My friend Manfred Wolf recently published a
column with the above title in The West Portal
Monthly. He wanted to discuss “that most problematic of utterances, those
between two, shall we say, ‘romantic’ partners.”
“Why
problematic?” he asks, and he answers, “Because it is at once indefinable and
absolutely indispensable. Expressing it in any good adult relationship is not
optional... But when lovers or a married couple say it to one another,
what do they mean?”
Manfred
goes on:
The problem, I
suppose, boils down to this: we don't know what ”love” is and what the word
stands for when we say it. I might mean ”I like being with you,” but my partner
might mean ”Your well-being matters to me more than your presence.” More disconcertingly,
one partner may mean ”I'd love you more if your presence were more agreeable”
and the other partner might well think to herself, ”I am concerned about his
well-being but I sure wish he were different.”
And that raises yet
another semantic problem in ”I love you.” The statement can be aspirational,
even performative; we want to elicit something more than we say. The age-old
problem here, I believe, is that people crave to be loved as they love, and
they find the others' different understanding and style of loving to be less
than fully, really, genuinely loving.
Take the
familiar problem almost endemic to the relationships of men and women: The
woman might well think, ”Real love would be much more expressive than this man,”
while the man is thinking, ”Doesn't she see that all my acts of consideration,
thoughtfulness, concern are much better, more genuinely loving, than frequent
effusions of feeling?”
My response: does ”I love you” really present us, as Manfred says, with a semantic problem? I find the issue intriguing because of the way in which problems of philosophy and problems of love get intertwined here.
“I
love you” expresses a commitment
There is some truth to the idea that saying
the words is often performative (and this may be one source of bewilderment).
This is connected with the realization that it feels unsatisfactory to think about
them simply as a report, say, of some definite inner state (like thirst or
fatigue). Rather, they will primarily be used as a declaration or an
affirmation. (It is true that they may also be used in a more report-like way, as when I confess my love to
someone: “I love you; I’m afraid I can’t help it”; say, circumstances being
such that I consider it wrong for me to have these feelings, or my having no
hope that my feelings will be reciprocated. But a confession may equally well be
uttered to a third party, whereas a declaration or an affirmation will
primarily be addressed at the person one loves or professes to love.)
The
performative character of “I love you” is bound up with the fact that the
speaker is undertaking a commitment. This means that there are ways of acting
that may be regarded by the other as a betrayal of those words; though not necessarily as a refutation of
them. I may fall short in my love, even badly so, and still have love – in
fact, it is only as long as I love that I may fall short. This is one reason why saying ”I love you” is not like a report of a
state.
(But
if so, you may ask, when will the other’s words start to sound hollow? Well, who’s
to decide that for you if you can’t decide it?)
“I
love you” may be true or false
“But ‘I love you’ must be more than a
commitment”, we feel like saying. Of course it is not the same as a promise. If
I’ve promised to help you move, then if I turn up with my van I’m fulfilling my
promise regardless of whether my heart is in it. But if I say I love you it’s
not enough that I cook your meals, listen to you talk about your day or accompany
you on your vacation – or whatever it is you expect of me – unless I do so willingly
and with some degree of enjoyment.
In
saying I love someone I present myself, my feelings, in a certain light. Even
if ”I love you” is not a report of my feelings, I do not speak truly if my
feelings aren’t in it.
“Do
we mean the same?”
“But this is all intolerably vague”,
someone will retort. “You speak about feelings and commitments, but you don’t tell
us exactly what you’re supposed to feel and what you’re committing yourself to when
you say you love someone.”
Manfred concludes:
when it comes to the basic style and content of loving we want done for us and to us what we do to others. That has the power to make us truly happy. The failure to receive the kind of love you want often leads to the thought that the other "doesn't love me," or, more perniciously, "never loved me," when in fact it was only the difference in style of loving that became the problem. - - -
Perhaps the only thing to do is try to understand that the other person needs, requires, insists on the style of loving he or she wants, and not the one you want. Almost certainly the two of you mean something different when you say "I love you."
My response: it may not be true in all cases
that what we want done for us is what we do for others. But even where that is the
case, does this point to something problematic about the very concept of love?
An account of the
use of the word “love” must allow for its being used between people who have different
demands and expectations, between those who are hopeful and those who are disappointed
in love, between those who are self-centred, cynical, sincere or generous. Where
misunderstandings arise, they do so because people misunderstand each other; it’s
not the fault of our language.
We should not look
to a conceptual investigation to tell us whether we love truly or are truly loved.
What philosophy can do is try to indicate the kind of place the word “love” occupies
in people’s lives. It is up to us how we use it.
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For more on the topic, read Ilham Dilman’s book
Love and Human Separateness, as well as
Camilla Konqvist’s essay “The Promise that Love will Last”, Inquiry 54 (6): 605-668 (2011).
