theme of the essay of love

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Of Love by Francis Bacon: A Summary and Line by Line Explanation

This blog post covers everything you need to know about Bacon’s view on love. It includes a summary, line by line explanation, discussion of its theme, and answers to a few FAQs, all explained in simple language.

Table of Contents

Of Love Summary

Francis Bacon’s essay “Of Love” primarily discusses adverse impacts of passionate love on human behavior and life. In contrast to its idealized portrayal in theatrical plays, intense love in real life is often harmful and leads to suffering. It can allure, in its powerful grip, anyone, even those who are usually wise.

Another significant consequence of love is a lover loses touch with reality and starts thinking irrationally. This state can significantly affect his judgment.

Moreover, love can lead to the loss of both fortune and knowledge. For instance, Paris was so captivated by Helen that ignored the gifts of wealth and wisdom for the sake of his passionate love.

Line by Line Explanation

Love on stage and in real life.

“THE stage is more beholding to love, than the life of man. For as to the stage, love is ever matter of comedies, and now and then of tragedies; but in life it doth much mischief; sometimes like a siren, sometimes like a fury. You may observe, that amongst all the great and worthy persons (whereof the memory remaineth, either ancient or recent) there is not one, that hath been transported to the mad degree of love: which shows that great spirits, and great business, do keep out this weak passion.”

The stage depicts the theme of love more than actual experiences in life. Plays tend to focus on love as a central theme far more than experiences in everyday life.

Bacon wrote this essay in the Elizabethan era. Being an essayist of that period, he likely refers to Elizabethan plays. Bacon observes that many playwrights of his time glorified love and often gave undue importance to it.

For example, plays such as “Romeo and Juliet”, “The Merchant of Venice”, “Twelfth Night”, “Endymion present love in a light-hearted manner. They end in happiness, like marriages or reunions.

According to Bacon, this is a misrepresentation of love on stage. What the playwrights often ignore is to show the darker aspects of love in their plays. They seldom depict love as having serious and sorrowful consequences.

Amorous love in real life is not always a source of happiness. It often causes more trouble and distress in a person’s life than benefitting him.

To explain the destructive power of love, Bacon compares passionate love to a siren and fury. A siren’s enchanting song and voice lures sailors and distracts them on their way. Similarly, love draws individuals away from their duties, potentially leading them to ruin.

Because of its destructive nature, notable individuals, either from the past or present, have never let it overpower them. They have always kept “this weak passion” (Bacon 88) aside from their work in their ambitions or intellectual pursuits.

For instance, Nikola Tesla and Elon Musk have not allowed this emotion to overwhelm them. As a result, they have become extraordinary in their respective fields.

In contrast, an average person who has surrendered himself to erotic love might have ended up mediocre.

The difference between successful and unsuccessful men lies in how much priority they give to love.

Love is a Powerful Emotion

“You must except, nevertheless, Marcus Antonius, the half partner of the empire of Rome, and Appius Claudius, the decemvir and lawgiver; whereof the former was indeed a voluptuous man, and inordinate; but the latter was an austere and wise man: and therefore it seems (though rarely) that love can find entrance, not only into an open heart, but also into a heart well fortified, if watch be not well kept. It is a poor saying of Epicurus, Satis magnum alter alteri theatrum sumus; as if man, made for the contemplation of heaven, and all noble objects, should do nothing but kneel before a little idol, and make himself a subject, though not of the mouth (as beasts are), yet of the eye; which was given him for higher purposes.”

Love is such a strong emotion that, if not controlled, it can affect both amorous and sagacious individuals’ lives. To explain, Bacon cites examples from history. Both Mark Antony and Appius Claudius were both high-ranking men in ancient Rome.

Mark Antony was a Roman General. He fell in love with Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt, and married her.

Marrying Cleopatra became a cause of downfall for Mark Antony. He distributed Roman territories to her children, which was seen as a betrayal of Roman interests.

Octavian emphasized his alliance with Cleopatra to turn public opinion against Antony. He portrayed Antony as a traitor to Rome, influenced by a foreign queen, which helped justify his declaration of war.

In the end, his defeat at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC marked the end of Antony’s political and military career.

Claudius was an austere Roman senator and a leading decemvir in 451 B.C. Rome.

However, Claudius lusted after the daughter of a commoner, Virginia. (Pitcher 88n3) and he wanted to enslave her by using his power. To save Virginia from the clutch of Claudius, her father had to kill her.

It caused an uproar in Rome and Claudius’ downfall.

This comparison highlights that anyone can succumb to passionate love, regardless of one’s personality. Whether one is passionate like Antony or wise like Claudius, this powerful force can impact anyone if it is allowed to grow unchecked.

If a man with high ambitions focuses on this weak passion, it will overpower him. He is not supposed to indulge himself in such a pleasure.

Therefore, Bacon criticizes a statement of the Greek philosopher Epicurus; “Satis magnum alter alteri theatrum sumus” (Bacon 88). It means “each of us is enough of an audience for the other” (Pitcher 88n4).

This implies that the mere presence of another person should be enough to satisfy our need for engagement. The statement emphasizes personal relationships and simple pleasures are sufficient for a fulfilling life.

Bacon viewed Epicurus’s statement as underestimating other aspects of a fulfilling life. He believes that Epicurus’s philosophy focuses too much on personal relationships, which restricts human potential.

If all men meant for contemplating the universe or pursuing ambitious endeavors were to focus solely on love, they would give undue importance to this passion.

Even if a man in love is not driven by instinct like an animal, he is captivated by his lover’s appearance. It is a misuse of his gift of sight. Instead of using his sight, metaphorically, insight, for higher purposes, he indulges in petty pleasures.

Deceptive Nature of Love

“It is a strange thing, to note the excess of this passion, and how it braves the nature, and value of things, by this; that the speaking in a perpetual hyperbole, is comely in nothing but in love. Neither is it merely in the phrase; for whereas it hath been well said, that the arch-flatterer, with whom all the petty flatterers have intelligence, is a man’s self; certainly the lover is more. For there was never proud man thought so absurdly well of himself, as the lover doth of the person loved; and therefore it was well said, That it is impossible to love, and to be wise.”

Bacon finds it peculiar how love’s intensity can defy the nature of reality. Love can distort a person’s perception, keeping reality at bay from the lover.

He says hyperbolic speech in love is often deemed acceptable, but not in other aspects of life.

We can explain this phenomenon with the help of the halo effect. The attractiveness or a characteristic of one forms an overall positive perception in the lover’s mind.

As a result, one forms biased opinions about the other. It often leads to endless exaggerated compliments.

Bacon refers to a saying that the greatest flatterer is oneself, highlighting how people often deceive themselves more than others. Yet, a person in love becomes an even greater flatterer towards his beloved than towards himself.

Conversely, a wise and self-content man does not hold himself in as high regard as a passionate lover. The halo effect influences cognitive capacity. Consequently, it overvalues the loved one irrationally.

In this context, Bacon cites a line from Publilius Syrus’ Sententiae , 15,

Because of the irrational tendency, it is impossible to love and act rationally at the same time.

One-sided Passionate Love

“Neither doth this weakness appear to others only, and not to the party loved; but to the loved most of all, except the love be reciproque. For it is a true rule, that love is ever rewarded, either with the reciproque, or with an inward and secret contempt. By how much the more, men ought to beware of this passion, which loseth not only other things, but itself!”

The weaknesses of being blindly in love are not apparent either to others or to the person who is only partially loved. However, this weakness is visible to the one being loved, especially when the love is not mutual.

Bacon states that love is always answered in one of two possibilities. Either the loved one will reciprocate to the feelings or develop hidden contempt for the other as the lover’s advanced progress.

Therefore, Bacon cautions that people should be wary of this emotion. It is detrimental to one’s well-being but also to the passion of love.

This can occur because the intensity of unreciprocated love may lead to its own demise. This happens either through the erosion of the affection itself or through the harm it causes, making it unsustainable.

Love is the Child of Folly

“As for the other losses, the poet’s relation doth well figure them: that he that preferred Helena, quitted the gifts of Juno and Pallas. For whosoever esteemeth too much of amorous affection, quitteth both riches and wisdom. This passion hath his floods, in very times of weakness; which are great prosperity, and great adversity; though this latter hath been less observed: both which times kindle love, and make it more fervent, and therefore show it to be the child of folly.”

While discussing losses, Bacon cites a story from classical mythology. In this story, Paris, the Trojan prince, chooses Venus’s offer of the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen. He rejects the offers of power, wealth, and wisdom from goddesses Juno and Pallas (Athena).

Paris’s decision to abduct Helen from her husband sparked a war between the Trojans and Spartans. Ultimately, this led to his own death and the eventual destruction of Troy.

Thus, Bacon emphasizes that placing an excessive value on romantic love can lead to the depletion of both wealth and wisdom.

Bacon observes that love often arises in times of both prosperity and adversity. In prosperity, a man may become vulnerable to passionate feelings. It may lead him to senseless actions.

Similarly, in adversity, he might seek passion to escape from reality. However, love during hardship is an occasional experience.

Since love tends to intensify during these times, it underscores the notion that love is a product of foolishness rather than reason or wisdom.

Balancing Love and Goals

“They do best, who if they cannot but admit love, yet make it keep quarters; and sever it wholly from their serious affairs, and actions, of life; for if it check once with business, it troubleth men’s fortunes, and maketh men, that they can no ways be true to their own ends.”

Some men fall in love but do not act irrationally. They manage their feelings carefully, even if they cannot avoid falling in love. They ensure that love remains controlled.

To control, they always keep love separate from their goals or responsibilities. They know very well that if their desire and serious matters are mingled, it could lead to financial losses and compromise their ability to stay true to their objectives.

For instance, many successful people are not great lovers in the traditional sense. While they may have experienced love, they never allow it to impact their work. Instead, they adeptly balance these aspects of their lives.

Love as an Escape Route

“I know not how, but martial men are given to love: I think, it is but as they are given to wine; for perils commonly ask to be paid in pleasures.”

Bacon says that martial men have a tendency to fall in love. He compares their attraction to women with their fondness for wine. It suggests that the pleasures of love or wine alleviate their harsh lives.

The risks in their profession may drive soldiers to seek emotional solace in romantic love. Just as they might turn to wine for escape or relief, love offers a similar respite from the stark realities of military life.

Different Types of Love

“There is in man’s nature, a secret inclination and motion, towards love of others, which if it be not spent upon some one or a few, doth naturally spread itself towards many, and maketh men become humane and charitable; as it is seen sometime in friars. Nuptial love maketh mankind; friendly love perfecteth it; but wanton love corrupteth, and embaseth it.”

Apart from such sensual love, Bacon also mentions other types of love: altruistic love, nuptial love, and friendly love.

Altruistic Love: Bacon notices that humans have an inherent tendency to extend their love beyond a single individual, encompassing all humanity. Altruistic love, often seen in religious figures, is a selfless love concerned with the well-being of others.

This type of love fosters humanity and charity, as opposed to selfishness and flattery.

Nuptial Love: This love pertains to marriage. Marital love plays a vital role in the continuation of the human race. Bacon expresses a similar view about nuptial love in “ Of Marriage and Single Life ”.

He says, “wife and children are a kind of discipline of humanity” (82).

Friendly Love: It is related to friendship bonds. This type of love enhances humanity’s moral and social virtues, contributing to its perfection and enrichment.

Wanton Love: In contrast to other types, amorous love is superficial and degrades one’s life. Passionate love may be fleeting, but its effects can be enduring.

Though Bacon mentions these types of love, he does not delve deep into them. He discusses primarily passionate love and its detrimental effects.

Of Love Video Explanation

What does Francis Bacon say about love?

Bacon describes love as a powerful and potentially harmful emotion. He highlights that the dramatists do not show the dark side of love in theatrical plays. He argues that even historical figures of great renown could not escape love’s overwhelming impact. Love impairs one’s grasp on reality and reasoning. It makes rational thought challenging for those in love.

What are the three different kinds of love that Bacon talks of in his essay?

Bacon discusses four types of love in his essay: altruistic love, nuptial love, friendly love, and wanton love.

What does Bacon call a man who is gripped by the passion of love?

Bacon describes a person overcome by passionate love as irrational. Such individuals become overly emotional and struggle to distinguish between reality and logic. They fool themselves, excessively idolizing the person they love to the point of foolishness.

Bacon, Francis. “Of Love.” Francis Bacon: The Essays , edited by John Pitcher, Penguin Books, 1985, pp. 88, 89.

Badian, E. “Mark Antony: Roman triumvir.” Britannica , 28 Jul. 2022, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mark-Antony-Roman-triumvir

Cherry, Kendra. “Why the Halo Effect Influences How We Perceive Others.” verywellmind , 19 Jul. 2020. https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-halo-effect-2795906

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Critical analysis of love essay

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Of Love by Francis Bacon Summary

Bacon opens the essay by claiming that the love or romance shown on the stage, plays, and theatres is highly unrealistic, far from reality. On stage, love is portrayed as a noble trait leading to joy and excitement. It often brings tragedy and sorrow. However, in the real life, love does the real disasters by bringing dark and foreboding. History has a record that all the great, noble, and worthier man who has done something great in the life have refused this week passion and keep themselves and their business away from such things.

Bacon illustrates the example of Marcus Antonius, a member of Roman royalty who was given a chance to rule over 1/3rd of the empire, and Appius Claudius, the second member of royalty who was given the other 1/3rd of empire, to explain the destructing effects of love. The former was the man of ambition and power, however, amorous, impulsive, and restrained. He had little or no control over his heart and wandered in pursuit of love and lust. While Claudius was a sober, sage and wise man of great wisdom. He never brought himself disgrace while rushing towards quixotic desire.

Bacon quotes the Greek philosopher Epicurus who promoted self-control, self-discipline, and restraint in one’s life. He warned his followers against chasing the worldly desires and says that “we are sufficient for one another”. By this, he conveys a message that one must live his life fully, without indulging into conflicts with others. One should not avenge other and must restrain himself from other such misdeeds. He expresses his disproval for a man of great worth who bowed in front of a woman he loves and makes themselves small and miserable.

Bacon, furthermore, talks about the unfettered love that destroys the man. He says that such love devalues the man and make them insignificant in front of others. Moreover, Bacon argues about romantic poetry in which the writer exaggerates the beauty of his beloved unnecessary. To him, such exaggeration is only suitable for romance and writing; they are not applicable in practical life. A paramour who detriments his discriminating influence to transfer flattering words to his woman evidently negotiates with his intellect, and judging power. A proud man will never make his beloved to rule over him by pouring sugarcoated words on her. For Bacon, a wise man must not love as it is impossible to be wise and to love at the same time.

In an unrequited love, the praises and compliment of a man for his beloved woman appear to be a weakness of his character. Moreover, when her woman doesn’t feel responding the paramour, she treats his love as a pitiable weakness of his character. The love of man can result in two things: either the woman will respond to him in the same way or will create an inward feeling of insignificant in a woman for the man. So, Bacon warns, the man before falling in love should understand one thing that it doesn’t harm anything but man’s self-esteem.

Those who see the world as nothing but a place to fulfill their carnal desires destroy themselves. They losses both affluence and wisdom in search or sexual pleasures in the world. Bacon argues that such passions are overwhelmed in the period of prosperity than of adversity. Carnal pleasures get accentuated in the time of both happiness and distress and can be called as “child of folly”. However, these sensual pleasure when are uncontrolled can lead to the destruction of business, wealth, and health.

The army men seem to have a special attraction for love as they have for the wine. Bacon discusses the men’s nature and argues that men have a special inclination towards love for other. He makes his love universal by expanding it towards everyone, no matter such love gentle and kind and people who have some spiritual and religious belonging have this kind of love. In the end, Bacon says that the love that arises from marriage is the root cause of mankind’s creation, while love in friendship makes it perfect but lust corrupts it and embarrass it.

Of Love by Francis Bacon Literary Analysis

The essay “Of Love” is an argumentative essay written by Sir Francis Bacon. Bacon in this essay argues about the various ills of falling in love. He particularly argues about the carnal pleasures and its consequences.

Sir Francis Bacon is a well-known English Essayist and philosopher. He devoted himself to writing along with scientific work and wrote sixty essays. This essay, Of Love, is regarding the love. Love, in today’s world, have influenced a large number of people. The objective of Bacon in this essay is to demonstrate the effect of love on all kinds of people. No matter who you are, you will fall in love with somebody and this love will definitely have an effect on you, and sometimes love makes one do senseless things.

Bacon then talks about the sensual love that drains one’s intelligence. For some people, love is nothing but a source of Carnal pleasure. However, such love if lasted long has hard consequences.

Bacon then talks about the noble and kind love the spiritual people possess. They don’t love a single person or group of people but the entire universe. They are more inclined towards every creation in the universe. Another kind of noble love that Bacon argues about is the love between husband and wife. This love is further dignified with the love of friends.

Conciseness, straightforwardness, wittiness, and compact opinions are the merits that Bacon’s essay cover. The methodical way of inscription makes his essay logical and rational. The subject matter that he argues about is taken from real life experiences and is a hot topic of discussion in every time. The readers find his essay more welcoming and pleasurable. The use of the Latin proverb in his essay shows his high knowledge regarding the Latin language, and it also adds colors to his writing.

The Theme of Love

The theme of love is one of the themes that have appeared in many books or rather works of literature that has been written in the past. This has appeared in many forms; love as a virtue that brings peace and consolation in the society or love as a virtue that causes pain in the society. Following this point, there are various sides that love is shown to the public in different books in the society. One of the books that carry the theme of love is ‘Cold Sassy Tree’ by Olive Ann Burns. The book reveals different forms of love that are exhibited among its characters, in different ways. Whereas love is expected to be genuine and based on one’s choice, love in the book ‘Cold Sassy Tree’ is based more on lust and material things.

To begin with, whereas marriage is built on love, there is a perspective that is explained by some characters in this book that raises eyebrows in regard to their loving one another. In this case, the reader is left wondering whether the love that is exhibited among these characters is genuine or whether it is a fake love. In line with this, the novel begins with a love story between Grandpa Enoch Rucker Blakeslee, who announces that he had intentions of marrying Miss Love Simpson, one of the young girls that worked in his store (Burns 5). To the readers and to some of the characters in this novel, the love between grandpa and Miss Love is questionable since the wife to grandpa, Mattie Lou had died just three weeks earlier. On the other hand, interracial love is depicted in this case whereby the characters in this book do not expect grandpa to marry from people who were outside his race (5).

The genuineness of the love of grandpa to his late is also questionable. Whereas it was expected as a husband in this society to love one’s wife, and thus this love will be there whenever somebody is married, this is not the case in grandpa’s life. While he assures his daughters that it was not disrespect to her late wife for him to remarry just three weeks after her death, what he speaks to Miss Love shows that he had been eyeing her even when his wife was still alive. He says, “I been a-waitin’ for this minute ever since the day I laid my eyes on you!” (Burns 300). This raises the question whether his love to his late wife was a true love as it was expected. On the other hand, one cannot tell whether this love towards Miss Love by Grandpa was genuine since he argues that he loved her the first day he saw her whereas during this time he was married (300). This depicts lust and not love.

The theme of love comes out clearly in this book in different perspective. It is important to observe that there is a high attachment to material things in most relationships that are depicted in this book rather than these relationships being build on love. For example, grandpa argues that when he marries Miss Love Simpson, he would be able to reduce household costs that would have been incurred if he employed a house help (Burns 6). Similarly, he reiterates that he did not want to burden his daughters and therefore, to avoid this, he had to marry (6).

On the contrary, whereas Miss Love is expected to marry Grandpa Enoch Rucker Blakeslee out of love, it becomes evident in the novel that she agreed to marry him because of wealth. In one of the conversations, Miss Love argues that she accepted to marry Grandpa Enoch Rucker Blakeslee since he accepted to deed the house to her together with its furniture (Burns 130). In other words, her love was being bought by Grandpa Enoch Rucker Blakeslee. Thus, without the promise of a house and furniture, Miss Love could not have accepted to marry Grandpa Enoch Rucker Blakeslee since she had no love for him.

There is a lot of irony in the book that brings out the theme of love in a clear way. First, the name Love or rather Miss Love Simpson is an ironic name since this woman did not have any love in her. Instead, she believed in materials things as a way of allowing herself to give out her love to those that required it. To begin with, she accepts nothing less than a house and furniture in order to marry Grandpa Enoch Rucker Blakeslee (Burns 133). On the other hand, she has a high level of lust rather than love in her heart. For example, whereas she knew in her heart that she did not love her former fiancé, she allowed him to kiss her passionately disregarding her married status (137).

The theme of love is also depicted between Grandpa Enoch Rucker and Mattie Lou. From the conversation between Grandpa Enoch Rucker and Miss Love Simpson, there existed a one-sided love. Mattie Lou loved Grandpa Rucker with all her heart and did everything he could to make him happy. In fact, Grandpa Rucker reflects back and narrates to Miss Love that he gave birth to so many children thus endangering her health as she sought for a boy that would enable the lineage of Grandpa Enoch Rucker to continue (Burns 301). However, she also fail in delivering unconditional love to her husband as she is caught up in the web of materialism as a way expressing her love to her husband.

Whereas love is expected to be genuine and based on one’s choice, love in the book ‘Cold Sassy Tree’ is based more on lust and material things. Throughout this book, there are different characters that try to express their love to one another. However, it is notable that their love is based on material things rather than on the choice of one’s heart. Every character in this book that falls in love was found to have a particular attachment to material things in one way or the other. Similarly, there is a strong element of lust with some characters such as Will, Grandpa Rucker, Miss Love and her former fiancé disrespecting marriage because of lusting after other people.

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Love in 'Romeo and Juliet'

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The play "Romeo and Juliet" has become forever associated with love. It's a truly iconic story of romance and passion—even the name “Romeo” is still used to describe enthusiastic young lovers.

But while the romantic love between the titular characters is often what we think of when we consider the love theme in "Romeo and Juliet," Shakespeare ’s treatment of the concept of love is complex and multifaceted. Through different characters and relationships, he portrays some of the various types of love and the different ways it can manifest.

These are some of the expressions of love Shakespeare threads together to create the play.

Shallow Love

Some characters fall in and out of love very quickly in "Romeo and Juliet." For example, Romeo is in "love" with Rosaline at the start of the play, but it is presented as an immature infatuation. Today, we might use the term “puppy love” to describe it. Romeo’s love for Rosaline is shallow, and nobody really believes that it will last, including Friar Laurence:

Romeo: Thou chid'st me oft for loving Rosaline. Friar Laurence: For doting, not for loving, pupil mine. (Act Two, Scene Three)

Similarly, Paris’ love for Juliet is borne out of tradition, not passion. He has identified her as a good candidate for a wife and approaches her father to arrange the marriage. Although this was the tradition at the time, it also says something about Paris’ staid, unpassionate attitude toward love. He even admits to Friar Laurence that in his haste to rush the wedding, he hasn’t discussed it with his bride-to-be:

Friar Laurence: On Thursday, sir? the time is very short. Paris: My father Capulet will have it so; And I am nothing slow to slack his haste. Friar Laurence: You say you do not know the lady's mind: Uneven is the course, I like it not. Paris: Immoderately she weeps for Tybalt's death, And therefore have I little talked of love. (Act Four, Scene One)

Friendly Love

Many of the friendships in the play are as sincere as Romeo and Juliet’s love for one another. The best example of this is in Act Three, Scene One, where Mercutio and Romeo fight Tybalt. When Romeo attempts to bring peace, Mercutio fights back at Tybalt's slander of Romeo. Then, it is out of rage over Mercutio's death that Romeo pursues—and kills—Tybalt:

Romeo: In triumph, and Mercutio slain! Away to heaven, respective lenity, And fire-eyed fury be my conduct now.— Now, Tybalt, take the “villain” back again That late thou gavest me, for Mercutio’s soul Is but a little way above our heads, Staying for thine to keep him company. Either thou or I, or both, must go with him. (Act Three, Scene One)

It is out of friendly love for his companion that Romeo acts out.

Romantic Love

Then, of course, is romantic love, the classic idea of which is embodied in "Romeo and Juliet." In fact, maybe it is "Romeo and Juliet" that has influenced our definition of the concept. The characters are deeply infatuated with one another, so committed to being together that they defy their respective families.

Romeo: By a name I know not how to tell thee who I am. My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself Because it is an enemy to thee. Had I it written, I would tear the word. (Act Two, Scene Two)

Perhaps Romeo and Juliet's love is fate ; their love is given a cosmic significance, which suggests that the universe plays a role in the creation of deep romantic love. Despite their love being disallowed by the Capulet and Montague households , they inevitably—and irresistibly—find themselves drawn together.

Juliet: Prodigious birth of love it is to me That I must love a loathèd enemy. Act One, Scene Five)

All in all, Shakespeare presents romantic love as a force of nature, so strong that it transcends expectations, tradition, and—through the combined suicides of lovers who cannot live without one another—life itself.

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Romeo and Juliet Themes

Themes are the recurrent ideas underlying a creative piece. These central ideas enable readers to view a certain piece from various angles to broaden their understanding. Regarded as one of the most significant and widely read playwrights, Shakespeare has skillfully explored diverse themes such as loyalty, the dichotomy of love and hate, violence, greed, and insanity in his tragedies. “Romeo and Juliet” is perhaps Shakespeare’s most significant contribution with various themes. However, instead of portraying an idyllic romance , this timeless play presents tragic themes governing human life. A few central themes in “Romeo and Juliet” are discussed below.

Themes in “Romeo and Juliet”

The abiding quality of romantic love.

Although presented as a short-term expression of youthful passion, Romeo and Juliet’s love for each other ultimately wins over every form of social constraints. The abiding quality of their selfless love is an essential theme of the play. It serves to reinforce the claim that if authentic lovers cannot be united in this world, they can certainly be together in the life hereafter.

Individual vs. Society

The conflict between individual desires and social institutions is a recurrent theme in “Romeo and Juliet”. The young lovers’ struggle against their respective families is the most important theme. By opting for individual fulfillment as opposed to social traditions, both Romeo and Juliet refuse to follow the commands of their families. They illustrate the triumph of an individual’s will over social customs. On a metaphorical level, this courage highlights the threat that young love poses to the absurd social traditions.

The theme of violence also plays a significant role in the play. Usually, blind passion, hatred and desperation are some instances of violence given throughout “Romeo and Juliet”. Tybalt kills Mercutio though it was not intentional. In order to avenge Mercutio’s death and in a moment of desperation, Romeo kills Tybalt and Paris. Both murders are classic examples of violence. The blind love of Romeo and Juliet that motivate them to commit suicide is another example. These examples show that violence has a vital role in this tragedy .

The Overarching Power of Patriarchy

In “Romeo and Juliet”, most of the significant decisions are made by the men of the two families, the Capulets, and the Montagues. Lady Capulet and Lady Montague’s views are not important. It is clearly displayed by their silent assertion of their husbands’ ideas in the play. It is Lord Capulet who selects Paris as his daughter’s future husband. Then forces Juliet to abide by his decision. Perhaps the most blatant example of the rule of men in the play is the feud between Lord Capulet and Lord Montague. Although their wives don’t harbor any ill-will toward each other, the two Lords force their families to support them in their pointless dispute and keep up their enmity against each other.

The Theme of Death

Death is a theme that lurks throughout the play. In many ways, “Romeo and Juliet” shows the journey of the two lovers from their initial, love-filled meeting up to their death. Thus, death serves as the tragic resolution of various conflicts. For instance, Romeo’s conflict with Tybalt ends with the latter’s death. Moreover, the two young lovers’ conflict with the hostile social conformity ends with their untimely deaths. These tragic losses make the entire play as if it is only a play of deaths.

The Inevitability of Fate

The inevitability of fate is another important thematic concern of “Romeo and Juliet”. The phrase , “star-crossed” refers to the fact that the two lovers were destined to die from the beginning. Hence, aside from a string of poor choices made by the two lovers and their families, the power of fate governs the end of the play. Friar John’s inability to deliver the letter to Romeo on time was inescapable fate and a deadly blow. The letter would have informed Romeo that Juliet was alive. It is the most fatalistic moment in the play that drives Romeo to commit suicide.

The institution of marriage is another important theme in the play. Contrary to popular beliefs, marriage is not shown as a good institution in the play. The play emphasizes the idea that though marriages of the Capulets and Montagues are socially approved, it lacks a soul. On the other hand, the union of Romeo and Juliet is authentic and yet condemned. Moreover, the political motive behind Friar Lawrence’s approval of Romeo and Juliet’s marriage highlights that in the Shakespearean era, marriage was seen as a means to ensure political strength.

Ideological Divide Between the Young and the Old

The ideological divide between the younger and the older generation is also a repetitive theme underlying the play. The impulsivity and youthful exuberance of Romeo, Juliet, Mercutio, and Paris serve as a strong contrast to calculating, the political foresight of Lord Capulet, Lord Montague, and Friar Lawrence. The tragedy of the play is in the fact that both the older and younger generations are unwilling to compromise and end the disagreement for good. They are not willing to resolve their pointless dispute.

The Absurdity Underlying Family Feuds

The absurd legacy of rivalry between the Montagues and the Capulets brings chaos that is shown later in the play. Although the actual reason for enmity between the two families remains undisclosed, it is shown that they are unable to reconcile with each other. It also shows that they have no credible reason for continuing the enmity between them.

In addition to violence, revenge is another destructive element that sustains the action of the play. Hence, it makes an important theme of the play. However, the tragedy carrying the cycle of revenge neither guarantees a good end nor does it lead to poetic justice . For instance, Romeo kills Tybalt in order to seek revenge for Mercutio’s murder. This rash action of Romeo is not tried in the court. Moreover, several other actions that require resolution are not brought to the law. Therefore, revenge seems to have the upper hand.

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Theme Of Love In Romeo And Juliet

Romeo and Juliet is set on a theme of love. Love is a central theme in the play, as Romeo and Juliet fall in love despite the ongoing feud between their families. This tragic story was written by William Shakespeare, and has been adapted numerous times for stage, film, and television.

In William Shakespeare’s play “Romeo and Juliet,” the theme of love is used as a major element to propel the plot forward. He portrays many different types of love and changes his depiction of this topic throughout the play in order to demonstrate the various aspects of affection.

Love is said to be a wonderful thing, and can have many different meanings, not just a feeling but an action. Love is something that can make you do crazy things, and in Romeo and Juliet’s case, it gets them both killed. Love is such a big theme in this story because Romeo and Juliet are two young lovers who are forced to keep their relationship a secret due to their feuding families, the Capulets and the Montagues.

Love makes Romeo and Juliet take risks and do things they normally wouldn’t do, like sneaking around and disobeying their parents. Even though they know the risks, they continue to see each other and eventually get married in secret. Love also leads to tragedy when Romeo kills Juliet’s cousin Tybalt in revenge for him killing Romeo’s friend Mercutio.

This leads to Romeo getting banished from Verona. Juliet fakes her own death in a plan to be reunited, but Romeo believes she is truly dead and kills himself. When Juliet finds Romeo’s corpse beside her, she kills herself as well. In the end, love causes the deaths of Romeo and Juliet, but it is also what brought them together in the first place. Love is a complex emotion that Shakespeare explores in depth through the characters of Romeo and Juliet.

In the first act of “Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare depicts the concept of love in a scene between Romeo and Benvolio, when he discusses his unrequited affection for Rosaline. Here, as Romeo employs oxymorons such as ‘o brawling love, o loving hate,’ it is clear how perplexed he is by his connection with Rosaline since she does not reciprocate his affection.

This oxymoron also foreshadows Romeo’s relationship with Juliet as it is full of conflict. This conflict is a result of the ongoing feud between the Montagues and Capulets, to which Romeo and Juliet belong. In Shakespeare’s day, there would have been great concern about young men and women being able to marry for love, rather than having their parents choose their husband or wife for them.

Love was not seen as something that could last forever, but more as a passing fancy. This is why Romeo and Juliet’s love is so special, because it does manage to conquer all odds and last forever, even though they both die.

The theme of love is also explored through the character of Mercutio. Mercutio is Romeo’s best friend and he does not believe in love, calling it a ‘sickness’ and a ‘notion.’ He thinks that Romeo is just infatuated with Rosaline and will soon get over her.

This is in stark contrast to Romeo, who is completely besotted with Juliet. Mercutio’s views on love are challenged when he meets Tybalt and they fight, leading to Mercutio’s death. Romeo is so distraught by his friend’s death that he kills Tybalt in revenge. This sets off a chain of events which leads to the deaths of Romeo and Juliet.

The theme of love is central to “Romeo and Juliet” and Shakespeare explores it in many different ways. He shows that love can be confused and troublesome, as well as being powerful enough to conquer all. Love is a huge part of our lives today and was just as important in Shakespeare’s time. This is what makes “Romeo and Juliet” such an enduring play, because it speaks to us all about one of the most universal themes there is.

Romeo explains what love is and how he feels powerless in the grip of his emotions, “a sea fed with lovers’ tears,” as he repeats again and again. This shows how Romeo feels tormented by his passion, as well as all the other lovers who have shed tears over their love, and how this is contributing to the sea levels high by nourishing the sea with their tears.

Love is a torment to Romeo as he can no longer be with Juliet and so compares it to a prison in which he is stuck. Love has made Romeo upset and crazy, something which is repeated later on in the play when Romeo meets Tybalt and fights him, against his better judgment, leading to Mercutio’s death. Love has the ability to make people behave irrationally and do things they wouldn’t normally do.

William Shakespeare was an English poet, playwright and actor, widely regarded as both the greatest writer in the English language, and the world’s pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England’s national poet and the “Bard of Avon”. His extant works, including collaborations, consist of approximately 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.

Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare early in his career about two young star-crossed lovers whose deaths ultimately reconcile their feuding families. It was among Shakespeare’s most popular plays during his lifetime and along with Hamlet, is one of his most frequently performed plays. Today, the title characters are regarded as archetypal young lovers. Romeo and Juliet belongs to a tradition of tragic romances stretching back to antiquity.

Its plot is based on an Italian tale translated into verse as The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke in 1562 and retold in prose in Palace of Pleasure by William Painter in 1567. Shakespeare borrowed heavily from both but expanded the plot by developing a number of supporting characters, particularly Mercutio and Paris. Believed to have been written between 1591 and 1595, the play was first published in a quarto version in 1597.

The text of the first quarto version was of poor quality, however, and later editions corrected it. Shakespeare’s use of his poetic dramatic structure (especially effects such as switching between comedy and tragedy to heighten tension, his exploitation of off-stage action, and his use of sub-plot to embellish the story) has been praised as an early sign of his dramatic skill.

The play ascribes different poetic forms to different characters, sometimes changing the form as the character develops. Romeo, for example, grows more adept at the sonnet over the course of the play.

Romeo and Juliet is set on a theme of love. Love is a powerful emotion that can sometimes lead to tragedy. In Romeo and Juliet, love is the cause of much conflict between the two families and leads to the deaths of Romeo and Juliet. Love is a central theme in Romeo and Juliet and is portrayed in many different ways. Shakespeare uses language techniques to help convey this theme to the audience.

Some examples include oxymorons, metaphors and similes. Oxymorons are used to show the contrast between love and hate. Shakespeare uses metaphors to show how love can be both good and bad. Similes are used to show how love can be like a drug. Love is a complex emotion and Shakespeare uses these language techniques to help explored this theme in Romeo and Juliet.

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This essay focuses on personal love, or the love of particular persons as such. Part of the philosophical task in understanding personal love is to distinguish the various kinds of personal love. For example, the way in which I love my wife is seemingly very different from the way I love my mother, my child, and my friend. This task has typically proceeded hand-in-hand with philosophical analyses of these kinds of personal love, analyses that in part respond to various puzzles about love. Can love be justified? If so, how? What is the value of personal love? What impact does love have on the autonomy of both the lover and the beloved?

1. Preliminary Distinctions

2. love as union, 3. love as robust concern, 4.1 love as appraisal of value, 4.2 love as bestowal of value, 4.3 an intermediate position, 5.1 love as emotion proper, 5.2 love as emotion complex, 6. the value and justification of love, other internet resources, related entries.

In ordinary conversations, we often say things like the following:

I love chocolate (or skiing).
I love doing philosophy (or being a father).
I love my dog (or cat).
I love my wife (or mother or child or friend).

However, what is meant by ‘love’ differs from case to case. (1) may be understood as meaning merely that I like this thing or activity very much. In (2) the implication is typically that I find engaging in a certain activity or being a certain kind of person to be a part of my identity and so what makes my life worth living; I might just as well say that I value these. By contrast, (3) and (4) seem to indicate a mode of concern that cannot be neatly assimilated to anything else. Thus, we might understand the sort of love at issue in (4) to be, roughly, a matter of caring about another person as the person she is, for her own sake. (Accordingly, (3) may be understood as a kind of deficient mode of the sort of love we typically reserve for persons.) Philosophical accounts of love have focused primarily on the sort of personal love at issue in (4); such personal love will be the focus here (though see Frankfurt (1999) and Jaworska & Wonderly (2017) for attempts to provide a more general account that applies to non-persons as well).

Even within personal love, philosophers from the ancient Greeks on have traditionally distinguished three notions that can properly be called “love”: eros , agape , and philia . It will be useful to distinguish these three and say something about how contemporary discussions typically blur these distinctions (sometimes intentionally so) or use them for other purposes.

‘ Eros ’ originally meant love in the sense of a kind of passionate desire for an object, typically sexual passion (Liddell et al., 1940). Nygren (1953a,b) describes eros as the “‘love of desire,’ or acquisitive love” and therefore as egocentric (1953b, p. 89). Soble (1989b, 1990) similarly describes eros as “selfish” and as a response to the merits of the beloved—especially the beloved’s goodness or beauty. What is evident in Soble’s description of eros is a shift away from the sexual: to love something in the “erosic” sense (to use the term Soble coins) is to love it in a way that, by being responsive to its merits, is dependent on reasons. Such an understanding of eros is encouraged by Plato’s discussion in the Symposium , in which Socrates understands sexual desire to be a deficient response to physical beauty in particular, a response which ought to be developed into a response to the beauty of a person’s soul and, ultimately, into a response to the form, Beauty.

Soble’s intent in understanding eros to be a reason-dependent sort of love is to articulate a sharp contrast with agape , a sort of love that does not respond to the value of its object. ‘ Agape ’ has come, primarily through the Christian tradition, to mean the sort of love God has for us persons, as well as our love for God and, by extension, of our love for each other—a kind of brotherly love. In the paradigm case of God’s love for us, agape is “spontaneous and unmotivated,” revealing not that we merit that love but that God’s nature is love (Nygren 1953b, p. 85). Rather than responding to antecedent value in its object, agape instead is supposed to create value in its object and therefore to initiate our fellowship with God (pp. 87–88). Consequently, Badhwar (2003, p. 58) characterizes agape as “independent of the loved individual’s fundamental characteristics as the particular person she is”; and Soble (1990, p. 5) infers that agape , in contrast to eros , is therefore not reason dependent but is rationally “incomprehensible,” admitting at best of causal or historical explanations. [ 1 ]

Finally, ‘ philia ’ originally meant a kind of affectionate regard or friendly feeling towards not just one’s friends but also possibly towards family members, business partners, and one’s country at large (Liddell et al., 1940; Cooper, 1977). Like eros , philia is generally (but not universally) understood to be responsive to (good) qualities in one’s beloved. This similarity between eros and philia has led Thomas (1987) to wonder whether the only difference between romantic love and friendship is the sexual involvement of the former—and whether that is adequate to account for the real differences we experience. The distinction between eros and philia becomes harder to draw with Soble’s attempt to diminish the importance of the sexual in eros (1990).

Maintaining the distinctions among eros , agape , and philia becomes even more difficult when faced with contemporary theories of love (including romantic love) and friendship. For, as discussed below, some theories of romantic love understand it along the lines of the agape tradition as creating value in the beloved (cf. Section 4.2 ), and other accounts of romantic love treat sexual activity as merely the expression of what otherwise looks very much like friendship.

Given the focus here on personal love, Christian conceptions of God’s love for persons (and vice versa ) will be omitted, and the distinction between eros and philia will be blurred—as it typically is in contemporary accounts. Instead, the focus here will be on these contemporary understandings of love, including romantic love, understood as an attitude we take towards other persons. [ 2 ]

In providing an account of love, philosophical analyses must be careful to distinguish love from other positive attitudes we take towards persons, such as liking. Intuitively, love differs from such attitudes as liking in terms of its “depth,” and the problem is to elucidate the kind of “depth” we intuitively find love to have. Some analyses do this in part by providing thin conceptions of what liking amounts to. Thus, Singer (1991) and Brown (1987) understand liking to be a matter of desiring, an attitude that at best involves its object having only instrumental (and not intrinsic) value. Yet this seems inadequate: surely there are attitudes towards persons intermediate between having a desire with a person as its object and loving the person. I can care about a person for her own sake and not merely instrumentally, and yet such caring does not on its own amount to (non-deficiently) loving her, for it seems I can care about my dog in exactly the same way, a kind of caring which is insufficiently personal for love.

It is more common to distinguish loving from liking via the intuition that the “depth” of love is to be explained in terms of a notion of identification: to love someone is somehow to identify yourself with him, whereas no such notion of identification is involved in liking. As Nussbaum puts it, “The choice between one potential love and another can feel, and be, like a choice of a way of life, a decision to dedicate oneself to these values rather than these” (1990, p. 328); liking clearly does not have this sort of “depth” (see also Helm 2010; Bagley 2015). Whether love involves some kind of identification, and if so exactly how to understand such identification, is a central bone of contention among the various analyses of love. In particular, Whiting (2013) argues that the appeal to a notion of identification distorts our understanding of the sort of motivation love can provide, for taken literally it implies that love motivates through self -interest rather than through the beloved’s interests. Thus, Whiting argues, central to love is the possibility that love takes the lover “outside herself”, potentially forgetting herself in being moved directly by the interests of the beloved. (Of course, we need not take the notion of identification literally in this way: in identifying with one’s beloved, one might have a concern for one’s beloved that is analogous to one’s concern for oneself; see Helm 2010.)

Another common way to distinguish love from other personal attitudes is in terms of a distinctive kind of evaluation, which itself can account for love’s “depth.” Again, whether love essentially involves a distinctive kind of evaluation, and if so how to make sense of that evaluation, is hotly disputed. Closely related to questions of evaluation are questions of justification: can we justify loving or continuing to love a particular person, and if so, how? For those who think the justification of love is possible, it is common to understand such justification in terms of evaluation, and the answers here affect various accounts’ attempts to make sense of the kind of constancy or commitment love seems to involve, as well as the sense in which love is directed at particular individuals.

In what follows, theories of love are tentatively and hesitantly classified into four types: love as union, love as robust concern, love as valuing, and love as an emotion. It should be clear, however, that particular theories classified under one type sometimes also include, without contradiction, ideas central to other types. The types identified here overlap to some extent, and in some cases classifying particular theories may involve excessive pigeonholing. (Such cases are noted below.) Part of the classificatory problem is that many accounts of love are quasi-reductionistic, understanding love in terms of notions like affection, evaluation, attachment, etc., which themselves never get analyzed. Even when these accounts eschew explicitly reductionistic language, very often little attempt is made to show how one such “aspect” of love is conceptually connected to others. As a result, there is no clear and obvious way to classify particular theories, let alone identify what the relevant classes should be.

The union view claims that love consists in the formation of (or the desire to form) some significant kind of union, a “we.” A central task for union theorists, therefore, is to spell out just what such a “we” comes to—whether it is literally a new entity in the world somehow composed of the lover and the beloved, or whether it is merely metaphorical. Variants of this view perhaps go back to Aristotle (cf. Sherman 1993) and can also be found in Montaigne ([E]) and Hegel (1997); contemporary proponents include Solomon (1981, 1988), Scruton (1986), Nozick (1989), Fisher (1990), and Delaney (1996).

Scruton, writing in particular about romantic love, claims that love exists “just so soon as reciprocity becomes community: that is, just so soon as all distinction between my interests and your interests is overcome” (1986, p. 230). The idea is that the union is a union of concern, so that when I act out of that concern it is not for my sake alone or for your sake alone but for our sake. Fisher (1990) holds a similar, but somewhat more moderate view, claiming that love is a partial fusion of the lovers’ cares, concerns, emotional responses, and actions. What is striking about both Scruton and Fisher is the claim that love requires the actual union of the lovers’ concerns, for it thus becomes clear that they conceive of love not so much as an attitude we take towards another but as a relationship: the distinction between your interests and mine genuinely disappears only when we together come to have shared cares, concerns, etc., and my merely having a certain attitude towards you is not enough for love. This provides content to the notion of a “we” as the (metaphorical?) subject of these shared cares and concerns, and as that for whose sake we act.

Solomon (1988) offers a union view as well, though one that tries “to make new sense out of ‘love’ through a literal rather than metaphoric sense of the ‘fusion’ of two souls” (p. 24, cf. Solomon 1981; however, it is unclear exactly what he means by a “soul” here and so how love can be a “literal” fusion of two souls). What Solomon has in mind is the way in which, through love, the lovers redefine their identities as persons in terms of the relationship: “Love is the concentration and the intensive focus of mutual definition on a single individual, subjecting virtually every personal aspect of one’s self to this process” (1988, p. 197). The result is that lovers come to share the interests, roles, virtues, and so on that constitute what formerly was two individual identities but now has become a shared identity, and they do so in part by each allowing the other to play an important role in defining his own identity.

Nozick (1989) offers a union view that differs from those of Scruton, Fisher, and Solomon in that Nozick thinks that what is necessary for love is merely the desire to form a “we,” together with the desire that your beloved reciprocates. Nonetheless, he claims that this “we” is “a new entity in the world…created by a new web of relationships between [the lovers] which makes them no longer separate” (p. 70). In spelling out this web of relationships, Nozick appeals to the lovers “pooling” not only their well-beings, in the sense that the well-being of each is tied up with that of the other, but also their autonomy, in that “each transfers some previous rights to make certain decisions unilaterally into a joint pool” (p. 71). In addition, Nozick claims, the lovers each acquire a new identity as a part of the “we,” a new identity constituted by their (a) wanting to be perceived publicly as a couple, (b) their attending to their pooled well-being, and (c) their accepting a “certain kind of division of labor” (p. 72):

A person in a we might find himself coming across something interesting to read yet leaving it for the other person, not because he himself would not be interested in it but because the other would be more interested, and one of them reading it is sufficient for it to be registered by the wider identity now shared, the we . [ 3 ]

Opponents of the union view have seized on claims like this as excessive: union theorists, they claim, take too literally the ontological commitments of this notion of a “we.” This leads to two specific criticisms of the union view. The first is that union views do away with individual autonomy. Autonomy, it seems, involves a kind of independence on the part of the autonomous agent, such that she is in control over not only what she does but also who she is, as this is constituted by her interests, values, concerns, etc. However, union views, by doing away with a clear distinction between your interests and mine, thereby undermine this sort of independence and so undermine the autonomy of the lovers. If autonomy is a part of the individual’s good, then, on the union view, love is to this extent bad; so much the worse for the union view (Singer 1994; Soble 1997). Moreover, Singer (1994) argues that a necessary part of having your beloved be the object of your love is respect for your beloved as the particular person she is, and this requires respecting her autonomy.

Union theorists have responded to this objection in several ways. Nozick (1989) seems to think of a loss of autonomy in love as a desirable feature of the sort of union lovers can achieve. Fisher (1990), somewhat more reluctantly, claims that the loss of autonomy in love is an acceptable consequence of love. Yet without further argument these claims seem like mere bullet biting. Solomon (1988, pp. 64ff) describes this “tension” between union and autonomy as “the paradox of love.” However, this a view that Soble (1997) derides: merely to call it a paradox, as Solomon does, is not to face up to the problem.

The second criticism involves a substantive view concerning love. Part of what it is to love someone, these opponents say, is to have concern for him for his sake. However, union views make such concern unintelligible and eliminate the possibility of both selfishness and self-sacrifice, for by doing away with the distinction between my interests and your interests they have in effect turned your interests into mine and vice versa (Soble 1997; see also Blum 1980, 1993). Some advocates of union views see this as a point in their favor: we need to explain how it is I can have concern for people other than myself, and the union view apparently does this by understanding your interests to be part of my own. And Delaney, responding to an apparent tension between our desire to be loved unselfishly (for fear of otherwise being exploited) and our desire to be loved for reasons (which presumably are attractive to our lover and hence have a kind of selfish basis), says (1996, p. 346):

Given my view that the romantic ideal is primarily characterized by a desire to achieve a profound consolidation of needs and interests through the formation of a we , I do not think a little selfishness of the sort described should pose a worry to either party.

The objection, however, lies precisely in this attempt to explain my concern for my beloved egoistically. As Whiting (1991, p. 10) puts it, such an attempt “strikes me as unnecessary and potentially objectionable colonization”: in love, I ought to be concerned with my beloved for her sake, and not because I somehow get something out of it. (This can be true whether my concern with my beloved is merely instrumental to my good or whether it is partly constitutive of my good.)

Although Whiting’s and Soble’s criticisms here succeed against the more radical advocates of the union view, they in part fail to acknowledge the kernel of truth to be gleaned from the idea of union. Whiting’s way of formulating the second objection in terms of an unnecessary egoism in part points to a way out: we persons are in part social creatures, and love is one profound mode of that sociality. Indeed, part of the point of union accounts is to make sense of this social dimension: to make sense of a way in which we can sometimes identify ourselves with others not merely in becoming interdependent with them (as Singer 1994, p. 165, suggests, understanding ‘interdependence’ to be a kind of reciprocal benevolence and respect) but rather in making who we are as persons be constituted in part by those we love (cf., e.g., Rorty 1986/1993; Nussbaum 1990).

Along these lines, Friedman (1998), taking her inspiration in part from Delaney (1996), argues that we should understand the sort of union at issue in love to be a kind of federation of selves:

On the federation model, a third unified entity is constituted by the interaction of the lovers, one which involves the lovers acting in concert across a range of conditions and for a range of purposes. This concerted action, however, does not erase the existence of the two lovers as separable and separate agents with continuing possibilities for the exercise of their own respective agencies. [p. 165]

Given that on this view the lovers do not give up their individual identities, there is no principled reason why the union view cannot make sense of the lover’s concern for her beloved for his sake. [ 4 ] Moreover, Friedman argues, once we construe union as federation, we can see that autonomy is not a zero-sum game; rather, love can both directly enhance the autonomy of each and promote the growth of various skills, like realistic and critical self-evaluation, that foster autonomy.

Nonetheless, this federation model is not without its problems—problems that affect other versions of the union view as well. For if the federation (or the “we”, as on Nozick’s view) is understood as a third entity, we need a clearer account than has been given of its ontological status and how it comes to be. Relevant here is the literature on shared intention and plural subjects. Gilbert (1989, 1996, 2000) has argued that we should take quite seriously the existence of a plural subject as an entity over and above its constituent members. Others, such as Tuomela (1984, 1995), Searle (1990), and Bratman (1999) are more cautious, treating such talk of “us” having an intention as metaphorical.

As this criticism of the union view indicates, many find caring about your beloved for her sake to be a part of what it is to love her. The robust concern view of love takes this to be the central and defining feature of love (cf. Taylor 1976; Newton-Smith 1989; Soble 1990, 1997; LaFollette 1996; Frankfurt 1999; White 2001). As Taylor puts it:

To summarize: if x loves y then x wants to benefit and be with y etc., and he has these wants (or at least some of them) because he believes y has some determinate characteristics ψ in virtue of which he thinks it worth while to benefit and be with y . He regards satisfaction of these wants as an end and not as a means towards some other end. [p. 157]

In conceiving of my love for you as constituted by my concern for you for your sake, the robust concern view rejects the idea, central to the union view, that love is to be understood in terms of the (literal or metaphorical) creation of a “we”: I am the one who has this concern for you, though it is nonetheless disinterested and so not egoistic insofar as it is for your sake rather than for my own. [ 5 ]

At the heart of the robust concern view is the idea that love “is neither affective nor cognitive. It is volitional” (Frankfurt 1999, p. 129; see also Martin 2015). Frankfurt continues:

That a person cares about or that he loves something has less to do with how things make him feel, or with his opinions about them, than with the more or less stable motivational structures that shape his preferences and that guide and limit his conduct.

This account analyzes caring about someone for her sake as a matter of being motivated in certain ways, in part as a response to what happens to one’s beloved. Of course, to understand love in terms of desires is not to leave other emotional responses out in the cold, for these emotions should be understood as consequences of desires. Thus, just as I can be emotionally crushed when one of my strong desires is disappointed, so too I can be emotionally crushed when things similarly go badly for my beloved. In this way Frankfurt (1999) tacitly, and White (2001) more explicitly, acknowledge the way in which my caring for my beloved for her sake results in my identity being transformed through her influence insofar as I become vulnerable to things that happen to her.

Not all robust concern theorists seem to accept this line, however; in particular, Taylor (1976) and Soble (1990) seem to have a strongly individualistic conception of persons that prevents my identity being bound up with my beloved in this sort of way, a kind of view that may seem to undermine the intuitive “depth” that love seems to have. (For more on this point, see Rorty 1986/1993.) In the middle is Stump (2006), who follows Aquinas in understanding love to involve not only the desire for your beloved’s well-being but also a desire for a certain kind of relationship with your beloved—as a parent or spouse or sibling or priest or friend, for example—a relationship within which you share yourself with and connect yourself to your beloved. [ 6 ]

One source of worry about the robust concern view is that it involves too passive an understanding of one’s beloved (Ebels-Duggan 2008). The thought is that on the robust concern view the lover merely tries to discover what the beloved’s well-being consists in and then acts to promote that, potentially by thwarting the beloved’s own efforts when the lover thinks those efforts would harm her well-being. This, however, would be disrespectful and demeaning, not the sort of attitude that love is. What robust concern views seem to miss, Ebels-Duggan suggests, is the way love involves interacting agents, each with a capacity for autonomy the recognition and engagement with which is an essential part of love. In response, advocates of the robust concern view might point out that promoting someone’s well-being normally requires promoting her autonomy (though they may maintain that this need not always be true: that paternalism towards a beloved can sometimes be justified and appropriate as an expression of one’s love). Moreover, we might plausibly think, it is only through the exercise of one’s autonomy that one can define one’s own well-being as a person, so that a lover’s failure to respect the beloved’s autonomy would be a failure to promote her well-being and therefore not an expression of love, contrary to what Ebels-Duggan suggests. Consequently, it might seem, robust concern views can counter this objection by offering an enriched conception of what it is to be a person and so of the well-being of persons.

Another source of worry is that the robust concern view offers too thin a conception of love. By emphasizing robust concern, this view understands other features we think characteristic of love, such as one’s emotional responsiveness to one’s beloved, to be the effects of that concern rather than constituents of it. Thus Velleman (1999) argues that robust concern views, by understanding love merely as a matter of aiming at a particular end (viz., the welfare of one’s beloved), understand love to be merely conative. However, he claims, love can have nothing to do with desires, offering as a counterexample the possibility of loving a troublemaking relation whom you do not want to be with, whose well being you do not want to promote, etc. Similarly, Badhwar (2003) argues that such a “teleological” view of love makes it mysterious how “we can continue to love someone long after death has taken him beyond harm or benefit” (p. 46). Moreover Badhwar argues, if love is essentially a desire, then it implies that we lack something; yet love does not imply this and, indeed, can be felt most strongly at times when we feel our lives most complete and lacking in nothing. Consequently, Velleman and Badhwar conclude, love need not involve any desire or concern for the well-being of one’s beloved.

This conclusion, however, seems too hasty, for such examples can be accommodated within the robust concern view. Thus, the concern for your relative in Velleman’s example can be understood to be present but swamped by other, more powerful desires to avoid him. Indeed, keeping the idea that you want to some degree to benefit him, an idea Velleman rejects, seems to be essential to understanding the conceptual tension between loving someone and not wanting to help him, a tension Velleman does not fully acknowledge. Similarly, continued love for someone who has died can be understood on the robust concern view as parasitic on the former love you had for him when he was still alive: your desires to benefit him get transformed, through your subsequent understanding of the impossibility of doing so, into wishes. [ 7 ] Finally, the idea of concern for your beloved’s well-being need not imply the idea that you lack something, for such concern can be understood in terms of the disposition to be vigilant for occasions when you can come to his aid and consequently to have the relevant occurrent desires. All of this seems fully compatible with the robust concern view.

One might also question whether Velleman and Badhwar make proper use of their examples of loving your meddlesome relation or someone who has died. For although we can understand these as genuine cases of love, they are nonetheless deficient cases and ought therefore be understood as parasitic on the standard cases. Readily to accommodate such deficient cases of love into a philosophical analysis as being on a par with paradigm cases, and to do so without some special justification, is dubious.

Nonetheless, the robust concern view as it stands does not seem properly able to account for the intuitive “depth” of love and so does not seem properly to distinguish loving from liking. Although, as noted above, the robust concern view can begin to make some sense of the way in which the lover’s identity is altered by the beloved, it understands this only an effect of love, and not as a central part of what love consists in.

This vague thought is nicely developed by Wonderly (2017), who emphasizes that in addition to the sort of disinterested concern for another that is central to robust-concern accounts of love, an essential part of at least romantic love is the idea that in loving someone I must find them to be not merely important for their own sake but also important to me . Wonderly (2017) fleshes out what this “importance to me” involves in terms of the idea of attachment (developed in Wonderly 2016) that she argues can make sense of the intimacy and depth of love from within what remains fundamentally a robust-concern account. [ 8 ]

4. Love as Valuing

A third kind of view of love understands love to be a distinctive mode of valuing a person. As the distinction between eros and agape in Section 1 indicates, there are at least two ways to construe this in terms of whether the lover values the beloved because she is valuable, or whether the beloved comes to be valuable to the lover as a result of her loving him. The former view, which understands the lover as appraising the value of the beloved in loving him, is the topic of Section 4.1 , whereas the latter view, which understands her as bestowing value on him, will be discussed in Section 4.2 .

Velleman (1999, 2008) offers an appraisal view of love, understanding love to be fundamentally a matter of acknowledging and responding in a distinctive way to the value of the beloved. (For a very different appraisal view of love, see Kolodny 2003.) Understanding this more fully requires understanding both the kind of value of the beloved to which one responds and the distinctive kind of response to such value that love is. Nonetheless, it should be clear that what makes an account be an appraisal view of love is not the mere fact that love is understood to involve appraisal; many other accounts do so, and it is typical of robust concern accounts, for example (cf. the quote from Taylor above , Section 3 ). Rather, appraisal views are distinctive in understanding love to consist in that appraisal.

In articulating the kind of value love involves, Velleman, following Kant, distinguishes dignity from price. To have a price , as the economic metaphor suggests, is to have a value that can be compared to the value of other things with prices, such that it is intelligible to exchange without loss items of the same value. By contrast, to have dignity is to have a value such that comparisons of relative value become meaningless. Material goods are normally understood to have prices, but we persons have dignity: no substitution of one person for another can preserve exactly the same value, for something of incomparable worth would be lost (and gained) in such a substitution.

On this Kantian view, our dignity as persons consists in our rational nature: our capacity both to be actuated by reasons that we autonomously provide ourselves in setting our own ends and to respond appropriately to the intrinsic values we discover in the world. Consequently, one important way in which we exercise our rational natures is to respond with respect to the dignity of other persons (a dignity that consists in part in their capacity for respect): respect just is the required minimal response to the dignity of persons. What makes a response to a person be that of respect, Velleman claims, still following Kant, is that it “arrests our self-love” and thereby prevents us from treating him as a means to our ends (p. 360).

Given this, Velleman claims that love is similarly a response to the dignity of persons, and as such it is the dignity of the object of our love that justifies that love. However, love and respect are different kinds of responses to the same value. For love arrests not our self-love but rather

our tendencies toward emotional self-protection from another person, tendencies to draw ourselves in and close ourselves off from being affected by him. Love disarms our emotional defenses; it makes us vulnerable to the other. [1999, p. 361]

This means that the concern, attraction, sympathy, etc. that we normally associate with love are not constituents of love but are rather its normal effects, and love can remain without them (as in the case of the love for a meddlesome relative one cannot stand being around). Moreover, this provides Velleman with a clear account of the intuitive “depth” of love: it is essentially a response to persons as such, and to say that you love your dog is therefore to be confused.

Of course, we do not respond with love to the dignity of every person we meet, nor are we somehow required to: love, as the disarming of our emotional defenses in a way that makes us especially vulnerable to another, is the optional maximal response to others’ dignity. What, then, explains the selectivity of love—why I love some people and not others? The answer lies in the contingent fit between the way some people behaviorally express their dignity as persons and the way I happen to respond to those expressions by becoming emotionally vulnerable to them. The right sort of fit makes someone “lovable” by me (1999, p. 372), and my responding with love in these cases is a matter of my “really seeing” this person in a way that I fail to do with others who do not fit with me in this way. By ‘lovable’ here Velleman seems to mean able to be loved, not worthy of being loved, for nothing Velleman says here speaks to a question about the justification of my loving this person rather than that. Rather, what he offers is an explanation of the selectivity of my love, an explanation that as a matter of fact makes my response be that of love rather than mere respect.

This understanding of the selectivity of love as something that can be explained but not justified is potentially troubling. For we ordinarily think we can justify not only my loving you rather than someone else but also and more importantly the constancy of my love: my continuing to love you even as you change in certain fundamental ways (but not others). As Delaney (1996, p. 347) puts the worry about constancy:

while you seem to want it to be true that, were you to become a schmuck, your lover would continue to love you,…you also want it to be the case that your lover would never love a schmuck.

The issue here is not merely that we can offer explanations of the selectivity of my love, of why I do not love schmucks; rather, at issue is the discernment of love, of loving and continuing to love for good reasons as well as of ceasing to love for good reasons. To have these good reasons seems to involve attributing different values to you now rather than formerly or rather than to someone else, yet this is precisely what Velleman denies is the case in making the distinction between love and respect the way he does.

It is also questionable whether Velleman can even explain the selectivity of love in terms of the “fit” between your expressions and my sensitivities. For the relevant sensitivities on my part are emotional sensitivities: the lowering of my emotional defenses and so becoming emotionally vulnerable to you. Thus, I become vulnerable to the harms (or goods) that befall you and so sympathetically feel your pain (or joy). Such emotions are themselves assessable for warrant, and now we can ask why my disappointment that you lost the race is warranted, but my being disappointed that a mere stranger lost would not be warranted. The intuitive answer is that I love you but not him. However, this answer is unavailable to Velleman, because he thinks that what makes my response to your dignity that of love rather than respect is precisely that I feel such emotions, and to appeal to my love in explaining the emotions therefore seems viciously circular.

Although these problems are specific to Velleman’s account, the difficulty can be generalized to any appraisal account of love (such as that offered in Kolodny 2003). For if love is an appraisal, it needs to be distinguished from other forms of appraisal, including our evaluative judgments. On the one hand, to try to distinguish love as an appraisal from other appraisals in terms of love’s having certain effects on our emotional and motivational life (as on Velleman’s account) is unsatisfying because it ignores part of what needs to be explained: why the appraisal of love has these effects and yet judgments with the same evaluative content do not. Indeed, this question is crucial if we are to understand the intuitive “depth” of love, for without an answer to this question we do not understand why love should have the kind of centrality in our lives it manifestly does. [ 9 ] On the other hand, to bundle this emotional component into the appraisal itself would be to turn the view into either the robust concern view ( Section 3 ) or a variant of the emotion view ( Section 5.1 ).

In contrast to Velleman, Singer (1991, 1994, 2009) understands love to be fundamentally a matter of bestowing value on the beloved. To bestow value on another is to project a kind of intrinsic value onto him. Indeed, this fact about love is supposed to distinguish love from liking: “Love is an attitude with no clear objective,” whereas liking is inherently teleological (1991, p. 272). As such, there are no standards of correctness for bestowing such value, and this is how love differs from other personal attitudes like gratitude, generosity, and condescension: “love…confers importance no matter what the object is worth” (p. 273). Consequently, Singer thinks, love is not an attitude that can be justified in any way.

What is it, exactly, to bestow this kind of value on someone? It is, Singer says, a kind of attachment and commitment to the beloved, in which one comes to treat him as an end in himself and so to respond to his ends, interests, concerns, etc. as having value for their own sake. This means in part that the bestowal of value reveals itself “by caring about the needs and interests of the beloved, by wishing to benefit or protect her, by delighting in her achievements,” etc. (p. 270). This sounds very much like the robust concern view, yet the bestowal view differs in understanding such robust concern to be the effect of the bestowal of value that is love rather than itself what constitutes love: in bestowing value on my beloved, I make him be valuable in such a way that I ought to respond with robust concern.

For it to be intelligible that I have bestowed value on someone, I must therefore respond appropriately to him as valuable, and this requires having some sense of what his well-being is and of what affects that well-being positively or negatively. Yet having this sense requires in turn knowing what his strengths and deficiencies are, and this is a matter of appraising him in various ways. Bestowal thus presupposes a kind of appraisal, as a way of “really seeing” the beloved and attending to him. Nonetheless, Singer claims, it is the bestowal that is primary for understanding what love consists in: the appraisal is required only so that the commitment to one’s beloved and his value as thus bestowed has practical import and is not “a blind submission to some unknown being” (1991, p. 272; see also Singer 1994, pp. 139ff).

Singer is walking a tightrope in trying to make room for appraisal in his account of love. Insofar as the account is fundamentally a bestowal account, Singer claims that love cannot be justified, that we bestow the relevant kind of value “gratuitously.” This suggests that love is blind, that it does not matter what our beloved is like, which seems patently false. Singer tries to avoid this conclusion by appealing to the role of appraisal: it is only because we appraise another as having certain virtues and vices that we come to bestow value on him. Yet the “because” here, since it cannot justify the bestowal, is at best a kind of contingent causal explanation. [ 10 ] In this respect, Singer’s account of the selectivity of love is much the same as Velleman’s, and it is liable to the same criticism: it makes unintelligible the way in which our love can be discerning for better or worse reasons. Indeed, this failure to make sense of the idea that love can be justified is a problem for any bestowal view. For either (a) a bestowal itself cannot be justified (as on Singer’s account), in which case the justification of love is impossible, or (b) a bestowal can be justified, in which case it is hard to make sense of value as being bestowed rather than there antecedently in the object as the grounds of that “bestowal.”

More generally, a proponent of the bestowal view needs to be much clearer than Singer is in articulating precisely what a bestowal is. What is the value that I create in a bestowal, and how can my bestowal create it? On a crude Humean view, the answer might be that the value is something projected onto the world through my pro-attitudes, like desire. Yet such a view would be inadequate, since the projected value, being relative to a particular individual, would do no theoretical work, and the account would essentially be a variant of the robust concern view. Moreover, in providing a bestowal account of love, care is needed to distinguish love from other personal attitudes such as admiration and respect: do these other attitudes involve bestowal? If so, how does the bestowal in these cases differ from the bestowal of love? If not, why not, and what is so special about love that requires a fundamentally different evaluative attitude than admiration and respect?

Nonetheless, there is a kernel of truth in the bestowal view: there is surely something right about the idea that love is creative and not merely a response to antecedent value, and accounts of love that understand the kind of evaluation implicit in love merely in terms of appraisal seem to be missing something. Precisely what may be missed will be discussed below in Section 6 .

Perhaps there is room for an understanding of love and its relation to value that is intermediate between appraisal and bestowal accounts. After all, if we think of appraisal as something like perception, a matter of responding to what is out there in the world, and of bestowal as something like action, a matter of doing something and creating something, we should recognize that the responsiveness central to appraisal may itself depend on our active, creative choices. Thus, just as we must recognize that ordinary perception depends on our actively directing our attention and deploying concepts, interpretations, and even arguments in order to perceive things accurately, so too we might think our vision of our beloved’s valuable properties that is love also depends on our actively attending to and interpreting him. Something like this is Jollimore’s view (2011). According to Jollimore, in loving someone we actively attend to his valuable properties in a way that we take to provide us with reasons to treat him preferentially. Although we may acknowledge that others might have such properties even to a greater degree than our beloved does, we do not attend to and appreciate such properties in others in the same way we do those in our beloveds; indeed, we find our appreciation of our beloved’s valuable properties to “silence” our similar appreciation of those in others. (In this way, Jollimore thinks, we can solve the problem of fungibility, discussed below in Section 6 .) Likewise, in perceiving our beloved’s actions and character, we do so through the lens of such an appreciation, which will tend as to “silence” interpretations inconsistent with that appreciation. In this way, love involves finding one’s beloved to be valuable in a way that involves elements of both appraisal (insofar as one must thereby be responsive to valuable properties one’s beloved really has) and bestowal (insofar as through one’s attention and committed appreciation of these properties they come to have special significance for one).

One might object that this conception of love as silencing the special value of others or to negative interpretations of our beloveds is irrational in a way that love is not. For, it might seem, such “silencing” is merely a matter of our blinding ourselves to how things really are. Yet Jollimore claims that this sense in which love is blind is not objectionable, for (a) we can still intellectually recognize the things that love’s vision silences, and (b) there really is no impartial perspective we can take on the values things have, and love is one appropriate sort of partial perspective from which the value of persons can be manifest. Nonetheless, one might wonder about whether that perspective of love itself can be distorted and what the norms are in terms of which such distortions are intelligible. Furthermore, it may seem that Jollimore’s attempt to reconcile appraisal and bestowal fails to appreciate the underlying metaphysical difficulty: appraisal is a response to value that is antecedently there, whereas bestowal is the creation of value that was not antecedently there. Consequently, it might seem, appraisal and bestowal are mutually exclusive and cannot be reconciled in the way Jollimore hopes.

Whereas Jollimore tries to combine separate elements of appraisal and of bestowal in a single account, Helm (2010) and Bagley (2015) offer accounts that reject the metaphysical presupposition that values must be either prior to love (as with appraisal) or posterior to love (as with bestowal), instead understanding the love and the values to emerge simultaneously. Thus, Helm presents a detailed account of valuing in terms of the emotions, arguing that while we can understand individual emotions as appraisals , responding to values already their in their objects, these values are bestowed on those objects via broad, holistic patterns of emotions. How this amounts to an account of love will be discussed in Section 5.2 , below. Bagley (2015) instead appeals to a metaphor of improvisation, arguing that just as jazz musicians jointly make determinate the content of their musical ideas through on-going processes of their expression, so too lovers jointly engage in “deep improvisation”, thereby working out of their values and identities through the on-going process of living their lives together. These values are thus something the lovers jointly construct through the process of recognizing and responding to those very values. To love someone is thus to engage with them as partners in such “deep improvisation”. (This account is similar to Helm (2008, 2010)’s account of plural agency, which he uses to provide an account of friendship and other loving relationships; see the discussion of shared activity in the entry on friendship .)

5. Emotion Views

Given these problems with the accounts of love as valuing, perhaps we should turn to the emotions. For emotions just are responses to objects that combine evaluation, motivation, and a kind of phenomenology, all central features of the attitude of love.

Many accounts of love claim that it is an emotion; these include: Wollheim 1984, Rorty 1986/1993, Brown 1987, Hamlyn 1989, Baier 1991, and Badhwar 2003. [ 11 ] Thus, Hamlyn (1989, p. 219) says:

It would not be a plausible move to defend any theory of the emotions to which love and hate seemed exceptions by saying that love and hate are after all not emotions. I have heard this said, but it does seem to me a desperate move to make. If love and hate are not emotions what is?

The difficulty with this claim, as Rorty (1980) argues, is that the word, ‘emotion,’ does not seem to pick out a homogeneous collection of mental states, and so various theories claiming that love is an emotion mean very different things. Consequently, what are here labeled “emotion views” are divided into those that understand love to be a particular kind of evaluative-cum-motivational response to an object, whether that response is merely occurrent or dispositional (‘emotions proper,’ see Section 5.1 , below), and those that understand love to involve a collection of related and interconnected emotions proper (‘emotion complexes,’ see Section 5.2 , below).

An emotion proper is a kind of “evaluative-cum-motivational response to an object”; what does this mean? Emotions are generally understood to have several objects. The target of an emotion is that at which the emotion is directed: if I am afraid or angry at you, then you are the target. In responding to you with fear or anger, I am implicitly evaluating you in a particular way, and this evaluation—called the formal object —is the kind of evaluation of the target that is distinctive of a particular emotion type. Thus, in fearing you, I implicitly evaluate you as somehow dangerous, whereas in being angry at you I implicitly evaluate you as somehow offensive. Yet emotions are not merely evaluations of their targets; they in part motivate us to behave in certain ways, both rationally (by motivating action to avoid the danger) and arationally (via certain characteristic expressions, such as slamming a door out of anger). Moreover, emotions are generally understood to involve a phenomenological component, though just how to understand the characteristic “feel” of an emotion and its relation to the evaluation and motivation is hotly disputed. Finally, emotions are typically understood to be passions: responses that we feel imposed on us as if from the outside, rather than anything we actively do. (For more on the philosophy of emotions, see entry on emotion .)

What then are we saying when we say that love is an emotion proper? According to Brown (1987, p. 14), emotions as occurrent mental states are “abnormal bodily changes caused by the agent’s evaluation or appraisal of some object or situation that the agent believes to be of concern to him or her.” He spells this out by saying that in love, we “cherish” the person for having “a particular complex of instantiated qualities” that is “open-ended” so that we can continue to love the person even as she changes over time (pp. 106–7). These qualities, which include historical and relational qualities, are evaluated in love as worthwhile. [ 12 ] All of this seems aimed at spelling out what love’s formal object is, a task that is fundamental to understanding love as an emotion proper. Thus, Brown seems to say that love’s formal object is just being worthwhile (or, given his examples, perhaps: worthwhile as a person), and he resists being any more specific than this in order to preserve the open-endedness of love. Hamlyn (1989) offers a similar account, saying (p. 228):

With love the difficulty is to find anything of this kind [i.e., a formal object] which is uniquely appropriate to love. My thesis is that there is nothing of this kind that must be so, and that this differentiates it and hate from the other emotions.

Hamlyn goes on to suggest that love and hate might be primordial emotions, a kind of positive or negative “feeling towards,” presupposed by all other emotions. [ 13 ]

The trouble with these accounts of love as an emotion proper is that they provide too thin a conception of love. In Hamlyn’s case, love is conceived as a fairly generic pro-attitude, rather than as the specific kind of distinctively personal attitude discussed here. In Brown’s case, spelling out the formal object of love as simply being worthwhile (as a person) fails to distinguish love from other evaluative responses like admiration and respect. Part of the problem seems to be the rather simple account of what an emotion is that Brown and Hamlyn use as their starting point: if love is an emotion, then the understanding of what an emotion is must be enriched considerably to accommodate love. Yet it is not at all clear whether the idea of an “emotion proper” can be adequately enriched so as to do so. As Pismenny & Prinz (2017) point out, love seems to be too varied both in its ground and in the sort of experience it involves to be capturable by a single emotion.

The emotion complex view, which understands love to be a complex emotional attitude towards another person, may initially seem to hold out great promise to overcome the problems of alternative types of views. By articulating the emotional interconnections between persons, it could offer a satisfying account of the “depth” of love without the excesses of the union view and without the overly narrow teleological focus of the robust concern view; and because these emotional interconnections are themselves evaluations, it could offer an understanding of love as simultaneously evaluative, without needing to specify a single formal object of love. However, the devil is in the details.

Rorty (1986/1993) does not try to present a complete account of love; rather, she focuses on the idea that “relational psychological attitudes” which, like love, essentially involve emotional and desiderative responses, exhibit historicity : “they arise from, and are shaped by, dynamic interactions between a subject and an object” (p. 73). In part this means that what makes an attitude be one of love is not the presence of a state that we can point to at a particular time within the lover; rather, love is to be “identified by a characteristic narrative history” (p. 75). Moreover, Rorty argues, the historicity of love involves the lover’s being permanently transformed by loving who he does.

Baier (1991), seeming to pick up on this understanding of love as exhibiting historicity, says (p. 444):

Love is not just an emotion people feel toward other people, but also a complex tying together of the emotions that two or a few more people have; it is a special form of emotional interdependence.

To a certain extent, such emotional interdependence involves feeling sympathetic emotions, so that, for example, I feel disappointed and frustrated on behalf of my beloved when she fails, and joyful when she succeeds. However, Baier insists, love is “more than just the duplication of the emotion of each in a sympathetic echo in the other” (p. 442); the emotional interdependence of the lovers involves also appropriate follow-up responses to the emotional predicaments of your beloved. Two examples Baier gives (pp. 443–44) are a feeling of “mischievous delight” at your beloved’s temporary bafflement, and amusement at her embarrassment. The idea is that in a loving relationship your beloved gives you permission to feel such emotions when no one else is permitted to do so, and a condition of her granting you that permission is that you feel these emotions “tenderly.” Moreover, you ought to respond emotionally to your beloved’s emotional responses to you: by feeling hurt when she is indifferent to you, for example. All of these foster the sort of emotional interdependence Baier is after—a kind of intimacy you have with your beloved.

Badhwar (2003, p. 46) similarly understands love to be a matter of “one’s overall emotional orientation towards a person—the complex of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings”; as such, love is a matter of having a certain “character structure.” Central to this complex emotional orientation, Badhwar thinks, is what she calls the “look of love”: “an ongoing [emotional] affirmation of the loved object as worthy of existence…for her own sake” (p. 44), an affirmation that involves taking pleasure in your beloved’s well-being. Moreover, Badhwar claims, the look of love also provides to the beloved reliable testimony concerning the quality of the beloved’s character and actions (p. 57).

There is surely something very right about the idea that love, as an attitude central to deeply personal relationships, should not be understood as a state that can simply come and go. Rather, as the emotion complex view insists, the complexity of love is to be found in the historical patterns of one’s emotional responsiveness to one’s beloved—a pattern that also projects into the future. Indeed, as suggested above, the kind of emotional interdependence that results from this complex pattern can seem to account for the intuitive “depth” of love as fully interwoven into one’s emotional sense of oneself. And it seems to make some headway in understanding the complex phenomenology of love: love can at times be a matter of intense pleasure in the presence of one’s beloved, yet it can at other times involve frustration, exasperation, anger, and hurt as a manifestation of the complexities and depth of the relationships it fosters.

This understanding of love as constituted by a history of emotional interdependence enables emotion complex views to say something interesting about the impact love has on the lover’s identity. This is partly Rorty’s point (1986/1993) in her discussion of the historicity of love ( above ). Thus, she argues, one important feature of such historicity is that love is “ dynamically permeable ” in that the lover is continually “changed by loving” such that these changes “tend to ramify through a person’s character” (p. 77). Through such dynamic permeability, love transforms the identity of the lover in a way that can sometimes foster the continuity of the love, as each lover continually changes in response to the changes in the other. [ 14 ] Indeed, Rorty concludes, love should be understood in terms of “a characteristic narrative history” (p. 75) that results from such dynamic permeability. It should be clear, however, that the mere fact of dynamic permeability need not result in the love’s continuing: nothing about the dynamics of a relationship requires that the characteristic narrative history project into the future, and such permeability can therefore lead to the dissolution of the love. Love is therefore risky—indeed, all the more risky because of the way the identity of the lover is defined in part through the love. The loss of a love can therefore make one feel no longer oneself in ways poignantly described by Nussbaum (1990).

By focusing on such emotionally complex histories, emotion complex views differ from most alternative accounts of love. For alternative accounts tend to view love as a kind of attitude we take toward our beloveds, something we can analyze simply in terms of our mental state at the moment. [ 15 ] By ignoring this historical dimension of love in providing an account of what love is, alternative accounts have a hard time providing either satisfying accounts of the sense in which our identities as person are at stake in loving another or satisfactory solutions to problems concerning how love is to be justified (cf. Section 6 , especially the discussion of fungibility ).

Nonetheless, some questions remain. If love is to be understood as an emotion complex, we need a much more explicit account of the pattern at issue here: what ties all of these emotional responses together into a single thing, namely love? Baier and Badhwar seem content to provide interesting and insightful examples of this pattern, but that does not seem to be enough. For example, what connects my amusement at my beloved’s embarrassment to other emotions like my joy on his behalf when he succeeds? Why shouldn’t my amusement at his embarrassment be understood instead as a somewhat cruel case of schadenfreude and so as antithetical to, and disconnected from, love? Moreover, as Naar (2013) notes, we need a principled account of when such historical patterns are disrupted in such a way as to end the love and when they are not. Do I stop loving when, in the midst of clinical depression, I lose my normal pattern of emotional concern?

Presumably the answer requires returning to the historicity of love: it all depends on the historical details of the relationship my beloved and I have forged. Some loves develop so that the intimacy within the relationship is such as to allow for tender, teasing responses to each other, whereas other loves may not. The historical details, together with the lovers’ understanding of their relationship, presumably determine which emotional responses belong to the pattern constitutive of love and which do not. However, this answer so far is inadequate: not just any historical relationship involving emotional interdependence is a loving relationship, and we need a principled way of distinguishing loving relationships from other relational evaluative attitudes: precisely what is the characteristic narrative history that is characteristic of love?

Helm (2009, 2010) tries to answer some of these questions in presenting an account of love as intimate identification. To love another, Helm claims, is to care about him as the particular person he is and so, other things being equal, to value the things he values. Insofar as a person’s (structured) set of values—his sense of the kind of life worth his living—constitutes his identity as a person, such sharing of values amounts to sharing his identity, which sounds very much like union accounts of love. However, Helm is careful to understand such sharing of values as for the sake of the beloved (as robust concern accounts insist), and he spells this all out in terms of patterns of emotions. Thus, Helm claims, all emotions have not only a target and a formal object (as indicated above), but also a focus : a background object the subject cares about in terms of which the implicit evaluation of the target is made intelligible. (For example, if I am afraid of the approaching hailstorm, I thereby evaluate it as dangerous, and what explains this evaluation is the way that hailstorm bears on my vegetable garden, which I care about; my garden, therefore, is the focus of my fear.) Moreover, emotions normally come in patterns with a common focus: fearing the hailstorm is normally connected to other emotions as being relieved when it passes by harmlessly (or disappointed or sad when it does not), being angry at the rabbits for killing the spinach, delighted at the productivity of the tomato plants, etc. Helm argues that a projectible pattern of such emotions with a common focus constitute caring about that focus. Consequently, we might say along the lines of Section 4.3 , while particular emotions appraise events in the world as having certain evaluative properties, their having these properties is partly bestowed on them by the overall patterns of emotions.

Helm identifies some emotions as person-focused emotions : emotions like pride and shame that essentially take persons as their focuses, for these emotions implicitly evaluate in terms of the target’s bearing on the quality of life of the person that is their focus. To exhibit a pattern of such emotions focused on oneself and subfocused on being a mother, for example, is to care about the place being a mother has in the kind of life you find worth living—in your identity as a person; to care in this way is to value being a mother as a part of your concern for your own identity. Likewise, to exhibit a projectible pattern of such emotions focused on someone else and subfocused on his being a father is to value this as a part of your concern for his identity—to value it for his sake. Such sharing of another’s values for his sake, which, Helm argues, essentially involves trust, respect, and affection, amounts to intimate identification with him, and such intimate identification just is love. Thus, Helm tries to provide an account of love that is grounded in an explicit account of caring (and caring about something for the sake of someone else) that makes room for the intuitive “depth” of love through intimate identification.

Jaworska & Wonderly (2017) argue that Helm’s construal of intimacy as intimate identification is too demanding. Rather, they argue, the sort of intimacy that distinguishes love from mere caring is one that involves a kind of emotional vulnerability in which things going well or poorly for one’s beloved are directly connected not merely to one’s well-being, but to one’s ability to flourish. This connection, they argue, runs through the lover’s self-understanding and the place the beloved has in the lover’s sense of a meaningful life.

Why do we love? It has been suggested above that any account of love needs to be able to answer some such justificatory question. Although the issue of the justification of love is important on its own, it is also important for the implications it has for understanding more clearly the precise object of love: how can we make sense of the intuitions not only that we love the individuals themselves rather than their properties, but also that my beloved is not fungible—that no one could simply take her place without loss. Different theories approach these questions in different ways, but, as will become clear below, the question of justification is primary.

One way to understand the question of why we love is as asking for what the value of love is: what do we get out of it? One kind of answer, which has its roots in Aristotle, is that having loving relationships promotes self-knowledge insofar as your beloved acts as a kind of mirror, reflecting your character back to you (Badhwar, 2003, p. 58). Of course, this answer presupposes that we cannot accurately know ourselves in other ways: that left alone, our sense of ourselves will be too imperfect, too biased, to help us grow and mature as persons. The metaphor of a mirror also suggests that our beloveds will be in the relevant respects similar to us, so that merely by observing them, we can come to know ourselves better in a way that is, if not free from bias, at least more objective than otherwise.

Brink (1999, pp. 264–65) argues that there are serious limits to the value of such mirroring of one’s self in a beloved. For if the aim is not just to know yourself better but to improve yourself, you ought also to interact with others who are not just like yourself: interacting with such diverse others can help you recognize alternative possibilities for how to live and so better assess the relative merits of these possibilities. Whiting (2013) also emphasizes the importance of our beloveds’ having an independent voice capable of reflecting not who one now is but an ideal for who one is to be. Nonetheless, we need not take the metaphor of the mirror quite so literally; rather, our beloveds can reflect our selves not through their inherent similarity to us but rather through the interpretations they offer of us, both explicitly and implicitly in their responses to us. This is what Badhwar calls the “epistemic significance” of love. [ 16 ]

In addition to this epistemic significance of love, LaFollette (1996, Chapter 5) offers several other reasons why it is good to love, reasons derived in part from the psychological literature on love: love increases our sense of well-being, it elevates our sense of self-worth, and it serves to develop our character. It also, we might add, tends to lower stress and blood pressure and to increase health and longevity. Friedman (1993) argues that the kind of partiality towards our beloveds that love involves is itself morally valuable because it supports relationships—loving relationships—that contribute “to human well-being, integrity, and fulfillment in life” (p. 61). And Solomon (1988, p. 155) claims:

Ultimately, there is only one reason for love. That one grand reason…is “because we bring out the best in each other.” What counts as “the best,” of course, is subject to much individual variation.

This is because, Solomon suggests, in loving someone, I want myself to be better so as to be worthy of his love for me.

Each of these answers to the question of why we love understands it to be asking about love quite generally, abstracted away from details of particular relationships. It is also possible to understand the question as asking about particular loves. Here, there are several questions that are relevant:

What, if anything, justifies my loving rather than not loving this particular person?
What, if anything, justifies my coming to love this particular person rather than someone else?
What, if anything, justifies my continuing to love this particular person given the changes—both in him and me and in the overall circumstances—that have occurred since I began loving him?

These are importantly different questions. Velleman (1999), for example, thinks we can answer (1) by appealing to the fact that my beloved is a person and so has a rational nature, yet he thinks (2) and (3) have no answers: the best we can do is offer causal explanations for our loving particular people, a position echoed by Han (2021). Setiya (2014) similarly thinks (1) has an answer, but points not to the rational nature of persons but rather to the other’s humanity , where such humanity differs from personhood in that not all humans need have the requisite rational nature for personhood, and not all persons need be humans. And, as will become clear below , the distinction between (2) and (3) will become important in resolving puzzles concerning whether our beloveds are fungible, though it should be clear that (3) potentially raises questions concerning personal identity (which will not be addressed here).

It is important not to misconstrue these justificatory questions. Thomas (1991) , for example, rejects the idea that love can be justified: “there are no rational considerations whereby anyone can lay claim to another’s love or insist that an individual’s love for another is irrational” (p. 474). This is because, Thomas claims (p. 471):

no matter how wonderful and lovely an individual might be, on any and all accounts, it is simply false that a romantically unencumbered person must love that individual on pain of being irrational. Or, there is no irrationality involved in ceasing to love a person whom one once loved immensely, although the person has not changed.

However, as LaFollette (1996, p. 63) correctly points out,

reason is not some external power which dictates how we should behave, but an internal power, integral to who we are.… Reason does not command that we love anyone. Nonetheless, reason is vital in determining whom we love and why we love them.

That is, reasons for love are pro tanto : they are a part of the overall reasons we have for acting, and it is up to us in exercising our capacity for agency to decide what on balance we have reason to do or even whether we shall act contrary to our reasons. To construe the notion of a reason for love as compelling us to love, as Thomas does, is to misconstrue the place such reasons have within our agency. [ 17 ]

Most philosophical discussions of the justification of love focus on question (1) , thinking that answering this question will also, to the extent that we can, answer question (2) , which is typically not distinguished from (3) . The answers given to these questions vary in a way that turns on how the kind of evaluation implicit in love is construed. On the one hand, those who understand the evaluation implicit in love to be a matter of the bestowal of value (such as Telfer 1970–71; Friedman 1993; Singer 1994) typically claim that no justification can be given (cf. Section 4.2 ). As indicated above, this seems problematic, especially given the importance love can have both in our lives and, especially, in shaping our identities as persons. To reject the idea that we can love for reasons may reduce the impact our agency can have in defining who we are.

On the other hand, those who understand the evaluation implicit in love to be a matter of appraisal tend to answer the justificatory question by appeal to these valuable properties of the beloved. This acceptance of the idea that love can be justified leads to two further, related worries about the object of love.

The first worry is raised by Vlastos (1981) in a discussion Plato’s and Aristotle’s accounts of love. Vlastos notes that these accounts focus on the properties of our beloveds: we are to love people, they say, only because and insofar as they are objectifications of the excellences. Consequently, he argues, in doing so they fail to distinguish “ disinterested affection for the person we love” from “ appreciation of the excellences instantiated by that person ” (p. 33). That is, Vlastos thinks that Plato and Aristotle provide an account of love that is really a love of properties rather than a love of persons—love of a type of person, rather than love of a particular person—thereby losing what is distinctive about love as an essentially personal attitude. This worry about Plato and Aristotle might seem to apply just as well to other accounts that justify love in terms of the properties of the person: insofar as we love the person for the sake of her properties, it might seem that what we love is those properties and not the person. Here it is surely insufficient to say, as Solomon (1988, p. 154) does, “if love has its reasons, then it is not the whole person that one loves but certain aspects of that person—though the rest of the person comes along too, of course”: that final tagline fails to address the central difficulty about what the object of love is and so about love as a distinctly personal attitude. (Clausen 2019 might seem to address this worry by arguing that we love people not as having certain properties but rather as having “ organic unities ”: a holistic set of properties the value of each of which must be understood in essential part in terms of its place within that whole. Nonetheless, while this is an interesting and plausible way to think about the value of the properties of persons, that organic unity itself will be a (holistic) property held by the person, and it seems that the fundamental problem reemerges at the level of this holistic property: do we love the holistic unity rather than the person?)

The second worry concerns the fungibility of the object of love. To be fungible is to be replaceable by another relevantly similar object without any loss of value. Thus, money is fungible: I can give you two $5 bills in exchange for a $10 bill, and neither of us has lost anything. Is the object of love fungible? That is, can I simply switch from loving one person to loving another relevantly similar person without any loss? The worry about fungibility is commonly put this way: if we accept that love can be justified by appealing to properties of the beloved, then it may seem that in loving someone for certain reasons, I love him not simply as the individual he is, but as instantiating those properties. And this may imply that any other person instantiating those same properties would do just as well: my beloved would be fungible. Indeed, it may be that another person exhibits the properties that ground my love to a greater degree than my current beloved does, and so it may seem that in such a case I have reason to “trade up”—to switch my love to the new, better person. However, it seems clear that the objects of our loves are not fungible: love seems to involve a deeply personal commitment to a particular person, a commitment that is antithetical to the idea that our beloveds are fungible or to the idea that we ought to be willing to trade up when possible. [ 18 ]

In responding to these worries, Nozick (1989) appeals to the union view of love he endorses (see the section on Love as Union ):

The intention in love is to form a we and to identify with it as an extended self, to identify one’s fortunes in large part with its fortunes. A willingness to trade up, to destroy the very we you largely identify with, would then be a willingness to destroy your self in the form of your own extended self. [p. 78]

So it is because love involves forming a “we” that we must understand other persons and not properties to be the objects of love, and it is because my very identity as a person depends essentially on that “we” that it is not possible to substitute without loss one object of my love for another. However, Badhwar (2003) criticizes Nozick, saying that his response implies that once I love someone, I cannot abandon that love no matter who that person becomes; this, she says, “cannot be understood as love at all rather than addiction” (p. 61). [ 19 ]

Instead, Badhwar (1987) turns to her robust-concern account of love as a concern for the beloved for his sake rather than one’s own. Insofar as my love is disinterested — not a means to antecedent ends of my own—it would be senseless to think that my beloved could be replaced by someone who is able to satisfy my ends equally well or better. Consequently, my beloved is in this way irreplaceable. However, this is only a partial response to the worry about fungibility, as Badhwar herself seems to acknowledge. For the concern over fungibility arises not merely for those cases in which we think of love as justified instrumentally, but also for those cases in which the love is justified by the intrinsic value of the properties of my beloved. Confronted with cases like this, Badhwar (2003) concludes that the object of love is fungible after all (though she insists that it is very unlikely in practice). (Soble (1990, Chapter 13) draws similar conclusions.)

Nonetheless, Badhwar thinks that the object of love is “phenomenologically non-fungible” (2003, p. 63; see also 1987, p. 14). By this she means that we experience our beloveds to be irreplaceable: “loving and delighting in [one person] are not completely commensurate with loving and delighting in another” (1987, p. 14). Love can be such that we sometimes desire to be with this particular person whom we love, not another whom we also love, for our loves are qualitatively different. But why is this? It seems as though the typical reason I now want to spend time with Amy rather than Bob is, for example, that Amy is funny but Bob is not. I love Amy in part for her humor, and I love Bob for other reasons, and these qualitative differences between them is what makes them not fungible. However, this reply does not address the worry about the possibility of trading up: if Bob were to be at least as funny (charming, kind, etc.) as Amy, why shouldn’t I dump her and spend all my time with him?

A somewhat different approach is taken by Whiting (1991). In response to the first worry concerning the object of love, Whiting argues that Vlastos offers a false dichotomy: having affection for someone that is disinterested —for her sake rather than my own—essentially involves an appreciation of her excellences as such. Indeed, Whiting says, my appreciation of these as excellences, and so the underlying commitment I have to their value, just is a disinterested commitment to her because these excellences constitute her identity as the person she is. The person, therefore, really is the object of love. Delaney (1996) takes the complementary tack of distinguishing between the object of one’s love, which of course is the person, and the grounds of the love, which are her properties: to say, as Solomon does, that we love someone for reasons is not at all to say that we only love certain aspects of the person. In these terms, we might say that Whiting’s rejection of Vlastos’ dichotomy can be read as saying that what makes my attitude be one of disinterested affection—one of love—for the person is precisely that I am thereby responding to her excellences as the reasons for that affection. [ 20 ]

Of course, more needs to be said about what it is that makes a particular person be the object of love. Implicit in Whiting’s account is an understanding of the way in which the object of my love is determined in part by the history of interactions I have with her: it is she, and not merely her properties (which might be instantiated in many different people), that I want to be with; it is she, and not merely her properties, on whose behalf I am concerned when she suffers and whom I seek to comfort; etc. This addresses the first worry, but not the second worry about fungibility, for the question still remains whether she is the object of my love only as instantiating certain properties, and so whether or not I have reason to “trade up.”

To respond to the fungibility worry, Whiting and Delaney appeal explicitly to the historical relationship. [ 21 ] Thus, Whiting claims, although there may be a relatively large pool of people who have the kind of excellences of character that would justify my loving them, and so although there can be no answer to question (2) about why I come to love this rather than that person within this pool, once I have come to love this person and so have developed a historical relation with her, this history of concern justifies my continuing to love this person rather than someone else (1991, p. 7). Similarly, Delaney claims that love is grounded in “historical-relational properties” (1996, p. 346), so that I have reasons for continuing to love this person rather than switching allegiances and loving someone else. In each case, the appeal to both such historical relations and the excellences of character of my beloved is intended to provide an answer to question (3) , and this explains why the objects of love are not fungible.

There seems to be something very much right with this response. Relationships grounded in love are essentially personal, and it would be odd to think of what justifies that love to be merely non-relational properties of the beloved. Nonetheless, it is still unclear how the historical-relational propreties can provide any additional justification for subsequent concern beyond that which is already provided (as an answer to question (1) ) by appeal to the excellences of the beloved’s character (cf. Brink 1999). The mere fact that I have loved someone in the past does not seem to justify my continuing to love him in the future. When we imagine that he is going through a rough time and begins to lose the virtues justifying my initial love for him, why shouldn’t I dump him and instead come to love someone new having all of those virtues more fully? Intuitively (unless the change she undergoes makes her in some important sense no longer the same person he was), we think I should not dump him, but the appeal to the mere fact that I loved him in the past is surely not enough. Yet what historical-relational properties could do the trick? (For an interesting attempt at an answer, see Kolodny 2003 and also Howard 2019.)

If we think that love can be justified, then it may seem that the appeal to particular historical facts about a loving relationship to justify that love is inadequate, for such idiosyncratic and subjective properties might explain but cannot justify love. Rather, it may seem, justification in general requires appealing to universal, objective properties. But such properties are ones that others might share, which leads to the problem of fungibility. Consequently it may seem that love cannot be justified. In the face of this predicament, accounts of love that understand love to be an attitude towards value that is intermediate between appraisal and bestowal, between recognizing already existing value and creating that value (see Section 4.3 ) might seem to offer a way out. For once we reject the thought that the value of our beloveds must be either the precondition or the consequence of our love, we have room to acknowledge that the deeply personal, historically grounded, creative nature of love (central to bestowal accounts) and the understanding of love as responsive to valuable properties of the beloved that can justify that love (central to appraisal accounts) are not mutually exclusive (Helm 2010; Bagley 2015).

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Thomas, L., 1987, “Friendship”, Synthese , 72: 217–36.
–––, 1989, “Friends and Lovers”, in G. Graham & H. La Follette (eds.), Person to Person , Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 182–98.
–––, 1991, “Reasons for Loving”, in Solomon & Higgins (1991), 467–476.
–––, 1993, “Friendship and Other Loves”, in Badhwar (1993), 48–64.
Tuomela, R., 1984, A Theory of Social Action , Dordrecht: Reidel.
–––, 1995, The Importance of Us: A Philosophical Study of Basic Social Notions , Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Velleman, J. D., 1999, “Love as a Moral Emotion”, Ethics , 109: 338–74.
–––, 2008, “Beyond Price”, Ethics , 118: 191–212.
Vlastos, G., 1981, “The Individual as Object of Love in Plato”, in Platonic Studies , 2nd edition, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 3–42.
White, R. J., 2001, Love’s Philosophy , Rowman & Littlefield.
Whiting, J. E., 1991, “Impersonal Friends”, Monist , 74: 3–29.
–––, 2013, “Love: Self-Propagation, Self-Preservation, or Ekstasis?”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy , 43: 403–29.
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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

Aristotle , Nicomachean Ethics , translated by W.D. Ross.
Moseley, A., “ Philosophy of Love ,” in J. Fieser (ed.), Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Romeo and Juliet — Narrative Essay About Love

Narrative Essay About Love

Categories: Romeo and Juliet

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Literary Terms
Definition & Examples
When & How to Use Themes

I. What is Theme?

One of the first questions to ask upon hearing someone has written a story is, “What’s it about?” or “What’s the point?” Short answers may range from love to betrayal or from the coming of age to the haziness of memory. The central idea, topic, or point of a story, essay, or narrative is its theme .

II. Examples of Theme

A man, fueled by an urge for power and control due to his own pride, builds a supercomputer. That supercomputer then takes over the world, causing chaos and struggle galore.

This sci-fi style story contains many common themes. A few of its themes include:

Danger of excessive pride
The risky relationship between humankind and developing technology

A boy and a girl fall in love. The boy is forced to join the army and fights to survive in a war-torn country as his beloved waits at home. When he returns from war, the two are united and married.

The love story also has many common themes in literature:

The power of true love
Fate, which sometimes tears lovers apart and then joins them together

As can be seen from these examples, themes can range widely from ideas, as large as love and war, to others as specific as the relationship between humankind and technology.

III. Types of Theme

Just as a life is not constantly immersed in love, the pursuit of knowledge, or the struggle of the individual versus society, themes are not always constantly present in a story or composition. Rather, they weave in and out, can disappear entirely, or appear surprisingly mid-read. This is because there are two types of themes: major and minor themes.

a. Major Themes

Major themes are, just as they sound, the more important and enduring themes of the narrative. Major themes are the most significant themes of the story, and often they are a part of the entire story. A book on war would have the major theme of war’s effect on humanity, whereas a romance novel would have the major theme of love.

b. Minor Themes

Minor themes are, on the other hand, less important and less enduring. They may appear for part of the narrative only to be replaced by another minor theme later in the narrative. They provide discussion points for a chapter or two, but do not color the entire story. A book on war may have minor themes such as the home front’s reaction to war or the political aspects of war. A romance novel may have minor themes such as flirtation, marriage, and fidelity.

IV. The Importance of Using Theme

The importance of using theme in narrative is unparalleled. The theme is the underlining idea an author is trying to convey to an audience. A story without major ideas for the character and reader to experience, think through, and learn from is not a story at all. A story, by its very nature, must have a theme, sometimes many major and minor themes, all throughout. Themes are the ideas book clubs, poets, playwrights, literature students, film enthusiasts, movie-makers, and creative writers mull over in-depth. They are the meaning behind the entire story, the deeper reasons that the story has been written and shared.

V. Examples of Theme in Literature

Theme is a prominent element in literature. Here are a few examples of theme in poetry and prose:

“i carry your heart with me(i carry it in)” by E. E. Cummings:

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)i am never without it(anywhere i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done by only me is your doing,my darling) i fear no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true) and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

This poem’s major theme is clear: love. Minor themes include fate, togetherness, and desire.

Atonement by Ian McEwan is an example of a novel whose theme is its title. Here are a few revealing excerpts:

How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.

This section reveals the main theme of atonement along with other minor themes such as the life of the writer and forgiveness.

VI. Examples of Theme in Pop Culture

Just as literary narratives require themes, songs, movies, and television shows do as well. Here are a few examples of theme in pop culture:

The trailer shows that the main theme of Godzilla is nature, as a powerful and destructive force to be reckoned with. Other themes include the human effect on nature, fear of the unknown, and hubris.

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

The main theme of this movie is positivity in the face of a bad day, as they happen to all of us. Other themes include family, perseverance, and love.

VII. Related Terms

Because themes encompass main ideas in a narrative, they have many similar elements which do similar things for a narrative. Here are a few examples:

“And the moral of the story is…” As many fables and tales go, morals are a necessary element. They are the main message or lesson to be learned from reading a cautionary story. Although themes and morals are both major ideas in a story, they are different in that themes do not necessarily serve to teach a lesson, whereas morals always do. A theme is simply an idea to be examined, whereas a moral is a clear lesson to be learned. Here is an example of theme versus moral:

Love others the way you would like to be loved.

Whereas the theme is simply an idea, the moral is a message and instruction.

Motifs work in a story to emphasize the theme, and for this reason, is sometimes confused with the theme. Motifs are recurring images, objects, or ideas that highlight the theme. Here is one example of how motif works with theme:

A man is struggling with regret throughout a story. Motifs like dark dreams, repetitive thoughts, and dark lighting emphasize the mood and pervasiveness of the regret.

Whereas the theme is a larger idea, the motifs are smaller elements of a story which repeat in order to reflect that idea.

VIII. In Closing

Themes are the ideas that run through narratives, enlivening them with deeper meaning to be found in real life and fiction alike. They create stories that are not dull but compelling and emotional.

List of Terms

Alliteration
Amplification
Anachronism
Anthropomorphism
Antonomasia
APA Citation
Aposiopesis
Autobiography
Bildungsroman
Characterization
Circumlocution
Cliffhanger
Comic Relief
Connotation
Deus ex machina
Deuteragonist
Doppelganger
Double Entendre
Dramatic irony
Equivocation
Extended Metaphor
Figures of Speech
Flash-forward
Foreshadowing
Intertextuality
Juxtaposition
Literary Device
Malapropism
Onomatopoeia
Parallelism
Pathetic Fallacy
Personification
Point of View
Polysyndeton
Protagonist
Red Herring
Rhetorical Device
Rhetorical Question
Science Fiction
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Synesthesia
Turning Point
Understatement
Urban Legend
Verisimilitude
Essay Guide
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Home Essay Samples Literature Twelfth Night

The Theme of Love in "Twelfth Night"

Table of contents, types of love, unrequited love's impact, love's whimsical nature, love's transformative power.

Shakespeare, W. (1623). Twelfth Night, Or What You Will. First Folio.
Garber, M. (1994). Coming of Age in Shakespeare. Routledge.
Greenblatt, S. (Ed.). (2012). The Norton Shakespeare. W. W. Norton & Company.
Mowat, B. A., & Werstine, P. (Eds.). (2013). Twelfth Night (No Fear Shakespeare). SparkNotes.
Stallybrass, P., & White, A. R. (1986). The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Cornell University Press.

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All Quiet on The Western Front

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Before You Write a Love Essay, Read This to Get Examples

The day will come when you can’t escape the fate of all students: You will have to write a what is love essay.

No worries:

Here you’ll find tons of love essay topics and examples. No time to read everything? Scroll down to get a free PDF with original samples.

Definition: Essay on Love

First, let’s define what is love essay?

The most common topics are:

Definition of love
What is love?
Meaning of love

Why limit yourself to these hackneyed, general themes? Below, I’ll show how to make your paper on love original yet relevant to the prompt you get from teachers.

Love Essay Topics: 20 Ideas to Choose for Your Paper

Your essay on love and relationship doesn’t have to be super official and unemotional. It’s ok to share reflections and personal opinions when writing about romance.

Often, students get a general task to write an essay on love. It means they can choose a theme and a title for their paper. If that’s your case, feel free to try any of these love essay topics:

Exploring the impact of love on individuals and relationships.
Love in the digital age: Navigating romance in a tech world.
Is there any essence and significance in unconditional love?
Love as a universal language: Connecting hearts across cultures.
Biochemistry of love: Exploring the process.
Love vs. passion vs. obsession.
How love helps cope with heartbreak and grief.
The art of loving. How we breed intimacy and trust.
The science behind attraction and attachment.
How love and relationships shape our identity and help with self-discovery.
Love and vulnerability: How to embrace emotional openness.
Romance is more complex than most think: Passion, intimacy, and commitment explained.
Love as empathy: Building sympathetic connections in a cruel world.
Evolution of love. How people described it throughout history.
The role of love in mental and emotional well-being.
Love as a tool to look and find purpose in life.
Welcoming diversity in relations through love and acceptance.
Love vs. friendship: The intersection of platonic and romantic bonds.
The choices we make and challenges we overcome for those we love.
Love and forgiveness: How its power heals wounds and strengthens bonds.

Love Essay Examples: Choose Your Sample for Inspiration

Essays about love are usually standard, 5-paragraph papers students write in college:

One paragraph is for an introduction, with a hook and a thesis statement
Three are for a body, with arguments or descriptions
One last passage is for a conclusion, with a thesis restatement and final thoughts

Below are the ready-made samples to consider. They’ll help you see what an essay about love with an introduction, body, and conclusion looks like.

What is love essay: 250 words

Lao Tzu once said, “Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength while loving someone deeply gives you courage.” Indeed, love can transform individuals, relationships, and our world.

A word of immense depth and countless interpretations, love has always fascinated philosophers, poets, and ordinary individuals. This emotion breaks boundaries and has a super power to change lives. But what is love, actually?

It’s a force we feel in countless ways. It is the warm embrace of a parent, filled with care and unwavering support. It is the gentle touch of a lover, sparking a flame that ignites passion and desire. Love is the kind words of a friend, offering solace and understanding in times of need. It is the selfless acts of compassion and empathy that bind humanity together.

Love is not confined to romantic relationships alone. It is found in the family bonds, the connections we forge with friends, and even the compassion we extend to strangers. Love is a thread that weaves through the fabric of our lives, enriching and nourishing our souls.

However, love is not without its complexities. It can be both euphoric and agonizing, uplifting and devastating. Love requires vulnerability, trust, and the willingness to embrace joy and pain. It is a delicate balance between passion and compassion, independence and interdependence.

Finally, the essence of love may be elusive to define with mere words. It is an experience that surpasses language and logic, encompassing a spectrum of emotions and actions. Love is a profound connection that unites us all, reminding us of our shared humanity and the capacity for boundless compassion.

What is love essay: 500 words

A 500-word essay on why I love you

Trying to encapsulate why I love you in a mere 500 words is impossible. My love for you goes beyond the confines of language, transcending words and dwelling in the realm of emotions, connections, and shared experiences. Nevertheless, I shall endeavor to express the depth and breadth of my affection for you.

First and foremost, I love you for who you are. You possess a unique blend of qualities and characteristics that captivate my heart and mind. Your kindness and compassion touch the lives of those around you, and I am grateful to be the recipient of your unwavering care and understanding. Your intelligence and wit constantly challenge me to grow and learn, stimulating my mind and enriching our conversations. You have a beautiful spirit that radiates warmth and joy, and I am drawn to your vibrant energy.

I love the way you make me feel. When I am with you, I feel a sense of comfort and security that allows me to be my true self. Your presence envelops me in a cocoon of love and acceptance, where I can express my thoughts, fears, and dreams without fear of judgment. Your support and encouragement inspire me to pursue my passions and overcome obstacles. With you by my side, I feel empowered to face the world, knowing I have a partner who believes in me.

I love the memories we have created together. From the laughter-filled moments of shared adventures to the quiet and intimate conversations, every memory is etched in my heart. Whether exploring new places, indulging in our favorite activities, or simply enjoying each other’s company in comfortable silence, each experience reinforces our bond. Our shared memories serve as a foundation for our relationship, a testament to the depth of our connection and the love that binds us.

I love your quirks and imperfections. Your true essence shines through these unique aspects! Your little traits make me smile and remind me of the beautiful individual you are. I love how you wrinkle your nose when you laugh, become lost in thought when reading a book, and even sing off-key in the shower. These imperfections make you human, relatable, and utterly lovable.

I love the future we envision together. We support each other’s goals, cheering one another on as we navigate the path toward our dreams. The thought of building a life together, creating a home filled with love and shared experiences, fills my heart with anticipation and excitement. The future we imagine is one that I am eager to explore with you by my side.

In conclusion, the reasons why I love you are as vast and varied as the universe itself. It is a love that defies logic and surpasses the limitations of language. From the depths of my being, I love you for the person you are, the way you make me feel, the memories we cherish, your quirks and imperfections, and the future we envision together. My love for you is boundless, unconditional, and everlasting.

A 5-paragraph essay about love

I’ve gathered all the samples (and a few bonus ones) in one PDF. It’s free to download. So, you can keep it at hand when the time comes to write a love essay.

Ready to Write Your Essay About Love?

Now that you know the definition of a love essay and have many topic ideas, it’s time to write your A-worthy paper! Here go the steps:

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The Garden of Love Summary & Analysis by William Blake

Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis
Poetic Devices
Vocabulary & References
Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme
Line-by-Line Explanations

"The Garden of Love" is a poem by English Romantic visionary William Blake. Blake was devoutly religious, but he had some major disagreements with the organized religion of his day. The poem expresses this, arguing that religion should be about love, freedom, and joy—not rules and restrictions. The poem is part of his famous collection Songs of Innocence and Experience , which was first published in 1789.

Read the full text of “The Garden of Love”

The Full Text of “The Garden of Love”

1 I went to the Garden of Love,

2 And saw what I never had seen:

3 A Chapel was built in the midst,

4 Where I used to play on the green.

5 And the gates of this Chapel were shut,

6 And Thou shalt not. writ over the door;

7 So I turn'd to the Garden of Love,

8 That so many sweet flowers bore.

9 And I saw it was filled with graves,

10 And tomb-stones where flowers should be:

11 And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,

12 And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

“The Garden of Love” Summary

“the garden of love” themes.

Love vs. Organized Religion

See where this theme is active in the poem.

Childhood vs. Adulthood

Line-by-line explanation & analysis of “the garden of love”.

I went to the Garden of Love, And saw what I never had seen: A Chapel was built in the midst, Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut, And Thou shalt not. writ over the door;

So I turn'd to the Garden of Love, That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves, And tomb-stones where flowers should be:

Lines 11-12

And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds, And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

“The Garden of Love” Symbols

See where this symbol appears in the poem.

Graves and Tombstones

“the garden of love” poetic devices & figurative language.

See where this poetic device appears in the poem.

Alliteration

Polysyndeton, end-stopped line, “the garden of love” vocabulary.

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

Thou shalt not
See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.

Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Garden of Love”

Rhyme scheme, “the garden of love” speaker, “the garden of love” setting, literary and historical context of “the garden of love”, more “the garden of love” resources, external resources.

Illustration and Other Poems — A resource from the Tate organization, which holds a large collection of Blake originals. Here the poem can be seen in its original illustrated form.

Blake's Radicalism — An excerpt from a documentary in which writer Iain Sinclair discusses Blake's radicalism.

Blake's Visions — An excerpt from a documentary in which writer Iain Sinclair discusses Blake's religious visions.

Full Text of Songs of Innocence and Experience — Various formats for the full text in which "The Garden of Love" is collected.

A Reading by Allen Ginsberg — Beat poet Allen Ginsberg reads the poem.

LitCharts on Other Poems by William Blake

Ah! Sun-flower

A Poison Tree

Earth's Answer

Holy Thursday (Songs of Experience)

Holy Thursday (Songs of Innocence)

Infant Sorrow

Introduction (Songs of Innocence)

Nurse's Song (Songs of Experience)

Nurse's Song (Songs of Innocence)

The Chimney Sweeper (Songs of Experience)

The Chimney Sweeper (Songs of Innocence)

The Clod and the Pebble

The Divine Image

The Ecchoing Green

The Human Abstract

The Little Black Boy

The Little Vagabond

The School Boy

The Sick Rose

To the Evening Star

Ask LitCharts AI: The answer to your questions

Amor: the Roman God of Love and Desire

This essay about Amor in Roman mythology explores his role as the embodiment of love and desire. It highlights his paradoxical nature as both cherubic and fierce, and his influence on human emotions and ambitions. Through his mythological adventures and romantic entanglements, particularly with Psyche, Amor’s transformative power is illustrated. The essay emphasizes Amor’s enduring legacy in art and literature, portraying him as a timeless symbol of love’s ability to inspire, uplift, and unify humanity amidst a world of division and strife.

How it works

In the intricate fabric of Roman mythology, Amor emerges as a beacon, embodying the delicate embrace of love and the intoxicating allure of desire. Each stroke of his golden bow and each whisper of his ethereal presence creates a narrative that transcends time, drawing mortals and immortals alike into the enigmatic dance of passion and longing.

Born from the celestial union of Venus, the goddess of love, and Mars, the god of war, Amor is a paradox—cherubic yet fierce, gentle yet unyielding.

His depiction in art and literature captures the purity of youth alongside the wisdom of ages, his expression bearing the weight of millennia of human emotion.

Central to Amor’s being is his arsenal—a bow forged by Vulcan’s skilled hands and arrows imbued with enchantments beyond mortal comprehension. With a single shot, Amor can ignite a spark that transcends time and space, binding souls in a symphony of affection that resonates across the cosmos.

Amor’s influence, however, extends far beyond the realm of romantic entanglements. As the patron deity of desire, he fuels the flames of ambition, curiosity, and creativity within human hearts, urging mortals toward their deepest passions and aspirations. In every pursuit that enlivens the human spirit, Amor’s presence is felt, guiding mortals on journeys of self-discovery and enlightenment.

Throughout Roman mythology, Amor’s adventures are interwoven into countless tales, each a testament to the multifaceted nature of love’s enigmatic embrace. In one myth, he orchestrates the union of Pyramus and Thisbe, lovers whose tragic fate mirrors that of Romeo and Juliet, their love transcending the boundaries of life and death.

In another tale, Amor himself becomes ensnared by passion, falling victim to his own arrows and becoming enamored with the mortal Psyche. Their tumultuous love affair, fraught with trials and tribulations, serves as a poignant reminder of love’s transformative power and its ability to defy even the gods.

Yet, Amor’s greatest legacy may not lie in his romantic escapades, but in his capacity to unite humanity in empathy and understanding. In a world plagued by division and discord, love acts as a beacon of hope, bridging the gaps that separate us and fostering connections that transcend race, religion, and ideology.

In art, literature, and music, Amor’s image is immortalized in countless forms, from classical sculptures to timeless works of poetry and song. From Shakespeare’s sonnets to Beethoven’s symphonies, his presence is a constant refrain, reminding us of love’s enduring power to inspire, uplift, and transform.

Ultimately, Amor stands as a timeless symbol of love’s enduring power, a reminder that in a world rife with uncertainty and strife, love remains the one constant that sustains us, uplifts us, and gives our lives meaning. In his golden bow and arrows, we find not only the instruments of desire but the catalysts of transformation, guiding us on journeys of self-discovery and enlightenment. In his eternal presence, we find solace, knowing that no matter where life may lead, love will always be our guiding light.

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Theology: Biblical Metanarrative Essay Essay

Introduction, biblical metanarrative.

It is crucial to study the Bible and theology together. It is also essential to examine the Scripture in its entirety and read each verse with the understanding that they are inherently linked. The four main narrative phases, creation, fall, redemption, and new creation, should be used to understand God and His precepts. The Bible is coherent from start to finish, and when correctly read, it will constitute the Biblical Metanarrative instead of being a collection of isolated episodes (Kimble & Spellman, 2020). The Bible narrates a tale from start to end, or, to put it differently, it describes the origin and destiny of humankind and teaches individuals how to live to secure an eternal place in Heaven (Etzel & Small, 2016). Thus, in the Bible, the theological themes of love and creation are revealed through the four main plot phases of creation: fall, redemption, and new creation.

A narrative is a story with an origin, middle, and conclusion. A solid narrative comprises six components: protagonists, plot, environment, issue, conclusion, and resolution. Many books in the Scripture serve as storytelling illustrations, so even believers frequently wonder how the Bible’s various books connect collectively (Kimble & Spellman, 2020). The term “metanarrative” is frequently used to explain how to view the Bible. The phrase Metanarrative signifies a more thorough narrative that still contains the entire tale components present in a regular report because the prefix “meta” basically implies more thorough.

A Scriptural Metanarrative unites diverse Scripture texts with the overarching goal of restoration. Although many Christians believe that each book of the Bible tells a different story, the Bible must be viewed as a unit (Kaminsky & Reasoner, 2020). The totality of the Bible constitutes God’s word as perceived by the public and by the followers of Jesus Christ. The four main plot arcs in the Bible, seen as a metanarrative, are creation, the fall, redemption, and new creation. Each arc has its cast of characters, setting, issues, and answers. If people read the Bible utilizing the four fundamental plot developments, they must be able to grasp the coherence God desired. When studying the Bible, one should recognize that God’s teachings on creation and love are the same.

The Metanarrative emphasizes the idea that the greatest commandment ever presented was to love. In the creation story, God created Eve out of love for Adam to prevent Adam from being alone. Since every creature was assigned a name in Genesis 2:19, love permeated the whole creation account (Etzel & Gutiérrez, 2014). Although man erred before God, love continued to exist during the fall. After they had consumed the fruit from the forbidden tree, God talked to Adam and Eve out of compassion. God might have wiped out humankind at that moment, but He chose to give them a path instead.

The most beautiful illustration of love is the tale of redemption. The New Testament uses the words “love of God” and “love of Christ” interchangeably. God is love, and according to 1 John 4:8 and 16, “he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.” According to John 3:16, “God so loved the world,” which is a crucial aspect of God according to Christianity. Since it illustrates what love feels like, 1 Corinthians 13 is referred to as the “love chapter” of the Scripture.

Since humankind can re-establish communion with God at that time, fresh creation is the most remarkable illustration of love once the old has expired and the new has arrived. Romans 5:8 emphasizes that Christ died for people while they were still offenders to give them a new life, illustrating the love that manifests in the new creation. The four key New and Old Testament plot developments have a recurring theme of God’s love.

One might accept that God is the creator of many things while looking at Genesis in the Scripture and theological works. God made the heavens and the planets at the start, according to Genesis 1:1, the first verse of the Bible. Believers know that God created humanity and Jesus to reveal His character to the world. Jesus shows what God is like because Jesus is God (Forger, 2020). Beginning with the making of humankind, creation is essential to the development of the four storylines and God’s plan. “Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves,” reads Genesis 3:7 (New International Version Bible, 2007). This represented the creation aspect of humanity, He inhaled the life-giving breath into the man’s nose, causing the man to become a living being.

Once Adam and Eve were created, sin invaded the Garden of Eden, and humankind fell when they could see things concerning them that prompted them to regret their acts of disobedience. God gave those who trust in him the privilege of eternal life at the time of humanity’s fall. Jesus served as God’s example of how to live for and via Him. From this, people got an idea of what a path to everlasting life should entail.

God created Jesus and sent him to earth as a simple path to redemption. However, the wonderful thing concerning redemption is that whenever individuals do make errors, He forgives them because He is the writer and perfecter of the Christian faith. Due to this, forgiveness has transformed followers into new creatures who now give God their very best. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here,” according to 2 Corinthians 5:17 (New International Version Bible, 2007). Knowing the distinction between the maker and his creation has practical ramifications. Moreover, it is important to understand that God is in charge at all times and that humankind has meaning. God provided his one and only child to reveal that those who believe in him shall be granted an unending life. The most significant present from God shall be this new form of being in Heaven.

A metanarrative demonstrates how the Bible connects from beginning to end. These four movements address various theological issues, but the themes of love and creation are highlighted in this essay. Using the four main story events, the biblical themes of love and creation demonstrate unity. These actions contribute to painting a depiction of God’s love for people and His purpose for humanity. When Christians apply the four primary narrative arcs to their interpretations, they can see how the Bible’s sections relate to one another; all religious texts have salvation as their central theme. The only way to be saved is by living for Christ and trusting him. People can understand the Bible and God’s instructions using their readings’ four basic narrative developments. It is incredible to see how the Bible’s entirety ties together.

Etzel, G., & Gutiérrez, B. (2014). Theology applied: A living faith . B&H Academic.

Etzel, G., & Small, R. N. (2016). Everyday theology: Exploring the Christian faith . B&H Academic.

Forger, D. (2020). Jesus as God’s word(s): Aurality, epistemology and embodiment in the gospel of John. Journal for the Study of the New Testament , 42 (3), 274–302. Web.

Kaminsky, J., & Reasoner, M. (2020). In quest of a coherent portrait of Paul: A rejoinder to Michael Bird . Harvard Theological Review , 113 (4), 513–527. Web.

Kimble, J. M., & Spellman, C. (2020). Invitation to biblical theology: Exploring the shape, storyline, and themes of Scripture . Kregel Academic.

New International Version Bible (2007). Hodder & Stoughton Ltd.

Theology: "The Early Narratives of Genesis" by James Orr
The Rule of Life from a Religious Perspective
Redemption as a Biblical Image of Salvation
Old Testament Covenants and Their Analysis
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Latino Theology: Origins and Contributions
Personal Reflection on Theology and Pastoral Care
Chicago (A-D)
Chicago (N-B)

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Bibliography

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What does 'Terra and Mare' mean? Decoding the Ambani's 2nd pre-wedding invite

What does 'Terra and Mare' mean? Decoding the Ambani's 2nd pre-wedding invite

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Anant Ambani & Radhika Merchant's 2nd pre-wedding bash invite goes viral: Salman Khan, MS Dhoni, Alia Bhatt & other celebs jet off to Italy

10 Books To Read If You Love Fourth Wing

Fans of Rebecca Yarros' Fourth Wing should check out other great books for more dragons and romance with a political twist.
Those who love the " romantasy " genre will get their fill from popular novels like A Court of Thorns & Roses and Divine Rivals .
Many novels offer diverse takes on dragons and dangerous academies, making them ideal for Fourth Wing fans seeking similar reads.

Rebecca Yarros' Fourth Wing has become a massive hit among book lovers, and there's plenty more in store for fans of this story and world — but they may be looking for other books to read while they await the third Empyrean novel and future sequels . Part of what makes Fourth Wing so unique is its combined focus on fantasy and romance, setting it firmly in the " romantasy " genre with other popular stories like Sarah J. Maas' Court of Thorns and Roses books and Jennifer L. Armentrout's Blood and Ash series.

Of course, Fourth Wing may have strong romance elements, but it doesn't hold back on the fantasy. That's precisely why it's so hard to follow. So many similar stories lean more in one direction than the other, but Fourth Wing weaves an intricate world full of politics, magic, and dragons. These are well-balanced with its romance subplots, so the Empyrean series really does offer something for everyone. Depending on what readers enjoy about Fourth Wing, they'll be able to find books with similar motifs. There are plenty of great follow-ups to Yarros' 2023 novel and its sequel, Iron Flame .

Fireborne By Rosaria Munda

Those who enjoy the dragons and dragon-riding featured in Fourth Wing should pick up Rosaria Munda's Fireborne , the first book in the author's Aurelian Cycle . Fireborne is a young adult novel, so its romance themes will be less mature than those in Yarros' series. Still, the two novels have many similarities. Fireborne follows two dragon riders — Annie and Lee — as they compete for a top-ranking position in their faction while navigating the political turmoil unraveling in their world. Like Fourth Wing, Fireborne has themes of rebellion, dragons, and a complicated romance. It's an obvious choice for fans of Yarros' work.

Dragonfall By L.R. Lam

Another book centered on dragons is L.R. Lam's Dragonfall , and its premise plays up the complicated relationship between humans and dragons — something Fourth Wing could benefit from digging into in more depth. Dragonfall is set in a world where humans betrayed dragons hundreds of years ago, and the dragons haven't forgotten. When a dragon prophesied to save his species gets mixed up with a thief, he sees an opening. However, fulfilling his destiny will require betraying the thief in question, and this becomes a more difficult task as the two grow closer. With intense politics and a compelling enemies-to-lovers romance, Lam's novel is perfect for Fourth Wing fans.

A Court Of Thorns & Roses By Sarah J. Maas

Sarah J. Maas' Court of Thorns & Roses series focuses on fae instead of dragons, but it's commonly recommended to fans of Fourth Wing — and for good reason . Another " romantasy " series that took BookTok by storm, ACOTAR has a fan-favorite romance at its core, along with great supporting characters and a complex enough fantasy setup to satisfy readers looking for more than a love story. ACOTAR follows Feyre Archeron as she's swept into the world of Prythian and forced to navigate the fae and their politics. Like Violet, Feyre really comes into her own over the course of the series. Her story will appeal to anyone who enjoys Fourth Wing.

10 Books To Read If You Love A Court Of Thorns & Roses

The serpent and the wings of night by carissa broadbent.

A lesser-known romantasy novel, Carissa Broadbent's The Serpent and the Wings of Night is often pitched to fans of Fourth Wing and ACOTAR, though it doesn't deal with dragons or fae. The Serpent and the Wings of Night chronicles a romance between a vampire and a human, and it's perfect for those looking for the steamy fantasy moments present in Fourth Wing and Iron Flame . In addition to a compelling romance, Broadbent's novel features a deadly tournament on par with the recruitment process for Basgiath War College and lots of magic. Needless to say, Fourth Wing fans will eat it up.

To Shape A Dragon's Breath By Moniquill Blackgoose

Those who want more of Fourth Wing 's academy setting or higher political stakes can check out To Shape a Dragon's Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose. The first installment in the Nampeshiweisit series, To Shape a Dragon's Breath follows an Indigenous woman named Anequs as she finds a dragon and is given a choice: enroll in an academy run by the people who colonized her home or watch her dragon be killed. Anequs chooses the former, but her differing beliefs and way of life make this a difficult adjustment for her. To Shape a Dragon Breath goes beyond most other dragon books in that regard, tackling hard topics like colonization head on.

The Priory Of The Orange Tree By Samantha Shannon

A lengthy fantasy novel by Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree is a multi-perspective story that has three things in common with Fourth Wing : high-stakes politics, a looming extraordinary threat, and dragons. While Shannon's story is lengthier than Fourth Wing and contains more running threads, its themes are ideal for anyone looking for a follow-up to Yarros' series. There's also great LGBTQ+ representation, though the romance subplots take a backseat to the fantasy elements of Shannon's story.

An Ember In The Ashes by Sabaa Tahir

Sabaa Tahir's An Ember in the Ashes doesn't have dragons, but it features a ruthless military academy and a corrupt government — two major elements of Fourth Wing . The first novel in Tahir's four-book series, An Ember in the Ashes kicks off a thrilling story with strong female characters, revolution, and magic. It also features a forbidden romance, so there's a lot for fans of Fourth Wing to love about this book . Laia and Elias' story is a memorable one, and it holds up as one of the best adult fantasy series in recent years.

A Deadly Education By Naomi Novik

Dangerous and deadly schools are a common theme in fantasy, and Naomi Novik's A Deadly Education will also appeal to readers who like Fourth Wing 's setting . The novel is set at the Scholomance, where those who fail their magical studies are doomed to die — a reality that the characters in Fourth Wing know all too well. The story follows El as she enrolls and starts digging into the school's secrets. It also sees her grappling with her own magical abilities, with its story spinning out from there.

Divine Rivals By Rebecca Ross

Divine Rivals and Fourth Wing blew up on BookTok around the same time , and while they don't have a ton in common, both fall firmly in the romantasy category. Those looking for another compelling blend of the two genres should give Rebecca Ross' novel a try. The fantasy elements of Divine Rivals aren't as expansive or complex as Fourth Wing 's, but the character dynamics hold up. The book's leads — Iris Winnow and Roman Kitt — also set out to uncover the truth about the war between gods that's impacting their nation. This search for truth is present in Fourth Wing , and Violet and Roman would fit right into the Scribe Quadrant.

From Blood And Ash By Jennifer L. Armentrout

From Blood and Ash has a story that's very different from that of Fourth Wing, but its steamy romantic elements are sure to appeal to fans of Yarros' book . Jennifer L. Armentrout's book also has a powerful female lead like Violet, and Poppy wants to save her people in much the same way. Poppy's role in her story differs greatly from Violet's, but those who appreciate a tough female protagonist who can save the day and engage in a thrilling romance should check From Blood and Ash out. There are six books in the series, so that will keep readers occupied until Fourth Wing 's next sequel is out.

10 Books To Read If You Love Fourth Wing

The Big AI Risk Not Enough People Are Seeing

Beware technology that makes us less human.

“Our focus with AI is to help create more healthy and equitable relationships.” Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder and executive chair of the dating app Bumble, leans in toward her Bloomberg Live interviewer. “How can we actually teach you how to date?”

When her interviewer, apparently bemused, asks for an example of what this means, Herd launches into a mind-bending disquisition on the future of AI-abetted dating: “Okay, so for example, you could in the near future be talking to your AI dating concierge, and you could share your insecurities. ‘I just came out of a breakup. I have commitment issues.’ And it could help you train yourself into a better way of thinking about yourself. And then it could give you productive tips for communicating with other people. If you want to get really out there, there is a world where your dating concierge could go and date for you with other dating concierges.” When her audience lets out a peal of uneasy laughter, the CEO continues undeterred, heart-shape earrings bouncing with each sweep of her hands. “No, no, truly. And then you don’t have to talk to 600 people. It will then scan all of San Francisco for you and say, These are the three people you really ought to meet. ”

What Herd provides here is much more than a darkly whimsical peek into a dystopian future of online dating. It’s a window into a future in which people require layer upon layer of algorithmic mediation between them in order to carry out the most basic of human interactions: those involving romance, sex, friendship, comfort, food. Implicit in Herd’s proclamation—that her app will “ teach you how to date”—is the assumption that AI will soon understand proper human behavior in ways that human beings do not. Despite Herd’s insistence that such a service would empower us, what she’s actually describing is the replacement of human courtship rituals: Your digital proxy will go on innumerable dates for you, so you don’t have to practice anything so pesky as flirting and socializing.

Read: America is sick of swiping

Hypothetical AI dating concierges sound silly, and they are not exactly humanity’s greatest threat. But we might do well to think of the Bumble founder’s bubbly sales pitch as a canary in the coal mine, a harbinger of a world of algorithms that leave people struggling to be people without assistance. The new AI products coming to market are gate-crashing spheres of activity that were previously the sole province of human beings. Responding to these often disturbing developments requires a principled way of disentangling uses of AI that are legitimately beneficial and prosocial from those that threaten to atrophy our life skills and independence. And that requires us to have a clear idea of what makes human beings human in the first place.

In 1977, Ivan Illich, an Austrian-born philosopher, vagabond priest , and ruthless critic of metastatic bureaucracies, declared that we had entered “the age of Disabling Professions.” Modernity was characterized, in Illich’s view, by the standardization and professionalization of everyday life. Activities that were once understood to be within the competencies of laypeople—say, raising children or bandaging the wounded—were suddenly brought under the purview of technical experts who claimed to possess “secret knowledge,” bestowed by training and elite education, that was beyond the ken of the untutored masses. The licensed physician displaced the local healer. Child psychologists and their “cutting edge” research superseded parents and their instincts. Data-grubbing nutritionists replaced the culinary wisdom of grandmothers.

Illich’s singular insight was that the march of professional reason—the transformation of Western civilization into a technocratic enterprise ruled by what we now call “best practices”—promised to empower us but actually made us incompetent, dependent on certified experts to make decisions that were once the jurisdiction of the common man. “In any area where a human need can be imagined,” Illich wrote , “these new professions, dominant, authoritative, monopolistic, legalized—and, at the same time, debilitating and effectively disabling the individual—have become exclusive experts of the public good.” Modern professions inculcate the belief not only that their credentialed representatives can solve your problems for you, but also that you are incapable of solving said problems for yourself. In the case of some industries, like medicine, this is plainly a positive development. Other examples, like the ballooning wellness industry, are far more dubious.

If the entrenchment of specialists in science, schooling, child-rearing, and so on is among the pivotal developments of the 20th century, the rise of online dating is among the most significant of the 21st. But one key difference between this more recent advancement and those of yesteryear is that websites such as Tinder and Hinge are defined not by disabling professionals with fancy degrees, but by disabling algorithms . The white-coated expert has been replaced by digital services that cut out the human middleman and replace him with an (allegedly) even smarter machine, one that promises to know you better than you know yourself.

Faith Hill: ‘Nostalgia for a dating experience they’ve never had’

And it’s not just dating apps. Supposed innovations including machine-learning-enhanced meal-kit companies such as HelloFresh, Spotify recommendations, and ChatGPT suggest that we have entered the Age of Disabling Algorithms as tech companies simultaneously sell us on our existing anxieties and help nurture new ones. At the heart of it all is the kind of AI bait-and-switch peddled by the Bumble CEO. Algorithms are now tooled to help you develop basic life skills that decades ago might have been taken as a given: How to date. How to cook a meal. How to appreciate new music. How to write and reflect. Like an episode out of Black Mirror , the machines have arrived to teach us how to be human even as they strip us of our humanity. We have reason to be worried.

As conversations over the dangers of artificial intelligence have heated up over the past 18 months—largely thanks to the meteoric rise of large language models like ChatGPT—the focus of both the media and Silicon Valley has been on Skynet scenarios. The primary fear is that chat models may experience an “intelligence explosion” as they are scaled up, meaning that LLMs might proceed rapidly from artificial intelligence to artificial general intelligence to artificial superintelligence (ASI) that is both smarter and more powerful than even the smartest human beings. This is often called the “fast takeoff” scenario, and the concern is that if ASI slips out of humanity’s control—and how could it not—it might choose to wipe out our species, or even enslave us.

These AI “existential risk” debates—at least the ones being waged in public —have taken on a zero-sum quality: They are almost exclusively between those who believe that the aforementioned Terminator-style dangers are real, and others who believe that these are Hollywood-esque fantasies that distract the public from more sublunar AI-related problems, like algorithmic discrimination , autonomous weapons systems , or ChatGPT-facilitated cheating . But this is a false binary, one that excludes another possibility: Artificial intelligence could significantly diminish humanity, even if machines never ascend to superintelligence, by sapping the ability of human beings to do human things.

The epochal impact of online dating is there for all to see in a simple line graph from a 2019 study . It shows the explosive growth of online dating since 1995, the year that Match.com, the world’s first online-dating site, was launched . That year, only 2 percent of heterosexual couples reported meeting online. By 2017, that figure had jumped to 39 percent as other ways of meeting—through friends or family, at work or in church—declined precipitously.

Besides online dating, the only way of meeting that increased during this period was meeting at a bar or restaurant. However, the authors of the study noted that this ostensible increase was a mirage: The “apparent post-2010 rise in meeting through bars and restaurants for heterosexual couples is due entirely to couples who met online and subsequently had a first in-person meeting at a bar or restaurant or other establishment where people gather and socialize. If we exclude the couples who first met online from the bar/restaurant category, the bar/restaurant category was significantly declining after 1995 as a venue for heterosexual couples to meet.” In other words, online dating has become hegemonic. The wingman is out. Digital matchmaking is in.

But even those selling online-dating services seem to know there’s something unsettling about the idea that algorithms, rather than human beings, are now spearheading human romance. A bizarre Tinder ad from last fall featured the rapper Coi Leray playing the role of Cupid, perched on an ominously pink stage, tasked with finding a date for a young woman. A coterie of associates, dressed in Hunger Games chic, grilled a series of potential suitors as Cupid swiped left until the perfect match was found. These characters put human faces on an inhuman process.

Leif Weatherby, an expert on the history of AI development and the author of a forthcoming book on large language models, told me that ads like this are a neat distillation of Silicon Valley’s marketing playbook. “We’re seeing a general trend of selling AI as ‘empowering,’ a way to extend your ability to do something, whether that’s writing, making investments, or dating,” Weatherby explained. “But what really happens is that we become so reliant on algorithmic decisions that we lose oversight over our own thought processes and even social relationships. The rhetoric of AI empowerment is sheep’s clothing for Silicon Valley wolves who are deliberately nurturing the public’s dependence on their platforms.” Curtailing human independence, then, is not a bug, but a feature of the AI gold rush.

Of course, there is an extent to which this nurtured dependence isn’t unique to AI, but is an inevitable by-product of innovation. The broad uptake of any new technology generally atrophies the human skills for the processes that said technology makes more efficient or replaces outright. The advent of the vacuum was no doubt accompanied by a corresponding decline in the average American’s deftness with a broom. The difference between technologies of convenience, like the vacuum or the washing machine, and platforms like Tinder or ChatGPT is that the latter are concerned with atrophying competencies, like romantic socializing or thinking and reflection, that are fundamental to what it is to be a human being.

Read: AI has lost its magic

The response to our algorithmically remade world can’t simply be that algorithms are bad, sensu stricto. Such a stance isn’t just untenable at a practical level—algorithms aren’t going anywhere—but it also undermines unimpeachably positive use cases, such as the employment of AI in cancer diagnosis . Instead, we need to adopt a more sophisticated approach to artificial intelligence, one that allows us to distinguish between uses of AI that legitimately empower human beings and those—like hypothetical AI dating concierges—that wrest core human activities from human control. But making these distinctions requires us to re-embrace an old idea that tends to leave those of us on the left rather squeamish: human nature.

Both Western intellectuals and the progressive public tend to be hostile to the idea that there is a universal “human nature,” a phrase that now has right-wing echoes . Instead, those on the left prefer to emphasize the diversity, and equality, of varying human cultural traditions. But this discomfort with adopting a strong definition of human nature compromises our ability to draw red lines in a world where AI encroaches on human territory. If human nature doesn’t exist, and if there is no core set of fundamental human activities, desires, or traits, on what basis can we argue against the outsourcing of those once-human endeavors to machines? We can’t take a stand against the infiltration of algorithms into the human estate if we don’t have a well-developed sense of which activities make humans human , and which activities—like sweeping the floor or detecting pancreatic cancer —can be outsourced to nonhuman surrogates without diminishing our agency.

One potential way out of this impasse is offered by the so-called capability approach to human flourishing developed by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum and others. In rejection of the kind of knee-jerk cultural relativism that often prevails in progressive political thought, Nussbaum’s work insists that advocating for the poor or marginalized, at home or abroad, requires us to agree on universal “basic human capabilities” that citizens should be able to develop. Nussbaum includes among these basic capabilities “being able to imagine, to think, and to reason” and “to engage in various forms of familial and social interaction.” A good society, according to the capability approach, is one in which human beings are not just theoretically free to engage in these basic human endeavors, but are actually capable of doing so.

As AI is built into an ever-expanding roster of products and services, covering dating, essay writing, and music and recipe recommendations, we need to be able to make granular, rational decisions about which uses of artificial intelligence expand our basic human capabilities, and which cultivate incompetence and incapacity under the guise of empowerment. Disabling algorithms are disabling precisely because they leave us less capable of, and more anxious about, carrying out essential human behaviors.

Of course, some will object to the idea that there is any such thing as fundamental human activities. They may even argue that describing behaviors like dating and making friends, critical thinking, or cooking as central to the human condition is ableist or otherwise bigoted. After all, some people are asexual or introverted. Others with mental disabilities might not be adept at reflection, or written or oral communication. Some folks simply do not want to cook, an activity which is historically gendered besides. But this objection relies on a sleight of hand. Identifying certain activities as fundamental to the human enterprise does not require you to believe that those who don’t or can’t engage in them are inhuman, just as embracing the idea that the human species is bipedal does not require you to believe that people born without legs lack full personhood. It only asks that you acknowledge that there are some endeavors that are vital aspects of the human condition, taken in the aggregate, and that a society where people broadly lack these capacities is not a good one.

Without some minimal agreement as to what those basic human capabilities are—what activities belong to the jurisdiction of our species, not to be usurped by machines—it becomes difficult to pin down why some uses of artificial intelligence delight and excite, while others leave many of us feeling queasy.

What makes many applications of artificial intelligence so disturbing is that they don’t expand our mind’s capacity to think, but outsource it. AI dating concierges would not enhance our ability to make romantic connections with other humans, but obviate it. In this case, technology diminishes us, and that diminishment may well become permanent if left unchecked. Over the long term, human beings in a world suffused with AI-enablers will likely prove less capable of engaging in fundamental human activities: analyzing ideas and communicating them, forging spontaneous connections with others, and the like. While this may not be the terrifying, robot-warring future imagined by the Terminator movies, it would represent another kind of existential catastrophe for humanity.

Whether or not the Bumble founder’s dream of artificial-intelligence-induced dalliances ever comes to fruition is an open question, but it is also somewhat beside the point. What should give us real pause is the understanding of AI, now ubiquitous in Big Tech, that underlies her dystopian prognostications. Silicon Valley leaders have helped make a world in which people feel that everyday social interactions, whether dating or making simple phone calls, require expert advice and algorithmic assistance. AI threatens to turbocharge this process. Even if your personalized dating concierge is not here yet, the sales pitch for them has already arrived, and that sales pitch is almost as dangerous as the technology itself: AI will teach you how to be a human.

'Bachelor' Star Ryan Sutter Says 'Absence Makes The Heart Grow Fonder' as Wife Trista Rejoins Family

Trista made her return to Instagram on Saturday to share that she reunited with her family after time away.

Ryan Sutter is done being cryptic -- as his wife, Trista Sutter, has reunited with her family!

On Sunday, the Bachelor Nation star took to Instagram to share a photo of him, Trista and their two children, Maxwell, 16, and Blakesley, 14 on a family vacation.

"They say absence makes the heart grow fonder…. We found out it’s true. It also makes the heart more grateful, more sympathetic, more appreciative for what someone does for you, with you, alongside of you," Ryan wrote next to a selfie of him, his wife and their children all smiling while rocking swimming gear on the beach. "It brings questions and wonder and worry and then answers and peace and celebration. It brought time for reflection, for projects, prayer and independence but mostly it brought joy at its conclusion. Real joy. And that's really what it's all about…Welcome back @tristasutter We missed you…. #love #love #reunitedanditfeelssogood."

Ryan didn't get into further details about his wife's previous absence.

On Saturday, Trista made her return to Instagram -- a week after her husband shared a series of cryptic posts hinting that she wasn't with their family. For her part, the former Bachelorette used her post to set the record straight about her absence , and clarify that she is safe and sound.

"Geez people. Can't a girl have a nervous breakdown/trial separation/midlife crisis/death/divorce in peace around here?! 😜🤣," the 51-year-old former reality TV star wrote alongside the a picture of her and the family posing on the beach. "In all seriousness, for those concerned, I'm safe and sound, happy and healthy, in love and grateful. 🥰. For those who'd rather focus on being critical and searching way too hard for darkness, good luck with that. 🙃 An opportunity for perspective and personal growth presented itself and with the unconditional support of my family and friends, I chose myself and betterment, knowing that my stay-at-home-mom job and my kids end-of-the-school-year needs were in the best, most capable hands."

Trista went on to explain Ryan's post, which alluded to her taking time away from the family on Mother's Day, leaving fans and followers of the longtime couple worried about her well-being.

"My stoic husband who usually chooses privacy over posting, decided to share his love for me in messages that would find me in my travels. We look at Instagram like a digital diary. Most of the time, the world doesn't pay too much attention. This time, he couldn’t say anything right and just about every news outlet picked up his 'cryptic/confusing/attention-seeking/dramatic' pictures and captions. To me, they gave me exactly what my Words of Affirmation love language needed to get me through some serious self doubt and fear…and that’s all that matters. He doesn’t owe anyone any explanation or require permission to post what he wants to post and share what he wants to share. 💯. If you want to know the rest of the story, I will share in due time. For now, it's back to our regularly scheduled programming - from a beach in Mexico! 🇲🇽 🏝️🤿 After all, nervous breakdowns and separations require much needed rest and relaxation! 😎."

Last week Ryan took to Instagram to share a picture of his dog and briefly discuss all the chatter surrounding his post about his wife.

"I strayed from the safety of the usual dog theme and chose to post a message to my wife for a time when she could eventually read it. She understood the context and so did I. No one else did however, and that's where things went sideways," he wrote in part. "It was suggested that Trista had died, we were in trouble or that it must be a mid life crisis among many other creative ideas. Some thought I was intentionally misleading people in order to somehow benefit from it? It got picked up on entertainment news sites and I started getting texts from friends asking if I was ok."

He added, "All because I missed my wife and chose to share how that felt. It felt weird to wear the clothes of past fame once again, even if only briefly. It reminded me of how crazy life was and of how grateful I am for the life I have. But, to be honest, it also felt good to know people still cared, and worried and wondered. It felt good to be noticed and inspired me to do better at paying attention to others - when they do good or when they need help. In the end, like most things, everything turned out ok. Though I think I’ll go back to posting about my dog again for a bit…#life."

Ryan and Trista -- who were married in 2003 during the first season of The Bachelorette -- were last seen together publicly in January when they attended the wedding ceremony for The Golden Bachelor couple , Gerry Turner and Theresa Nist.

Updates on Celebrity News, TV, Fashion and More!

Ryan Sutter Says Wife Trista is 'Fine' After His Cryptic Posts

'The Bachelorette' Star Trista Sutter Says She Is 'Safe and Sound'

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How-To Geek

This spotify client hack is spotify on steroids, and i love the new features.

All Spotify needs is a little spice.

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Modifying spotify using spicetify, custom spotify apps and extensions, cool themes for a unique look, how to add spicetify to your spotify client, key takeaways.

Spicetify lets you customize Spotify with mods like themes, extensions, and apps for a better user experience.
Spicetify Marketplace offers mods that add new features to your Spotify client.
Installing Spicetify and mods is very easy.

I streamed over 90,000 minutes worth of music on Spotify last year—you could say I'm a bit of a connoisseur. While the official Spotify app is solid, there's certainly a lot of room for more "power user" features. I've recently discovered an easy way to make it even better with a nifty tool.

Spicetify is a CLI (Command-Line Interface) tool that you inject into Spotify, allowing you to customize your Spotify app on Windows, Linux, or MacOS. Spicetify doesn't actually add any features by itself; it merely lets you install mods. Most notably, you can use it to install the Spicetify Marketplace, which contains various Spotify modifications that add to or alter the functionality of your Spotify.

Using Spicetify to modify your Spotify client may be considered a violation of Spotify's Terms of Service, which could lead to account suspension or termination.

Spotify isn't exactly packed with features. In fact, the exact opposite is happening. Spotify keeps removing features that fans love—there's no longer a "Create Similar Playlist" option, and they even removed lyrics from the free plan .

That's where Spicetify's custom apps, extensions, and snippets come in. Snippets are the simplest modifications available on the Spicetify Marketplace. For example, they can round off the edges of the "Now Playing" bar and images, automatically collapse the friends list, move interface elements around, make them hoverable, fix bugs, etc. I like their lightweight nature because they let me fine-tune how my Spotify client looks and feels.

Next up are extensions, which are mods that can completely change how Spotify operates. Some of the most popular extensions include Auto Skip Videos, Bookmark, Christian Spotify (auto skip explicit songs), and Keyboard Shortcut. My personal favorite is the Trash Bin, which lets you permanently ban songs from appearing in your shuffle by auto-skipping them. I also like Cat Jam Synced . It's a silly one that puts a synced version of the popular Catjam GIF on top of your Spotify client.

Apps are the most complex mods, and they need to be installed manually. To give you a rough idea, Spicetify Marketplace is technically considered a custom app. They add stuff like audio visualizers, mini-games, and playlist mods.

Spotify is one of the few popular apps that only has a dark mode. While I personally use dark mode on everything , my fiancée hates it and would prefer that her Spotify was light themed. If you agree with her, Spicetify has a nice selection of themes to choose from. I currently use the Default (Ocean) Spicetify theme that modifies the default color scheme from the dull dark gray to a sleek dark blue.

My theme is pretty lightweight, but there are some themes that have very vibrant colorways and alter various interface elements. For instance, StarryNight replaces the whole background with a starry night sky and moves the player to the top-right corner.

It's worth noting that most themes also have several completely unique colorways. My favorite part about how themes are implemented in Spiceitfy is that they don't break your extensions. As you can see from my screenshot, the Catjam extension moved to the corner together with the player. Everything just works, which is a rare sight in any modding community.

Installing Spicetify on your PC couldn't be easier. Just note you need to install the latest version of Spotify before you can install Spicetify. On Windows, open the Start menu, type "PowerShell," and click on the tool to open it. Next, copy-paste the following command and hit Enter:

iwr -useb https://raw.githubusercontent.com/spicetify/cli/main/install.ps1 | iex

After 20–30 seconds, you'll get a confirmation in PowerShell that Spicetified has been successfully installed. To install the Spicetify Marketplace, paste the following command:

iwr -useb https://raw.githubusercontent.com/spicetify/marketplace/main/resources/install.ps1 | iex

MacOS and Linux users can use their respective Terminals and this command to install Spicetify:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/spicetify/cli/main/install.sh | sh

For the Spicetify Marketplace, use the following:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/spicetify/marketplace/main/resources/install.sh | sh

That's it! You can now access the Marketplace in the top-left corner and use it for further modding. Both Spotify and Spicetify and its mods update automatically, but you should still occasionally check for new updates, just in case.

Regardless of whether you have Spotify Premium or not , Spicetify is a must-have tool if you use Spotify on your PC. Even if you don't care about customizing the appearance of your client, there's at least a handful of useful extensions that'll make your music-listening experience way more enjoyable.

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Guest Essay

Men Fear Me, Society Shames Me, and I Love My Life

A photo illustration of a woman on a beach facing a sunset. The sun’s reflected light is seen through her silhouette.

By Glynnis MacNicol

Ms. MacNicol is a writer, a podcast host and the author of the forthcoming memoir “I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself.”

I was once told that the challenge of making successful feminist porn is that the thing women desire most is freedom.

If that’s the case, one might consider my life over the past few years to be extremely pornographic — even without all the actual sex that occurred. It definitely has the makings of a fantasy, if we allowed for fantasies starring single, childless women on the brink of turning 50.

It’s not just in enjoying my age that I’m defying expectations. It’s that I’ve exempted myself from the central things we’re told give a woman’s life meaning — partnership and parenting. I’ve discovered that despite all the warnings, I regret none of those choices.

Indeed, I am enjoying them immensely. Instead of my prospects diminishing, as nearly every message that gets sent my way promises they will — fewer relationships, less excitement, less sex, less visibility — I find them widening. The world is more available to me than it’s ever been.

Saying so should not be radical in 2024, and yet, somehow it feels that way. We live in a world whose power structures continue to benefit from women staying in place. In fact, we’re currently experiencing the latest backlash against the meager feminist gains of the past half-century. My story — and those of the other women in similar shoes — shows that there are other, fulfilling ways to live.

It is disconcerting to enjoy oneself so much when there is so much to assure you to expect the opposite, just as it is strange to feel so good against a backdrop of so much terribleness in the world. But with age (hopefully) comes clarity.

Fifty is a milestone. And the fact my 50th birthday lands on or around some other significant 50ths has brought some things into focus. Last year was the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. This year is the 50th of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which may be less well known but remains significant: It allowed women for the first time to have bank accounts and credit cards in their own name, not needing a male signature.

That my birth date landed between the passing of these two landmark laws makes it easier for me to see that the life I’m living is a result of women having authority over both their bodies and their finances. I represent a cohort of women who lead lives that do not require us to ask permission or seek approval. I have availed myself of all the choices available to me, and while the results come with their own set of risks, they have been enormously satisfying.

The timing of my birthday also helps me see the violent rollback of women’s rights happening right now as a response to the independence these legal rights afforded women. Forget about the horror of being alone and middle-aged — there is nothing more terrifying to a patriarchal society than a woman who is free. That she might be having a better time without permission or supervision is downright insufferable.

My entry into middle age certainly had the makings of an unpleasant story.

Like many, I spent the early months of the pandemic by myself. It was the type of solitary confinement that popular science, and certain men with platforms, enjoy reminding us will be the terrible future that awaits a woman who remains single for too long. I went untouched by anyone. Unsmelled, too, which you might think is a strange thing to note, but it’s an even stranger thing to experience. Unseen except by the building exterminator and the remaining doormen of the Upper West Side who gave distant friendly greetings on my evening walks around Covid-empty New York.

Alone, unmarried, childless, past my so-called prime. A caricature, culture would have it, a fringe identity; a tragedy or a punchline, depending on your preference. At the very least a cautionary tale.

By August 2021, I was desperate — not for partnership but for connection. I bought a ticket to Paris, a place where I’d spent much of my free time before the pandemic and where I had a group of friends.

Paris, I reminded myself, prioritizes pleasure. I dived in. Cheese, wine, friendships, sex — and repeat.

At first it was shocking. I was ill prepared to get what I wanted, what it seemed I had summoned. There were moments when I wondered whether I should be ashamed. I had also never felt so free and so fully myself. I felt no shame or guilt, only the thrill that came with the knowledge I was exercising my freedom.

These days, generally speaking, there is little in cinema or literature, let alone the online world, to suggest that when you are a woman alone (forget about a middle-aged woman), things will go your way, as I have often experienced.

There have been better times. In the 1980s, sitcoms were stacked with starring women for whom men were a minor-character concern — “Designing Women,” “Murphy Brown,” “The Golden Girls” — all of which, if they premiered today (and that’s a big if), would feel radical. Later there was “Girlfriends.” Even “Sex and the City,” with its often regressive marriage plotting, remains surprisingly modern in its depictions of adult friendship and sexual mores. In each case, just as it looked as if these narratives might begin to fully take root in the real world, the women largely went back inside (or into body bags, in the case of many “Law & Order” plotlines). By the early aughts we were housewives again, real and imagined.

I suspect that a lot of this backlash is connected to the terror that men experienced at discovering that they are less necessary to women’s fulfillment than centuries of laws and stories have allowed them to believe. That terror is abundantly apparent today: From Harrison Butker’s commencement speech suggesting that women may find more fulfillment in marriage and children than in having a career, to the Supreme Court once again debating access to abortion to the push to roll back no-fault divorce laws: All are efforts to return women to a place where others can manage their access to … well, just about everything.

It’s in this light that my enjoyment begins to feel radical. Come fly with me. There’s no fear here.

Glynnis MacNicol is a writer, a podcast host and the author of the forthcoming memoir “I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

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Of Love by Francis Bacon: A Summary and Line by Line Explanation
The stage depicts the theme of love more than actual experiences in life. Plays tend to focus on love as a central theme far more than experiences in everyday life. Bacon wrote this essay in the Elizabethan era. Being an essayist of that period, he likely refers to Elizabethan plays.
What is the main theme of Francis Bacon's essay "Of Love"?
Quick answer: Frances Bacon's essay "Of Love" explores the nature of love. He uses various metaphors to discuss whether love and its consequences are good or bad for people. He examines the all ...
Of Love by Francis Bacon Summary and Analysis
The essay "Of Love" is an argumentative essay written by Sir Francis Bacon. Bacon in this essay argues about the various ills of falling in love. He particularly argues about the carnal pleasures and its consequences. Sir Francis Bacon is a well-known English Essayist and philosopher. He devoted himself to writing along with scientific work ...
The Theme of Love
The theme of love is one of the themes that have appeared in many books or rather works of literature that has been written in the past. This has appeared in many forms; love as a virtue that brings peace and consolation in the society or love as a virtue that causes pain in the society. Following this point, there are various sides that love ...
Love Themes in 'Romeo and Juliet'
Shallow Love. Some characters fall in and out of love very quickly in "Romeo and Juliet." For example, Romeo is in "love" with Rosaline at the start of the play, but it is presented as an immature infatuation. Today, we might use the term "puppy love" to describe it. Romeo's love for Rosaline is shallow, and nobody really believes that it ...
What is the main idea of Francis Bacon's essay "Of Love"?
His essay on love is a revelation of his own character. See eNotes Ad-Free Start your 48-hour free trial to get access to more than 30,000 additional guides and more than 350,000 Homework Help ...
Themes in Romeo and Juliet with Examples and Analysis
The Theme of Death. Death is a theme that lurks throughout the play. In many ways, "Romeo and Juliet" shows the journey of the two lovers from their initial, love-filled meeting up to their death. Thus, death serves as the tragic resolution of various conflicts. For instance, Romeo's conflict with Tybalt ends with the latter's death.
Theme of Love in Romeo and Juliet: [Essay Example], 1071 words
Love is a central theme in the play, explored in various forms, including romantic love between the titular characters, familial love, and the love between Juliet and her Nurse. The essay highlights how Romeo and Juliet experience a deep and passionate love for each other, even to the extent of risking their lives.
Exploring the Multifaceted Themes of Love in Literature
This essay about the themes of love in literature examines how various forms of love are portrayed and their significance in understanding human experiences. It explores romantic love through classics like "Romeo and Juliet," highlighting love's power to transcend obstacles. The essay also delves into familial love, as seen in "Beloved ...
Theme Of Love In Romeo And Juliet Essay
In Romeo and Juliet, love is the cause of much conflict between the two families and leads to the deaths of Romeo and Juliet. Love is a central theme in Romeo and Juliet and is portrayed in many different ways. Shakespeare uses language techniques to help convey this theme to the audience. Some examples include oxymorons, metaphors and similes.
Love
Love. First published Fri Apr 8, 2005; substantive revision Wed Sep 1, 2021. This essay focuses on personal love, or the love of particular persons as such. Part of the philosophical task in understanding personal love is to distinguish the various kinds of personal love. For example, the way in which I love my wife is seemingly very different ...
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Love is a complex and powerful force that has been the subject of countless literary works throughout history. One of the most famous examples of this is William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, a timeless tale of young love that ends in tragedy. In this essay, we will explore the theme of love in Romeo and Juliet, examining its various forms ...
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What is Theme? A Look at 20 Common Themes in Literature
Power and Corruption. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This theme is often closely related to "Man vs Society.". Additionally, "Power" can refer to a person's political leadership, personal wealth, physical prowess, etc. In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez.
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A theme is simply an idea to be examined, whereas a moral is a clear lesson to be learned. Here is an example of theme versus moral: Theme: Love . Moral: Love others the way you would like to be loved. Whereas the theme is simply an idea, the moral is a message and instruction. Motif
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A 500-word essay on why I love you. Trying to encapsulate why I love you in a mere 500 words is impossible. My love for you goes beyond the confines of language, transcending words and dwelling in the realm of emotions, connections, and shared experiences. Nevertheless, I shall endeavor to express the depth and breadth of my affection for you.
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Powered by LitCharts content and AI. "The Garden of Love" is a poem by English Romantic visionary William Blake. Blake was devoutly religious, but he had some major disagreements with the organized religion of his day. The poem expresses this, arguing that religion should be about love, freedom, and joy—not rules and restrictions.
Amor: the Roman God of Love and Desire
In the intricate fabric of Roman mythology, Amor emerges as a beacon, embodying the delicate embrace of love and the intoxicating allure of desire. Each stroke of his golden bow and each whisper of his ethereal presence creates a narrative that transcends time, drawing mortals and immortals alike into the enigmatic dance of passion and longing.
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These four movements address various theological issues, but the themes of love and creation are highlighted in this essay. Using the four main story events, the biblical themes of love and creation demonstrate unity. These actions contribute to painting a depiction of God's love for people and His purpose for humanity.
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Ryan Sutter and Trista Sutter were married in 2003. - John Parra/Getty Images for Sandals Resorts "They say absence makes the heart grow fonder…. We found out it's true. It also makes the ...
This Spotify Client Hack Is Spotify on Steroids, and I Love the New
Custom Spotify Apps and Extensions Spotify isn't exactly packed with features. In fact, the exact opposite is happening. Spotify keeps removing features that fans love—there's no longer a "Create Similar Playlist" option, and they even removed lyrics from the free plan.. That's where Spicetify's custom apps, extensions, and snippets come in. Snippets are the simplest modifications available ...
Opinion
Men Fear Me, Society Shames Me, and I Love My Life. Ms. MacNicol is a writer, a podcast host and the author of the forthcoming memoir "I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself.". I was once told that ...

Of Love by Francis Bacon: A Summary and Line by Line Explanation

Of Love Summary

Line by Line Explanation

Love is a Powerful Emotion

Deceptive Nature of Love

One-sided Passionate Love

Love is the Child of Folly

Balancing Love and Goals

Love as an Escape Route

Different Types of Love

Of Love Video Explanation

What does Francis Bacon say about love?

What are the three different kinds of love that Bacon talks of in his essay?

What does Bacon call a man who is gripped by the passion of love?

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Of Love by Francis Bacon Summary

Of Love by Francis Bacon Literary Analysis

More From Francis Bacon

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Individual vs. Society

The Overarching Power of Patriarchy

The Theme of Death

The Inevitability of Fate

Ideological Divide Between the Young and the Old

The Absurdity Underlying Family Feuds

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