A Conception of Romantic Love

Earlier this year, I participated in an intensive seminar designated for aspiring philosophers. At the event, one professor chose to hold a talk/discussion on a topic I found interesting, the topic of romantic love. I also distinctly remember us sharing answers to a particular question: What are the markers and examples of romantic love?

Amongst other things, this made me want to think about the question of love even further.

Love is a concept that very few of us are unfamiliar with. This isn’t to say that most of us necessarily have real, prolonged experience with it (I admittedly do not have a whole lot at the time of writing). But that certainly does not prevent people from talking about it, nor should it.

It’s a part of the human condition that we all become acquainted with. As a child, we may witness romantic relationships in our household or in public places, and learn about them at school. We then presumably attain a better understanding of them as we mature.

Romantic love often acts as an important theme in much of our media consumption. People continuously watch films and television shows about happy or tragic love stories. They endlessly listen to trashy songs about heartbreaks. And they now look at social media posts about people’s relationships and supposed dating advice.

It is quite a well-known topic in our mainstream culture, and people claim to be able to recognize love when they see it. However, most people (myself included) may have trouble precisely defining love as a concept.

In this post, I am going to attempt to define love in some way. And I will do so by exploring two different conceptions of love.

Is love a state that exists on its own and is waiting for us to fall into? Or does love require our participation and effort in order to be brought about?

In other words, is love passive or active? This post will contrast these two ideas.

To start with the first conception, can love be purely understood as a blissful experience? An experience which one has as a matter of chance. A state that one falls into if they are lucky.

People generally understand love in this way. Single people tend to feel a sense of envy when they see other people in relationships, that others got lucky enough to find a loving relationship.

There exists that famous saying: “True love comes to those who wait”. We then believe that love is known intuitively, that it is a feeling that one experiences only when fortunate enough.

Simply put, love is an object that falls into one’s possession.

With this passive conception of love, people do not work to portray themselves as loving, but as loveable.

There is then a discernible effort to constantly maintain or improve one’s lovability. One may try to enhance their physical appearance by styling their hair, working out, following a strict diet, putting on makeup, wearing certain clothes, or even getting cosmetic procedures. They may also try to increase their social status, such as by advancing their career and accumulating more wealth.

On a side note, I do think this idea relates to a phenomenon we can observe online: post-breakup makeup videos. After falling out of relationships, some people make an effort to look more ‘beautiful’ in order to cope with their breakup, getting procedures done on their face, body, and hair.

I know these people may say that they do this out of self-love, with no concern about what others want. However, I highly doubt that trying to change so much of one’s physical appearance can be purely done out of self-love.

Our actions are not done in a vacuum. Yes, a person may experience a boost in confidence, but this is precisely because they feel they will consequently be perceived as beautiful or attractive by others. After all, beauty standards are socially determined and they can only exist when people hold you accountable to them.

This is also part of the reason why people try to be seen as loveable. Because even if they do not find themselves in an actual romantic relationship, they still reap the social benefits of being seen as attractive by friends, peers, strangers, and others. They become more assured of themselves as a result. Hence, the effort to be seen as loveable becomes self-serving.

Coming back to relationships though, of course not everyone will find a particular person attractive or loveable. So individuals try to be loveable to certain types of people, adopting characteristics that attract the people they would like.

In a sense, people become commodities on a dating market, attempting to increase their own market value based on what others want.

There will be the straight man who portrays himself as hypermasculine and a potential leader of a household, the aspiring housewife who works hard to conform to conventional beauty standards, the feminine gay guy who wishes to attract an older partner to provide for him, and so on.

Again, with this passive conception of love, one does not learn how to be a lover themselves, but simply how to become loved by another.

As alluded to above, this often plays out in particularly gendered ways. In dating culture, it is still quite common for the man to be seen as the giver, while the woman is the receiver.

There are gender expectations that men should be the ones who “make the first move”, plan out dates, and buy or pay for things in order to somehow show their love. In this dynamic, a woman largely just waits for the man to act and expects it.

Needless to say, not all women behave this way but it is quite an appealing position for a woman to occupy, since it is a lot easier to be a passive receiver than an active giver. The only concern the woman would have is to ensure she is seen as loveable by men. And, as I mentioned before, being loveable has benefits even outside of a romantic relationship, including a positive reception from other people.

A romantic partner is simply a by-product of doing something for oneself.

Ultimately, a passive conception of love just entails finding someone who has enough social value in your eyes while also having a desire for you. In a nutshell, love becomes the pursuit of people as commodities that are attractive to you and that can fulfill your preexisting desires.

With all that in mind, instead of focusing on being seen as loveable, why don’t we focus on loving itself? This brings me to talking about an active conception of love.

With this conception, love is seen as an activity, an activity that requires dedication and willpower. One does not ask continuously themselves “How do I become loved?”, rather they say “How do I love?”

It involves a certain level of knowledge, creativity, and effort, all to bring about and maintain an intimate relationship. It can play out in different ways. It can involve active listening and empathizing, bonding over shared interests, sharing one’s knowledge and internal world, providing meaningful advice and support, and enabling a person to achieve their goals and have new experiences.

In a sense, love becomes an art, one which requires practice.

When learning how to play an instrument, one must not only put in a great deal of effort but also practice at times when they may not really feel like it. Similarly, love demands active participation and one cannot be a good lover by only choosing to love when it is absolutely convenient for them.

Certainly, if there is abuse or persistent animosity in a relationship, one should try to break away. But still, one should have faith even in unfavourable times.

This active conception of love operates under the assumption that actions shape one’s feelings, and vice-versa. A person must be driven to take action, and then proceed to bring love about.

Love cannot exist simply by giving material things or sex, but by giving oneself as a person. Simply put, it is to actively nurture the flourishing of someone else, and to actualize oneself through their flourishing.

Now, I wish to explore an important concern regarding all this: can our conceptions of love be too idealistic? They definitely can be.

It can largely be due to the media we consume. Romanticized stories that we see in movies and television shows can make us have unrealistic expectations about what love is, ones that can cause a great deal of envy and dissatisfaction.

This can relate to the idea of “hyperreality” formulated by Jean Baudrillard. To explain it briefly, pieces of media (such as shows and movies) begin as simulations and imitations of our real world. However, as time goes on, later pieces of media are created as imitations of the previous ones. And so are the others after those. Copies of copies of copies, all being inspired by what came before. Eventually, our media becomes so detached from the reality it is ostensibly representing, yet we don’t fully recognize it.

We then view our own life through the prism of what we see in the fictional world (think of how people watch Friends and use it as a way to frame their personalities and what happens to them in real life). Ironically, the imaginary begins to dictate our reality.

By watching portrayals of love in our media, we can come to have a distorted conception of what love is. I think this is in part what fuels the weird discourse on love and relationships on social media for example, such as on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.

For one, people will look at videos of romanticized snippets of a person’s relationship, and then become unhappy about how they apparently have never been loved.

For two, people will use what they see and hear on social media to decide the entire value of a relationship. This often pushes them to passively expect more from their partner, instead of trying to become a better lover themselves. They may then want to receive more lavish things and witness grandiose displays of love, in order to make them feel they are on par with what they see online.

Considering this, a conception of love needs to include the recognition that a proper display of love is context-dependent. It depends on a lover’s interests, personality, skills, amount of free time, and even income.

This means that one should not look at glamourous displays of love online to determine whether love is present in their relationship, especially when those displays are largely performative highlights that are materialistic. As long as there is no abuse or other wrongdoing, no one should be dictating whether love exists or can exist in your relationship. We are all in different situations and have different needs.

Finally, there is one last point I want to address.

I hope it has become clear I think an active conception of love is a more adequate one. Nonetheless, there is the worry that such a conception may be a little unrealistic.

Indeed, the plurality of us do still have a desire to be loved ourselves, to be a receiver in a sense. Also, a focus on being given material things is largely a symptom of living in a highly consumerist culture, one which we cannot quickly get rid of.

Therefore, for love to be properly present in a relationship, an aspiring lover must strike an equilibrium between giving and receiving. I once saw someone say that love is about being in a 70/30 relationship, where you personally are always trying to be the one who is giving 70.

One should strive to perfect the art of loving their partner, while also having reason to believe that their partner is doing more or less the same. A lover should give for the sake of giving, but that does not mean they cannot receive as well.

Fundamentally, for those who can experience it, love is to be seen as a moral exercise, a more considerate way to treat another human person. It requires social and emotional intelligence, moral competency, and the ability to maintain positive relationships with others.

Instead of constantly complaining about not being sufficiently loved, we should focus on how we ourselves can bring love into our lives.

In the end, the pursuit of love should be motivated by an aspiration to witness and support the growth of another person, rather than a self-interested desire to simply not be lonely… though that might be hard to completely shrug off. That I know.