome when you strongly desire someone, and simultaneously wish them well, and simultaneously feel happy with them. Some people succeed to get the whole package. Some people only get a part of it, and find the experience confusing, asking themselves whether this is or isn’t “love”… and maybe try to fix the wrong part, for example by trying harder to be altruistic, when the actually missing part is that the other person’s presence doesn’t make them happy.
Well, that would be the whole package for romantic love. The whole package for loving your children includes wishing them well and feeling happy with them and feeling optimistic about their future. Etc.
People are kinda right when they refuse to be more specific, because “love” refers to the entire package, not any of its individual parts. But being more specific can be useful for figuring out why someone fails at love (what part exactly is missing from the package).
If you are worried that nobody obsessively overanalyzes the concept of love in a desperate search for something solid at the base of the concept, worry no longer.
Another aspect of Love that’s not really addressed here I tend to think of as a sense of ‘being on the same team.’ When I relate to people I love, I might help them or do something nice for them for the same reasons that Draymond Green passes the ball to Steph Curry—because when Steph makes a 3, the team’s score increases and that’s what they are trying to do. Draymond doesn’t (or at least shouldn’t) hold onto the ball and try to score himself unless he has a better shot (he usually doesn’t) - points are points.
Whereas when interacting with someone I don’t love, I might help them to the extent it advances my own goals, broadly defined (which includes things like ‘being well liked’, ‘getting helped in the future’, ‘the feeling of doing a good deed’).
Is the thing that you are talking about clearly distinct from this thing from my OP?
I suppose it’s related, but I think maybe I was thrown off by the parenthetical. I perceive it as fundamentally different from altruism. This form of ‘love as being on the same team’ is also about enjoying your loved ones’ successes, seeing them learn and grow and triumph, even if you don’t particularly give or protect anything in particular. Because when we’re on the same team, their win is my win.