PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE AND SEX

It is Possible for a Romantic Relationship to Include More Than Two Individuals

It is Possible for a Romantic Relationship to Include More Than Two Individuals

Philosophers writing on love have often taken some form of psychological or even metaphysical union to be crucial to the kind of love that characterizes long-term intimate relationships such as marriage. And romantic love, understood as a form of love that may precede and lead to such relationships, is equally often taken to involve or even to be constituted by a desire for such union. While such views have a long history, Robert Solomon, Robert Nozick, and Mark Fisher are among their strongest and most frequently discussed contemporary proponents. Solomon, for example, uses Aristophanes' metaphor of re-unification as a spring-board for his thesis that “the dominant conceptual ingredient in romantic love … is just this urge for shared identity, a kind of ontological dependency”. Nozick claims that “Love, romantic love, is wanting to form a we with [a] particular person”; where the desired relationship is in fact established, he describes the resultant we as constituting a new entity in the world, produced by “two persons flowing together and intensely merging”. Fisher goes so far as to say that lovers come to “perceive, feel and act as a single person, so that the perception, feeling or act does not exist unless both persons participate in it, and neither can say who originated it”.

Romantic love and sexual desire are central emotions in our life. Some identify the two emotions and some consider them to be completely different. (Ackerman, 1994) This paper analyzes the basic characteristics of each emotion and describes the connection between them. Love has been divided into many kinds: romantic love, parental love, sexual love, love of friends, religion, country, and so on. Not all these attitudes are emotional. Love for one's country, for example, is not a typical emotion. Romantic love itself can be categorized according to its various stages: falling in love, being in love, and staying in love (unless otherwise indicated, "love" refers to romantic love). My main concern here is in characterizing typical cases of romantic love and sexual desire.

Basic evaluative patterns

The typical emotional object is either the person experiencing the emotion or another person. Emotions are typically directed toward agents who can enjoy and suffer. People are more interesting to people than anything else.' The human nature of the typical emotional object is expressed in that we hardly have feelings toward the collapse of big companies, but are often very upset upon hearing about the poverty of a particular person we have known personally. (Baumeister et al, 1993) Similarly, people are hardly sorry when they cheat a big firm but not when they cheat an individual known to them. If agents are the typical emotional objects, emotions may be sorted into three groups according to whether the objects are: (a) the fortunes of agents, with emotions of happiness, hope, sadness, fear, envy, pity, (b) the actions of agents, ...