--- aliases: - dilectio - nb - living - philia - eros date: '2025-10-04' description: love as attention, care, commitment, and revision id: love modified: 2026-08-26 09:31:16 GMT-04:00 socials: essay: '[[posts/love|mutual becoming]]' hermeneutics: '[[posts/romantic epistemology|romantic epistemology]]' tags: - evergreen - love - philosophy - technical - fruit title: dilectio transclude: headings: false created: '2025-10-04' published: '2025-10-04' pageLayout: default slug: thoughts/love permalink: https://aarnphm.xyz/thoughts/love.md generator: quartz: v4.6.0 hostedProvider: Cloudflare baseUrl: aarnphm.xyz full: https://aarnphm.xyz/llms-full.txt --- I use _dilectio_ for love as a practice: sustained attention, care, and commitment to a particular person. Attraction and attachment can arrive unbidden. The practice begins in how I respond. This is an account of love I can act on. It leaves room for feeling, history, sex, luck, and biology. It also leaves me responsible for what I do with them. > \[!abstract\] Summary > > Love is attention that survives contact with another person’s reality. ## a working model Three distinctions stop the concept from turning into mush. 1. **Attraction** pulls attention toward someone. 2. **Attachment** makes their presence and absence matter to the nervous system. 3. **Love as practice** is the repeated work of seeing, caring, repairing, and choosing. Fisher separates mating into lust, romantic attraction, and attachment. These systems can interact and also come apart. Sternberg uses intimacy, passion, and commitment as a second map. \[@fisher2002brainsystems; @sternberg1986triangular\] These maps classify parts of a relationship. Each gives me a way to locate a failure. Passion can remain while trust collapses. Attachment can remain after a relationship becomes bad. Commitment can become inert if attention has stopped. My dating heuristic stays brutally simple: > When I do not know what to do, I ask what an emotionally healthy person would do, then I try that. The heuristic works because it converts a mood into a next action. The other person still gets a vote on whether that action expresses care. ## public criteria Love has public criteria. I infer it from patterns of conduct, memory, attention, and repair. A person remembers what matters to you. They notice changes. They can say what they think you mean and revise that account when you correct them. They protect your agency when stress makes control tempting. Wittgenstein’s point about criteria helps here. Criteria let us recognize a practice without reducing the practice to a checklist. \[@wittgenstein1953philosophical\] I trust these observations: - They remain curious after forming a confident interpretation. - They can name a mistake without turning the admission into a demand for comfort. - They change conduct after an apology. - They make room for my projects, friends, and solitude. - They tell me when care has become resentment. - They can leave when staying would require self-erasure. Staying through difficulty is weak evidence on its own. People also stay because of fear, dependence, coercion, habit, intermittent reinforcement, or a lack of alternatives. Love cannot be inferred from duration. Behaviorism can explain part of the history that produces attachment habits. Reinforcement, punishment, and extinction are real mechanisms. First-person meaning and the value of a commitment require further evidence. ## attention and revision Murdoch treats attention as moral work. The work happens before a dramatic choice, in what I notice, imagine, dismiss, and allow to correct me. \[@murdoch1970sovereignty\] This is harder than being nice. Niceness can run from a script. Attention has to survive surprise. Gadamer’s hermeneutic circle gives the right rhythm. I approach someone with a partial model. Their words and actions revise the model. The revised whole changes how I understand each part. Then I repeat. \[@gadamer1960truth\] Love fails when the model stops updating. “I know you” becomes a claim of ownership. A generous interpretation remains answerable to evidence. It can be charitable and still notice contempt, avoidance, manipulation, or incompatibility. > People change. Understanding has to be renewed with them. This gives [[thoughts/Epistemology|epistemic humility]] a practical form: 1. Say what I think I heard. 2. Let them correct it. 3. Look for the action implied by the correction. 4. Check later whether the action helped. ## choice and responsibility Kierkegaard, Fromm, and bell hooks all put weight on practice. Kierkegaard gives love the force of a task. Fromm calls it an art that requires discipline and knowledge. hooks makes action and accountability central. \[@kierkegaard1847worksoflove; @fromm1956art; @hooks2000love\] Choice here means taking responsibility for a response inside real constraints. Desire can remain involuntary, and endurance needs its own justification. The commitment I want is specific: keep learning the person, keep care legible, repair harms that can be repaired, and tell the truth when the relationship can no longer support both lives. ## care and judgment Care ethics keeps love particular. Gilligan and Noddings ask what this person needs in this relation, under these conditions. Kittay and Ruddick make the labor visible. Care consumes time, attention, coordination, money, sleep, and sometimes a body. \[@gilligan1982different; @noddings1984caring; @ruddick1989maternal; @kittay1999love\] Particularity creates duties and risks. A lover can know exactly where another person is vulnerable. Good judgment means using that knowledge to increase their room to act. Aristotle’s _philia_ adds reciprocity and shared activity. \[@aristotle\_nicomachean\_ethics\] Buber adds the distinction between meeting a person and managing an object. \[@buber1923i\] These ideas cash out in ordinary decisions: whether I ask, assume, disclose, conceal, repair, or leave. The test is mutual becoming. Does the relationship increase each person’s agency, practical knowledge, and capacity to care? A relationship can contain love and still fail this test. That is enough reason to change or end it. ## a model is a promise to update I need a model of someone to care for them well. I need to remember what tires them, what makes them laugh, which risks they want help taking, and which forms of help feel like control. The model becomes dangerous when I defend it against the person. This is the boundary between understanding and [[thoughts/Compression|compression]]. A useful model predicts enough to coordinate, then changes when prediction fails. A bad model treats surprise as disobedience. The right question is operational: > Which observations would make me trust that this is love, and which would make me update? That question has no permanent answer. Keeping the answer revisable is part of dilectio. ## what the biology can say Romantic love recruits systems involved in reward, motivation, attention, attachment, and social cognition. That sentence is as far as the current evidence travels safely. Song et al. compared an in-love group with $N=34$, an ended-love group with $N=34$, and a single group with $N=32$. \[@song2015loverelated\] They measured resting-state regional homogeneity and functional connectivity. The in-love group showed differences in networks that included the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, insula, caudate, amygdala, temporoparietal junction, and posterior cingulate cortex. The study found correlations with time in love and time since breakup. Those measurements identify group differences under one protocol. Dopamine withdrawal, anhedonia, grief recovery, and clinical treatment fell outside the study. The sample contained 45 women among 100 participants, so the old claim that it was mostly women was wrong. Bianchi-Demicheli et al. tested whether subliminal primes related to a beloved person changed lexical decisions. Their two experiments used 46 and 36 heterosexual women. \[@bianchi2006power\] The result concerns partner-related priming in that task. A general cognitive boost would require broader experiments. Zeki’s review connects romantic and maternal love studies to reward regions and discusses dopamine, oxytocin, vasopressin, serotonin, and nerve growth factor. \[@zeki2007neurobiology\] The causal story in humans remains limited. An fMRI contrast records blood-oxygen changes associated with a task or state. An account of love needs evidence at other levels. The prairie vole story has also become more interesting. Older work linked pair bonding to oxytocin and vasopressin systems. In 2023, prairie voles lacking a functional oxytocin receptor still formed partner preferences and parented offspring. \[@berendzen2023oxytocin\] This rules out the clean one-receptor switch. It leaves a distributed mechanism with redundancy, developmental effects, sex differences, and interactions among several circuits. The biology constrains the account. A scan can tell me that two groups differ under a protocol. Promises, agency, and repair need behavioral and first-person evidence. ## questionnaire Aron et al. designed a 45-minute procedure with escalating reciprocal disclosure to create temporary interpersonal closeness. \[@aron1997closeness\] The study found greater closeness than a small-talk condition. It did not test a recipe for falling in love. The pronouns below are adapted for current use. The task order and study conditions are retained. ### closeness-generating procedure
1. Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest? 2. Would you like to be famous? In what way? 3. Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why? 4. What would constitute a “perfect” day for you? 5. When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else? 6. If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want? 7. Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die? 8. Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common. 9. For what in your life do you feel most grateful? 10. If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be? 11. Take 4 minutes and tell your partner your life story in as much detail as possible. 12. If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?
13. If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future, or anything else, what would you want to know? 14. Is there something that you’ve dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven’t you done it? 15. What is the greatest accomplishment of your life? 16. What do you value most in a friendship? 17. What is your most treasured memory? 18. What is your most terrible memory? 19. If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living? Why? 20. What does friendship mean to you? 21. What roles do love and affection play in your life? 22. Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner. Share a total of 5 items. 23. How close and warm is your family? Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people’s? 24. How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?
25. Make 3 true “we” statements each. For instance, “We are both in this room feeling…” 26. Complete this sentence: “I wish I had someone with whom I could share…” 27. If you were going to become a close friend with your partner, please share what would be important for them to know. 28. Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time saying things that you might not say to someone you’ve just met. 29. Share with your partner an embarrassing moment in your life. 30. When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself? 31. Tell your partner something that you like about them already. 32. What, if anything, is too serious to be joked about? 33. If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven’t you told them yet? 34. Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be? Why? 35. Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most disturbing? Why? 36. Share a personal problem and ask your partner’s advice on how they might handle it. Also, ask your partner to reflect back to you how you seem to be feeling about the problem you have chosen.
### small-talk condition in study 1
1. When was the last time you walked for more than an hour? Describe where you went and what you saw. 2. What was the best gift you ever received and why? 3. If you had to move from California where would you go, and what would you miss the most about California? 4. How did you celebrate last Halloween? 5. Do you read a newspaper often and which do you prefer? Why? 6. What is a good number of people to have in a student household and why? 7. If you could invent a new flavor of ice cream, what would it be? 8. What is the best restaurant you’ve been to in the last month that your partner hasn’t been to? Tell your partner about it. 9. Describe the last pet you owned. 10. What is your favorite holiday? Why? 11. Tell your partner the funniest thing that ever happened to you when you were with a small child. 12. What gifts did you receive on your last birthday?
13. Describe the last time you went to the zoo. 14. Tell the names and ages of your family members, include grandparents, aunts and uncles, and where they were born (to the extent you know this information). 15. One of you say a word, the next say a word that starts with the last letter of the word just said. Do this until you have said 50 words. Any words will do, you aren’t making a sentence. 16. Do you like to get up early or stay up late? Is there anything funny that has resulted from this? 17. Where are you from? Name all of the places you’ve lived. 18. What is your favorite class at UCSC so far? Why? 19. What did you do this summer? 20. What gifts did you receive last Christmas/Hanukkah? 21. Who is your favorite actor of your own gender? Describe a favorite scene in which this person has acted. 22. What was your impression of UCSC the first time you ever came here? 23. What is the best TV show you’ve seen in the last month that your partner hasn’t seen? Tell your partner about it. 24. What is your favorite holiday? Why?
25. Where did you go to high school? What was your high school like? 26. What is the best book you’ve read in the last three months that your partner hasn’t read? Tell your partner about it. 27. What foreign country would you most like to visit? What attracts you to this place? 28. Do you prefer digital watches and clocks or the kind with hands? Why? 29. Describe your mother’s best friend. 30. What are the advantages and disadvantages of artificial Christmas trees? 31. How often do you get your hair cut? Where do you go? Have you ever had a really bad haircut experience? 32. Did you have a class pet when you were in elementary school? Do you remember the pet’s name? 33. Do you think left-handed people are more creative than right-handed people? 34. What is the last concert you saw? How many of that band’s albums do you own? Had you seen them before? Where? 35. Do you subscribe to any magazines? Which ones? What have you subscribed to in the past? 36. Were you ever in a school play? What was your role? What was the plot of the play? Did anything funny ever happen when you were on stage?