Tuesday, 9/9/03 - 09:17
Alien: I bring you love!
Hibbert: Is that the love between a man and a woman, or the love of a man for a fine Cuban cigar?
Alien: Uh... I bring you love!
Lenny: It's bringing love! Don't let it get away!
Question #3: I think there are different kinds of love. I loved my cat differently from how I love my friend's son differently from how I love my lover differently from how I love you differently from how I love chocolate ice cream, etc., but I've never been able to really work out if they're all parts of a whole or if they're really different things or if we ought to have lots of words for love like Eskimos have lots of words for snow. What do you think?
I think whatever everybody else thinks. The reason for that is because I don't think love exists "out there" as something with a true and essential nature that I can comment on. Whatever love is, it's inseparable from what we say about it and the cultural criteria telling us how to distinguish it from other feelings, what being in love means and why it matters. Everyone who's ever wondered if it's love, as if the answer somehow really mattered, or the stereotypical teenager who's sure it's love one day and two weeks later changes his mind, or the question you asked about different types of love and the indistinctness of the word itself -- all of these suggest some of the fuzziness of love as a concept. The fuzziness is as real as the love.
Insofar as love in our culture is a creation of our culture, the way to answer this question is not philosophy but anthropology or sociology. Our culture gives a bunch of different models for love based on pre-existing relationships -- teacher, mother, secret lover, etc. -- but they include many of the same criteria of warmth, willingness to put oneself at a disadvantage on behalf of the beloved, tendency to worry about the other's safety, hugging, etc. I'd venture to guess that most people think that love for a mother, a friend, a brother, and a spouse are different species of the same genus, and that love of ice cream is just hyperbole and not really love at all. I think I've heard people say things like that about ice cream, and a brief google on different kinds of love suggests the same thing.
Or maybe most people would erect a greater barrier between romantic love and other kinds of love, but consider things like sisterly love, brotherly love, and friendship to be variants of the same thing (hey, friendship isn't even incestuous). Certainly a lot of people have a stake in keeping the boundaries between romantic love and friendship strong. The monogamous romantic ideal depends on it. If the distinction between one's many friends and one's only beloved soul mate were allowed to slip, then idea that marriage is about finding your one true love and that you can't be in love with more than one person at a time would start looking even more ridiculous than it already does. The assumption of monoamory is foundational to both the romance of white weddings and sometimes later rationales for divorce. Although there are certainly other reasons for monogamy, such a change in thinking about love would probably go along with changes to marriage as an institution. On a more practical scale, if a woman wants to have male friends without compromising her own romantic ideals or making her boyfriend jealous, she's obliged not to think of friendship and romance as too close variations on the same thing.
For a given contemporary American, the set of potential romantic partners and the set of potential friends overlaps wildly, which means that maintaining the distinction between them is a lot of work, hence all the various overblown rituals of romance. Indeed, the increasingly expensive and elaborate middle class weddings of America in recent decades, as well as roses and Hallmark more generally, may be part of a deal to delineate roles and types of love that have been getting fuzzier since women started working the same jobs as men and gaining greater financial independence. Meanwhile our parents are increasingly our friends, and the love between master and servant remains delegitimated.
To hedge my initial answer -- my experience of love, though shaped by whatever everyone else thinks, is one of the variants that gives the concept rich, warm fuzz. In my experience, the boundaries between different species of love are unpredictably fluid, especially between friendship and romance. "Love" never quite refers to the same experience twice anyway; even the ways you love two different lovers are different; even the ways you love one lover are different. Different types of love can slip together willy-nilly within a single intense relationship, which means that over time it's fairly easy for a relationship to slip from being characterized primarily by one kind of love to being characterized by another. And though I've been talking so far mostly about people, I think I'm ready to include beloved objects, places, the divine, and abstractions in this statement as well. It's not entirely fair to separate out the inanimate and nonexistent from people like you and me, given that loving another person is to some extent loving an abstraction in the first place. Besides, love of nations, gods, or the Regenstein library has many of the same properties as other types of love.
Long live Diaryland!
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