Love/Continued

Finally, the big one. Why can there only be one right person? Why must this bond, or the potential for it, exist? Well, I admit that I haven't proved to you beyond all doubt that it must; indeed, I haven't yet managed to prove it to myself. Sometimes I think I might be wrong. Sometimes I think that maybe love is not real; that it's all just a meaningless mishmash of relationships, people bouncing off each other in some kind of Brownian experiment: sometimes sticking together, sometimes travelling parallel courses for a while but, ultimately, without meaning, purpose, or narrative. But that would be a dark, dark world, with no possibility of true love in it: just encounters, feelings, and decisions that may last hours or decades or a lifetime, but still, in the end, add up to nothing more meaningful than two people presenting a shared front against the night.
So no, I can't prove that the bond must exist. But I can answer the objections to prove that it can, and wouldn't you rather believe in a world where it did, even if only once in a thousand years, than in a world where there is no hope whatsoever of true love? - m48-mp1

Firstly: No. I dislike the idea of believing in something to make life rosier for me. There is nothing in my experience to make me think there is some kind of mystical bond of the sort you describe that exists between people. Admittedly, my experience is relatively limited - I'm still quite young and have only been married 4.5 years - but in my experience real love is born of friendship and matured by hard work and spending time together, and it is something both precious and very human, not some sort of bond that pre-existed my knowledge of the other person. So no, sorry. That particular argument doesn't work for me.

Secondly: You're missing the point. I believe love exists, I just disagree with your view of what it is. Your question is therefore irrelevant; we are not debating about whether true love exists or not, we are debating its form - SunKitten (still intending to reply to the rest later)

: Seconded. Love means all sorts of things. The word gets used in all sorts of ways. Heck, you may even come across it in a description of how soap works. So let's move on, and discuss what is meant by "TrueLove?". M48-mp1, you seem to greatly wish for the existence of TrueLove?, but what do you mean by that? Personally, I don't believe in the type of TrueLove? where two people meet, and there's an instant bond between them forever and a day, and they never annoy each other, etc. I think the model where TrueLove? lasts forever and non-TrueLove? doesn't is fundamentally flawed. For example, a relationship where there are disagreements can work and be very fulfilling indeed - in fact, how a couple handle conflict is one area where they can really show love towards each other. Conversely, if there is a relationship where it seems there is indeed TrueLove?, one partner could if he/she wanted to destroy that TrueLove?. Every human needs to receive love in order to exist at all. Just a tiny bit is required to allow a person to exist, and a bit more is required for the person to cope with difficulties in life, be happy, and be able to give love to others. So, to destroy TrueLove?, one simply needs to starve the TrueLove?r of all love, and he/she will become no longer capable of maintaining that TrueLove?.
: I do believe that TrueLove? is created by an act of will. A couple who both decide to love the other come what may can succeed. One partner can force the other to stop loving as shown above, and this may happen sometimes by mistake. When that happens, it is a tragedy. So, when dating, you are really looking to answer two questions: "Can I trust this person to love me," and "Can I trust myself to love this person". So I suppose my definition of TrueLove? would be this: when two people are both fully committed to loving each other, and also fully trust the other to continue loving them. This is why marriage involves announcing and pledging that love and that trust. You can't get much truer than that. --Admiral

But your idea of love is hardly worth the name. A mishmash of contingent happenstances, with nothing qualitatively different to set it apart from or give it more meaning than any other relationship in life, like the one with the milkman or your boss; just a bundle of friendship with added sex, all wrapped up in string and promises - m48-mp1

: In a love relationship, one thing that I would value very highly would be trust. It makes the relationship. It allows you to relax and feel safe. Without trust, just like without love, you cannot have a romantic relationship - it would be something else instead. That's my definition, anyway. Personally, I can build trust for a person, but I do not believe I could trust in a mystic bond between me and the person I love. As we discussed earlier, you cannot verify whether you actually have this bond with a particular person. So for me, a relationship without this FairytaleLove? is superior. --Admiral
: M48-mp1: Now who's being emotive and slightly insulting? Do at least try to understand where your debating partner is coming from, hm? I disagree with your notion of what True Love is, but I do not doubt that you believe in it, nor do I assume - just because I disagree - that what you believe in is shallow and worthless - SunKitten

You keep making a big thing about the marriage vows, but promises are just words, and they're broken all the time. You can promise something and fully intend to keep your promise, but you'll probably break it later, and then of what value was your promise? None at all; in fact less than nothing, for it was a lie. It would have been better to be silent. That this vow was made in the presence of God and witnesses doesn't make it worth any more when you break it. A love based on promises is worth nothing when the promises are broken, and as all promises can be broken it is worth nothing at all - m48-mp1

: I contest this. A broken promise is not worse than nothing in my opinion, because the act of breaking the promise can be forgiven. The promises made at a wedding are ongoing promises. You promise "I will ...", so even if you fail you are still bound to fulfil your promise in the future. Breaking such a promise does not release you from it. A marriage can (and should) survive the marriage vows being broken occasionally - because forgiveness exists. Obviously each infraction damages the relationship, by damaging the trust. Divorce is appropriate when the marriage vows are repeatedly broken without remorse, for that demonstrates that the person is no longer making an effort to follow his "I will ..." statement. --Admiral
: In addition to what Admiral said, with which I completely agree, if promises are worthless, then so are five-pound notes. So is the contract I have with my employers. So is the mortgage we hold with the bank. In any case, what more can we do? You have already said we can never identify a bond as the real thing. We are human; we cannot do more than promise - SunKitten

What's a soul? For the purposes of the discussion, the important factor is the soul's function as seat of identity: it's whatever makes you you, distinct from other people. It doesn't matter, in this context, how you believe that's manifested, whether it's some uniqueness in the chemistry of your brain, some Cartesian ghost attached to you, or some notion of the form of the matter that makes up your body. All that matters is that there is something that sets you apart from everyone else. The soul is the thing by which you are you and not me, and by which I am me and not any of the other people who might potentially have existed in my place. So to say that love is a bond between souls is to say that it is a bond between two unique people, which is predicated on their uniqueness. Someone really in love could not be happy with anyone other than their partner-in-love. Anything else makes love a contingent property, and that drains it of all specialness and meaning: it makes it just another event, just another relationship among many in a life, rather than the terrible glory that it is. To suppose otherwise is to fall into the existentialist's delusion of thinking that we can by sheer force of will impose meaning on the intrinsically meaningless - m48-mp1

: OK, thanks - just wanted to know, since it's important to your viewpoint, that we were talking about roughly the same thing when we used the word 'soul'. You hold love as a terrible, glorious thing - why do you say that? On what do you base that assertion? (Note again; I am not necessarily disagreeing with you). How about the love between family - parent to child, sibling to sibling? How about the love between friends? Where does that sort of thing fit in in your view of love? - SunKitten

To call unrequited love 'tragic' is to diminish that word beyond all recognition. Something just being nasty and undesirable is not enough to make it 'tragic'. To be tragic it must reach depths of experience far beyond the everyday; and, what's more, it must be within a context which gives it meaning as tragedy. Bad things happen every day; no more than a tiny proportion are truly tragic in a way that actually defines the meaning of the lives they touch. (Of course, it's possible that this 'unrequited' love might actually be real love, simply unrecognised by the other party; and that would be tragic, for this lack of recognition then robs both of their only chance at a meaningful romantic relationship. That's tragic. But most unrequited love, I suspect, is not of this kind: it would be properly called unrequited attraction, not love.) - m48-mp1

: I agree that calling simple unrequited love tragic is overdramatic. I was referring to two partners already deep into a love relationship, where one partner destroys the relationship by witholding love to the extent that the other partner cannot love back any more. Believe me, that can be tragic, and it can take the other partner years to recover. --Admiral
: I would argue that, since huge numbers of people die each day, people who are infintely precious to their siblings, parents and friends, that tragedies do indeed happen every day. But that is tangential - SunKitten

Aspects of love: love's constancy and its meaning as sharing oneself completely with another. Are these controversial? I thought they were universally accepted parts of love. Certainly they seem to be reasonably common. Constancy is surely the accepted ideal of love. All the songs, all the stories, aspire to it; and everybody realises than insofar as a relationship falls short of constancy, it falls short of perfection. And total sharing, again, I thought was agreed to be part of love; the opening of one's heart to another, light bits and dark bits, bits you're proud of and bits you're ashamed of. Your lover is supposed to share your life, aren't they? To share the triumphs and the disasters, the success and the failure. The rich and the poor, the sickness and the health. You're not supposed to keep anything back; and again, insofar as things are kept back, isn't that generally regarded as falling short of perfection? - m48-mp1

: You'll get no arguments from me on that score. However, there is a fairly common problem that occurs in love relationships, which should be avoided. That is, if one partner shares completely, and the other just takes advantage of this. This happens, because "being in love" makes a person blind to the shortcomings of their partner. Trust is the key, accompanied by making sure the person is trustworthy. A good way to do this is to ask friends what they think of the partner. --Admiral
: Yes of course, we fall short of perfection. No-one and nothing is perfect in this world, and that includes love. Or do you believe people and situations can be perfect? - SunKitten

This Admiral seems not to have read anything I wrote. True love involving people never annoying each other? What rot! Two people truly in love can not only annoy each other, they can hurt each other and destroy each other's lives like no one else. For that's part of love: it can be better than almost anything else but it can be worse too. What else in life makes even the strongest person more vulnerable than love? What else can cause worse pain? Two people in true love may be blissfully happy all the time; they may be constantly getting on each other's nerves, but still held together by a deep affection; they may be unable to stand the sight of each other and flee to opposite ends of the globe. The only thing love guarantees is passion: they can't be indifferent to each other. But passion can manifest itself in many ways, some healthy, some destructive. Love is a unique relationship between them, but that doesn't guarantee it will be a good relationship, and almost certainly guarantees it won't be a tranquil one - m48-mp1

: Eh, the bit about never annoying each other was a throwaway remark not essential to my line of argument. However, this paragraph makes me even more sure that I prefer a world without the mystic bond of true love. If this bond exists, then presumably I cannot control with whom I am bonded, opening me up to the kinds of destruction you describe. However, if I choose my lover according to trustworthiness and mutual love, I rate my chances a lot higher. --Admiral

I can't believe you can consider being on the same level as the free will argument as a 'reduction'. What could be more important than the question of whether we have free will? It is possibly the single most vital question in existence. If we do, then we are responsible for our actions, and what we do can have meaning; if we don't, then nothing we do has any meaning: we are just robots, and if we're just robots then our entire lives are pointless and why bother doing anything? So yes, I would put this almost on the same level as the free will argument: that is to say, at the highest level of importance in life. Actually the question of love is slightly less important than that of free will, as the question of free will affects and underlies every single aspect of every single human being's life, while lots of people get through their lives fine without ever experiencing love (another way in which Admiral is wrong). Love gives life meaning, but it's not the only thing that can; whereas without free will, our lives could never have any meaning at all.

: I assert that nobody goes through life without experiencing at least some amount of love. That amount may be very small, and you may be assuming a different definition of love to me, but I hold on this one. --Admiral
: Well, try looking at it this way (as indeed MoonShadow has pointed out below): You have said we can never be certain if the bond we feel with another person is the real thing or not. That means we cannot use the presence or absence of the bond in our decisions, because we can't know whether or not it is real. Therefore it makes no difference to our decisions. Similarly, with free will, we can never know whether or not we have it. Thus, whether it exists or not makes no difference to our daily lives; we act and will always act as though we do have free will. Therefore both debates, and both assertions (that there is a unique bond between people that is the only True Love, and that we have (or do not have) free will) are interesting to discuss from a philosophical point of view, but make no difference to us from a practical one - SunKitten

If what you say were all there is to love, what would be the point in it? - m48-mp1

: What is the point in any love? What is the point in dedicating your life to another? What is the point in promising to stick by them, no matter what they go through? Because the other person is precious, and because they matter more to you than you yourself do, ideally. Why does the fact that I don't believe in this bond of yours blind you to everything else I say? In my experience, I love my husband, and I married him not because I wanted to live with him, but because I did not want to live without him. Because the marriage vows we made described the way we felt, and still do feel.
: Suppose you are in love (you may indeed be; this is theoretical). How do you know whether or not that love is the real thing and worth giving your life to? Since you cannot know, and since promises are meaningless, what do you do with the person you believe you love? When all is said and done, if you can never know if this bond you have is real or not, how is what you feel for your beloved any different to what I feel for mine? - SunKitten

So to say that love is a bond between souls is to say that it is a bond between two unique people, which is predicated on their uniqueness. Someone really in love could not be happy with anyone other than their partner-in-love.

: You keep saying variations on this pair of statements as though the one follows from the other, and I keep not seeing why. Let us assume for the moment that one basis of love is a bond between people which is predicated on those people's inherent properties. I would not be unhappy with such a definition. However, things that occur in the natural world do not tend to be singular; they tend to occur in large groups of similar things. We do not generally observe things dividing neatly into black-and-white categories; we observe wide spreads of shades of grey. I do not see why a bond such as you describe should be an exception to this. In fact, a variety of bonds of varying strengths seems more like what we in fact observe by looking out at the world. Tales of, for instance, widowers finding new true loves also speak against the "unique" theory. Indeed, I will even grant that it is possible for a single unique ideal perfect bond to exist for each person, and all others to be less than this; yet I do not see that its existence makes the others not be love. Moreover, since one cannot know whether the bond one has encountered is the strongest one can have - although the common experience is that it feels like it! - nor has one a way of seeking towards a stronger bond, this makes the existence or otherwise of a strongest bond irrelevant in practice. The supposition of platonic solids does not stop us calling imperfect real-world cubes cubes. Ideals are doomed to remain, in the real world, unreachable; and thus, ideals that do not depend on our actions - ideals we cannot strive towards - meaningless to our lives. If only one possible bond went out from each person, finding it in a population of six billion would be quite, quite impossible, and we are unlikely to ever have in fact observed the result of such a happenstance, much less happen upon it ourselves; most or all the tales of true love we hear must be delusion! Surely - even if the evidence of your own eyes fails to convince you - since you suggest believing in the less depressing state of affairs, it is much less depressing to believe in a variety of potential bonds? - MoonShadow

: To answer another issue you raise, this irrelevancy-in-practice is precisely the relationship of your concept (and only your concept, mark!) of love to the question of the existence of free will and whether a negative answer will make our lives meaningless. To all intents and purposes it appears to us that we have free will; moreover, we are unable to act or make decisions (or have the illusion of acting or making decisions, if you will) in any other way than one that presupposes that we are able to do so and that doing so is somehow meaningful. Therefore, the answers to questions of whether the universe is purely deterministic, questions of whether our actions are completely predetermined by a past state of the universe or by the prescience of God, and other forms of questions of whether we have free will, are utterly irrelevant to how we are forced to live our lives. Technically, in some wider framework beyond my perception, I might not have free will. I might in truth be doomed to go through meaningless actions predetermined long ago; I might be an elaborate computer simulation; but as far as I am able to perceive, I am making the decisions I make, and my actions have meaning; so the wider framework is irrelevant. - MoonShadow

May I try to summarise what has gone before, as this seems to be getting rather hard to follow as it stands?

It seems to be that there are the following points at issue:

1) In the case of 'True' love, does 'true' mean that the love is different qualitatively or quantitatively?

2) Is the truth of 'True' love digital (i.e. love is 'true' or it is non-existent) or analogue (sliding scale)

3) Does totally 'true' love exist as an actual thing in the world, or in the conceptual realm as a desirable but unachievable ideal?

4) Does 'true love' have meaning, and what is that meaning?

My understanding of m48-mp1's position is this:

- True love = meaningful love; where 'meaningful love' means love that forms a bond qualitatively different from any one could make with someone else, and which cannot be broken

- To be meaningful, this love must also exist in practice, not just in concept.

Any attempt at defining love which excludes the above is rejected as meaningless.

The following are consequences of this definition:

- For 'love' to exist, it cannot depend being sustained by any human faculty, since both our hearts and minds can be fickle - any love founded on them is thus not unbreakable and falls outside the definition above.

- 'Love' can never be definitively identified, either during it or in hindsight, since one cannot know whether any given relationship could be, or could have been, broken.

m48-mp1, please could you say whether you recognise this as what you have been arguing?

I'm afraid that, as you are dealing with a bunch of scientists, you are not working far enough back in your argument for us to pick up its beginning to see if we agree with the axioms it is founded on. You are saying that 'true love' has to be unbreakable and meaningful. Others are contending it is not - if you want to convince, you must show us why you believe this - just repeating the assertion takes us nowhere. Thus far, the only reason I have found given is that it makes the world look sweeter; not only would I disagree that it makes the world look better to have this definition of 'true love' in it but, more importantly, it is not a very strong argument. It makes the world look sweeter to shut one's eyes to all sorts of unpleasant realities but one is a fool to do so.

Let me also try to condense my own view of love, which I am sure is substantially if not wholly shared by SunKitten and MoonShadow:

It may help to cast it in the form of the three Greek words which I understand are all translated in English as 'love':

1) Eros. Romantic/sexual attraction/love

2) Fileo. Affection, of a non-sexual nature, such as exists between friends, siblings etc.

These two it could be said are 'emotional' love.

3) Agape. The love from the will, decisional love, such as exemplified by "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." [John 15:13]

That is, it is the decision to act in love.

Philio is how I've always spelled it. And don't forget Storge either (Love for family, respect: any anime fan here will recognize the Japanese concept of Nakama to be very similar.) - ElliottBelser

: As far as I can tell, in an Attic / Biblical Greek translation it's 'phileo' or 'fileo' depending on whether you translate the Greek letter phi as 'ph' or 'f'. 'philio' would be a translation from modern Greek, I'd guess, where all the vowels have shifted around. --Requiem

In the foregoing debate, there has been a tendency to set agape in opposition to eros and say that it is cold. But it is not agape alone that is true love, but (in what we might term a romantic context at least) all three working together, and they support one another. They do not have to happen in any particular order - but when complete, all three are present. The reason that the agape has to be stressed is that it is the one that one has direct control over, whereas the more feely eros and fileo come and go depending on sickness and health, rows, hurts, romantic settings etc. Thus the quality of the love is determined by the quality of the agape component, but that is not the only component, since the practice of agape tend to give rise to the others even where they have previously vanished.

What we might call 'true love' is thus an analogue thing - one could love 90% truly, or 10%. Since we are all broken people and not capable of perfect agape, we are therefore not capable of 100% true love - it exists in the conceptual realm as an unattainable goal. But it is desirable to pursue it as far as possible.

This is a statement of position - it is not yet an attempt to defend that position. Questions about why I hold it are useful to the debate and may get us somewhere - merely restating that you disagree will merely take us back round the loop this has been stuck in for some time. --MJ

/Continued2