Charting Love

by Jacqueline Bond

picture by Jacqueline Bond

‘…Affection is the broadest basis of good in life.’

‘Do you think so?’ said Gwendolen with a little surprise. ‘I should have thought you cared most about ideas, knowledge, wisdom, and all that.’

‘But to care about them is a sort of affection,’ said Deronda, smiling at her sudden naïveté. 

‘Call it attachment, interest, willingness to bear a great deal for the sake of being with them and saving them from injury. Of course it makes a difference if the objects of interest are human beings; but generally in all deep affections the objects are a mixture — half persons and half ideas – sentiments and affections flow in together.’ 

Daniel Deronda, George Eliot 1876

How many words is love?

As English-speakers, we love whatever we want, however we want. From ‘I love your hair’ to ‘I love you’, love is a one-size-fits-all term. It stretches from fleeting expressions of appreciation to deep declarations that endure for decades. We might think we mean different types of love when expressing these feelings, but is there anything to justify this distinction?

We catch an insight into how tricky separating love can be through the words of Daniel Deronda, the eponymous protagonist of George Eliot’s final novel. Eliot explores the idea of love through two principal characters who treat it very differently, despite their mutual weakness for each other. Gwendolen and Deronda both exist as deep presences in each other’s minds, which is made only more potent as Gwendolen is unhappily married to another. 

Catching a fleeting opportunity to exchange conversation, Gwendolen is surprised to hear Deronda treats all objects of our affection alike, as ‘half persons and half ideas’. Gwendolen’s surprise implies a belief that feelings towards people are very different in nature to how we treat our hobbies and interests, such as the pursuit of knowledge. For Deronda, this is naïve; intellectual passions spring from the same care by which we care for anything. Our minds transform objects of our affection to make ideas more human-like and humans more idea-like until they are indistinguishable. If true, this goes against some basic intuitions that our love for people is distinct from our love for things. Whilst we may be inclined to, is it possible to deny Deronda’s conception of love, and if so, how?

Objectifying and humanising

We must first get on board with what Deronda means when he says that affections are half persons and half ideas. This fictional exchange does not use ‘love’, but ‘care’ or ‘affection’ seem      to share the same definitional issues. When it comes to our feelings for other people, these are limited by the nature of never fully or directly knowing someone else. Our feelings for a person are directed towards our representation of them in our minds. To feel for someone therefore means feeling for an idea of them.

Conversely, ideas can also become person-like. In loving our favourite hobbies, we morph them into person-like forms whom we protect and wish to keep close. When we have interests of a deeper sort, such as making or appreciating art, they are called passions for a reason. We want to spend time with them, we consider them in our thoughts and we miss them when absent. Deronda mentions wanting to ‘save them from injury’, much in the same way that art-lovers might find it abhorrent to discover that tomato soup was thrown on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. 

Conceding there is a difference if the objects of interest are human beings, Deronda loosens his claim, which makes room for people to have a special place in our hearts. However, while the tendency to humanise objects we love shows a prejudice that love towards other human beings may be stronger, it is possible to anthropomorphise our interests so they too can receive our deepest affections. Half persons and half ideas is the resulting blend; we love ideas of people because we cannot know them perfectly and we love ideas as people because it enables us to feel for them better.

Distinguishing types

Regardless of this explanation, it is still hard to get on board with love being one and the same kind, regardless of whether we talk about persons or other things. It is palatable that some lifelong passions can match love for people but what about lesser forms of affection? Is it not a slur to our loved ones – or even to true love itself – to say we cannot tell apart our feelings for them from loving someone’s new hairstyle?

First off, we can say the feeling intended in a cursory ‘I love your hair’ is not satisfactorily capturing the essence of expressing ‘I love you’ to a romantic partner. Whilst the ‘loves’ here are both used to convey appreciation towards something or someone else, they seem to differ so much in quality that if you had meant the same type of love for somebody’s hair it would seem quite wrong and unusual. 

Other languages ‘like’ when we ‘love’

But how do we feel this distinction so intuitively? Is it because love does not refer to the same definition in each? Some languages do not use ‘love’ in cases where English tends to, replacing it for ‘like’. Lines between definitions in English could be drawn by looking across a translation dictionary. If another language doesn’t use ‘love’ when we might in the same context, then it doesn’t mean love for them, and it needn’t do for us.

Using this method in English, one way of checking whether ‘love’ means the same across different instances could be to see whether we can substitute love for another word and achieve an equal meaning. ‘I like your hair’ seems to be perfectly adequate, whereas ‘I like you’ does not. The former, though less emphatic, broadly captures the same positive appraisal of external features and when used in conversation is intended as flattering and kind to the listener. 

The latter is not simply less emphatic, but to say, ‘I really like you’ is a shift away from the meaning intended with ‘I love you’. ‘I love you’ is not intended as a positive judgement of another person but captures a relational depth. However, while love for a partner, friends or family is not purely a judgement, it implies some positive appraisal of the other person. While it might be possible to love someone who we might simultaneously believe is a ‘bad person’, it is hard to pair the concept of love with a full-blown dislike of the one that is loved. Given this method, one can replace ‘love’ in certain phrases into ‘like’ where pure judgement is involved, but it is unclear whether loving someone is definitionally exclusive from liking. 

Friends vs lovers

As modern languages cannot draw a neat line between love and like, it’s time to look further back. The Greeks separated out eros and philia, to split apart romantic love from friendly affection. It feels right that love for a partner is different to the love for a friend. Romantic love, or eros, has a strong association with erotic desire. But how necessary is this? A loving relationship does not require the ever-presence of sexual desire. Perhaps instead eros is stronger in feeling. However, one can love someone for decades with utmost conviction but not feel it with equal strength, or at all, for sustained periods of time. This is not falling out of love for these moments, but merely recognising that we have lives to lead with distractions that occupy our minds. Love is not easily categorised as an emotion, a belief, or a state because it does not always have to be felt, thought, or be experienced every moment to maintain its truth. All this means that deep and long-lasting affection towards our friends cannot be separated straightforwardly from love for romantic partners.

graphical love

Neither modern nor ancient languages could help answer our question, so we now turn to science instead. We could try to solve whether there are ‘types of love’ experimentally. Distinct types could emerge when we place instances of love on a graph. Is all love ‘half-person, half-idea’ or some love that is 25% person and 75% idea? 

 There are many main variables that could define the axes across which love ranges. I have selected just one for its plausibility, because of its common associations with love. If love splits into clear groups across one variable, it not only supports the case for there being distinct types of love, but you could count how many. 

The variable I have selected is ‘intensity of feeling’ against which a range of instances of love could be plotted. Intensity could plausibly be the factor that differentiates loving someone’s hair, a hobby, a friend, or romantic partner. Intensity, much like the brightness of a bulb, can vary on a scale, e.g. The intensity of my love of my partner is higher than that of my love of my friend, which is higher than my love of swimming. Deronda claims there is a difference if the object is human, and here we might find that humans receive a significant increase in the intensity of love compared to inanimate objects.

Immediate questions about how to measure this can be solved superficially, but not comprehensively. Intensity could be measured via a physiological or psychological instrument. ‘Skin conductivity’ could be recorded as a signifier for levels of emotional arousal when participants are shown a series of potential objects of love, like a partner, friend, or preferred hairstyle. Alternatively, participants could answer a questionnaire to rate their feelings of intensity towards something. As these results can be quantified, with enough data they could be graphically displayed. Discrete groupings might emerge for certain objects of love. If all instances of inanimate objects rank lower than romantic partners, this would lend support to the theory there are multiple categories of love.

But here comes the problem: what if a distinct group also emerged for objects of love that all carried the similarity of having yellow features (blonde hair, yellow clothed lover, yellow-face painted friend)? We would be obliged to recognise ‘yellow love’ as much as romantic love. There is no getting around this; we would never be able to separate out or control for all the other features of potential types of love without already assuming what we were trying to distinguish. We might get results of different love types, not because they were presenting different types of love, but because they were distinguishable types for other independent reasons, such as ‘the person we spend most of our time with’, ‘an inanimate object’ or ‘being yellow’. A scientific test cannot be used to carve up a poorly defined notion, as the features that could separate it might have nothing to do with it unless we already assume they do.

And in this way, considering how we could ever distinguish types of love is a problem. We want to create distinctions because we are loath to consider one type of love in the same bracket as another. But the love we express for a romantic partner is self-classifying. That love is reserved for them. The romantic type of love is for romantic partners. The definition alone makes it distinct. Any ‘loving feeling’ for romantic partners cannot be proven as separate to any other type of love other than the fact it always regards partners.

love me for what i am

When considering the vast range of occasions we employ the word ‘love’, it is natural to assume love must warrant further distinction. There are many feelings and thoughts involved in love, but none of them are necessary or exclusive to a type of love over another. Like many of us, Gwendolen made the distinction between types of love and thus felt it wrong to pile affections for people and hobbies into one. What about it feels wrong? Understanding why we believe in more than one type of love comes down to preconceptions of what types of love are suitable for whom. The categories for objects of love we delineate are eligible for their appropriate types of love. It is exactly that and no more than the objects’ differences that creates the distinction. In other words, if it seems wrong to interpret loving someone’s hair as romantic, it is not a moral but a logical feeling of wrongness. This is because you have already defined what the right type of love to feel is – and to feel the wrong type is to make a categorical error.

Deronda’s account refers more to the internal representations of our objects of love, which is unlikely to be what Gwendolen initially considered in her view of love. He speaks of the distinctions between the objects of our affection as blurry because how we frame people and ideas in our minds are not purely one nor the other. How we categorise objects determines the range of feeling we allow ourselves to give them. When we think of objects as more human-like, this enables us to love them like humans. Similarly, when we change the framework of what we think is acceptable to love romantically, we enable ourselves to love more things romantically. Our prejudices form the boundaries, and without them we could love who and how we like.