A common answer to this question is that romantic love is an emotion. Yet some philosophers have denied this and have given different accounts of love’s nature. In this section, we will look at some of these accounts, starting with the one that identifies, or strongly connects, romantic love with brain activity.
Science
It has become recently fashionable to discuss romantic love in terms of chemical and neurological processes to try to understand what happens to us when we are in love. Basically, the idea is that when we fall in love, the brain signals to some glands to produce hormones (such as adrenaline and cortisol) that can make the experience of being in love a mixture of anxiety, excitement, and pleasure.2 The experience, especially of pleasure, makes it rewarding to be in love. Our brain is thus an enabler of love of sorts—it enables love by pumping hormones into our blood that make us want to continue to be in love. One interesting angle to this chemical aspect of love is possible medical intervention to, say, pharmaceutically either enhance or block the experience of love, and the moral questions this possibility raises. If one, for example, finds being in love to be oppressive, one might have recourse to drugs that would block the release of certain hormones, thereby helping one discontinue the love (or even preemptively help one not fall in love to begin with, like an immunization shot against it). Or, if one is finding it hard to keep one’s promises to “love and to hold forever,” one can take drugs to enhance one’s love in order to keep one’s promises.3
As fascinating as this discussion is, I would like to set it aside for a few reasons. First, even if love is a chemical process of sorts, this does not exhaust all the scientific questions about it, questions that are more important in their own ways than the chemistry of love. As the philosopher Ronald de Sousa puts it, “[O]ther perspectives are needed to explain why these mechanisms exist in the first place and what role they play in our lives. That calls for evolutionary theory, anthropology, psychology, sociology—none of which reduce to chemistry or physics” (2015, 78). Put slightly differently, chemical processes do not explain why nature has “designed” us in such a way so as to love; for that we need evolutionary biology and related fields. In addition, given that romantic love has always been clothed in different social and cultural mores, we need social scientific and cultural theories for a complete explanation of it.
In this regard, the philosopher Carrie Jenkins claims that romantic love has a dual nature: “it is ancient biological machinery embodying a modern social role” (2017, 82; emphases in the original). She uses the analogy of an actor playing a character to point to the relationship between love’s biology and love’s culture (2017, 82): for example, the actor Uma Thurman plays the role of The Bride in Kill Bill. When she has that wry smile on her face as she says to her enemies, “You and I have unfinished business,” that smile is both Thurman’s (biology, chemistry) and the Bride’s (culture). Thus, whether two gay women in the twenty-first century express their love publicly by holding hands or whether two gay women in the nineteenth century express theirs secretly by writing furtive love letters to each other, it is the same biology at work but expressed culturally differently.
It is instructive in this sense to think of other phenomena with a dual nature: most, if not all, of our emotions are probably rooted in some way in brain activity, yet are expressed, evaluated, and taken up differently depending on the culture and the time period. Ditto for sexual desire: it is a biological appetite, yet one that is always robed in cultural and social expressions and values. Ancient Roman men did not sexually desire women wearing stiletto heels simply because there were no such heels back then. How desires are felt, formed, and thought is deeply shaped by culture and social mores. Something similar surely happens with romantic love, though how to explain the connection between its biological aspect and its cultural one is the task that needs completion. So Jenkins is probably correct that romantic love has a dual nature, but the question is how to explicate this dual nature (I will return to her view shortly). Note that once we agree that romantic love is usually expressed in particular cultural formations, we must ever be on our guard on how inequalities in society seep into romantic love itself. For instance, because of gender inequality, the way men and women love might be different, even to this day.4
Now, because scientific investigators of romantic love are likely to agree with the claim that science does not provide a full explanation of love, we need to marshal other reasons as to why such scientific explanations are irrelevant. This takes us to the second reason for setting aside scientific explanations of love: given that all human (and mammalian) emotions are likely to be connected to some brain and chemical activity, and, given that some of these emotions might have a feel to them that is very similar to being in romantic love, science needs to better isolate whatever chemical and physical processes that are correlated with, cause, or are caused by being in love (Brogaard 2015, ch. 2). For example, if the prospect of seeing one’s beloved is exciting, anxiety-inducing, and pleasurable all at the same time, think of what the prospect of expressing your anger feels like; it, too, is exciting, pleasurable, and anxiety-inducing. Thus, to pin down romantic love’s chemistry we need a proper isolation method.
A third reason is that these scientific claims about love focus on people who are in love in its early passionate stages. Whether romantic love in its later, settled stages has such corresponding chemical actions and reactions remains to be seen. Although a study in 2012 involving the brain scans of 17 people who have been married (not to each other) for an average of 21 years showed that their brains exhibited activities similar to those activities exhibited by the brains of new lovers, more studies such as this are needed.5
A fourth, crucial reason for the irrelevancy of the scientific explanation of romantic love is that a proper understanding of romantic love might not require a scientific explanation at all. We can easily imagine, for example, an alien race whose chemical makeup is nowhere near our own, yet whose members seem to exhibit the same signs of love as we do: seeking each other out (as a pair or more), snuggling, taking care of each other, and so on. Upon discovering that their physical composition is not like ours, we are not likely to say, “They exhibit all the symptoms and behaviors we associate with human romantic love, but because their physical and chemical makeup is not like ours, they do not love.” Instead, we would agree that they love but that their love has a different chemical and physical correlation than our love does.
Indeed, we do not need to go to alien races to see this point. Suppose that your friend Melissa claims to have fallen in love with Sam and that she exhibits the range of all the usual symptoms and behaviors of human romantic love: lack of focus on things other than Sam, lack of appetite, impaired judgment, longing to be with Sam, giggling when with Sam, thinking that God broke the mold after creating Sam—the works. But suppose we discover that Melissa has none of the brain activity that scientists tell us are the neurological correlates of being in love. We would not change our minds about Melissa’s being in love. We would, I suspect, believe that Melissa’s love has different correlate activities in her brain.
Finally, a fifth reason is that even if we discover that love is connected to a certain type of brain or chemical activity, it is an open question how much this helps us understand love, as opposed to be able to control it, medicate it, and redirect it, for example. How would knowing that love is connected to a series of synapses firing an explanation of what love is, even a partial one? This is true of most psychological states: knowing that anger is connected to brain activity might leave us completely in the dark about what anger is.
For all these reasons, I will set aside the scientific discussion of love and move to other accounts of love’s nature.
Social Construction
In the previous section, I referred to Jenkins’s view that love is partly socially constructed. Explaining the relationship between the two sides of love—the social side and the non-social side—is important, especially for Jenkins’s view since she rejects the idea that society or culture shape how love is expressed. She claims, mysteriously, that this “downplays the importance of the social side of love … relegating it to mere expression” (2017, 81). The word “mere” is unfair to the concept of “expression,” since how things are expressed can be complicated and deep (as any quick look into the discussion of expression in the philosophy of art reveals). So what else is left for the social part to do other than (complexly) express love’s biology, if love is to have the dual nature of biology and society?
Jenkins calls the view that love has a dual nature (which she tentatively accepts) “constructionist functionalism” (2015b). The idea is that this view captures two things about love: its role and what makes someone play the role of love (“realizes” the role of love, as Jenkins puts it). In other words, when x loves y, love prompts x to do certain things with respect to y, such as courting y, feeling affection for y, valuing y, and marrying or committing in some form to y (Jenkins 2015b, 360). Now, some of those things that x is prompted to do are socially constructed: marrying y out of love, or courting y, are probably things that are specific to certain times and societies. Others are not socially constructed, such as feeling affection for y and valuing y. So far so good. However, we are left with the question: What makes x undergo or experience the things that x does towards y, whether socially constructed or not? To quote Jenkins: “What is it that prompts people to date, care, write heart-shaped letters, form new family units and marriage-like bonds, and so on?” (2015b, 361).
According to Jenkins, what realizes the love could be brain states, mental states, or “a drive best understood by studying our biology and/or evolutionary history, and so on” (2015b, 362). That is, we still need to fill in the part of, well, what love is (2015b, 361–2). If it is love that prompt...
