Imagine spending a perfect anniversary evening with your partner. You have just finished dinner. The conversation flowed from memories shared to talks about the future. You go to a little park and sit on a bench to watch the sun set. As the sky turns from blue to red, your partner turns to you and asks, «Why do you love me?»
Oftentimes, this question is a signal of relationship anxiety and a validation request. Over time, continually asking this question can undermine the relationship. When the question stems from an underlying anxiety, even if an answer satisfies temporarily, the anxiety soon returns. In this case, however, your partner is not insecure. The tone is playful. In this instance, they are flirting.
In asking this question, your partner is asking you to show them that they are important and special to you – not to tell them why they are important and special in general.
You answer honestly, “I don’t know. I just love you. If I gave you any other answer, it would show that I love those things that you happen to have or do, but other people could also have those traits or do those things. So, if I were to say I love you because of those things, I wouldn’t be telling you why I love you specifically.”
Your response does not go well, to say the least. Your partner may ask whether you have given the question any thought at all. They may hear your response as evasive, careless, or even dismissive. After all, if you really love them, shouldn’t you be able to explain why?
You botched your response because you answered what your partner asked rather than responding to what your partner was asking of you.
Philosophical Problems with Explaining Why We Love
Since Plato’s Symposium, philosophers have been grappling with how to answer why you love someone. The problem arises when a person explains their love by expressing appreciation for a person’s traits, rather than expressing love for the person as a person. The worry is that by saying, “I love you because you’re intelligent, beautiful, funny, or kind,” you are actually saying, “I love your qualities,” not that you love the particular individual.
The difficulty arises because we want to see ourselves as rational people who can provide coherent reasons for why we feel the way that we do. Otherwise, we fear that our love may be irrational or arbitrary. Not having a good answer to “Why do you love someone?” may make you question whether you actually love that person at all.
However, consider the following: Maybe you do love your partner’s good looks, sense of humor, or the way they smile when they look at you, yet if they lost those things, you would still love them. Also, if someone else had their sense of humor and good looks, you wouldn’t love that person instead. This shows that even when you do love certain qualities about a person, you don’t love the person because of those things. You love them, and you love those things about them.
Psychologically, the difficulty with “why” questions is that they encourage us to justify our beliefs, feelings, and decisions rather than understand how they developed. In searching for coherent explanations, we often create reasons that make our choices appear rational and consistent, even when they fail to capture the deeper experiences and relationships that shape what we believe, feel, or decide to do.
When we confabulate (in the general, nonclinical sense) reasons for acting, we portray ourselves as reasonable by providing explanations that should explain behavior, even if they don’t. However, when trying to explain why we love someone, we exacerbate the problem, because choosing to love someone is not the same type of choice as buying a nightgown or hiring a new employee. When buying something or hiring someone, the reasons we give for our choice speak to qualities in the thing bought or the person hired, and those qualities are typically things we want or need for our sake. When applied to the question of why we love, the question frames the worthiness of our love as something that exists independently of the relationship itself. It assumes some qualities cause the love we have for the person with whom we enter a relationship. Yet, we do not first decide that someone is worthy of love and then choose to love them in the same way that goods are “worthy” to purchase or employees are “worthy” for the job.
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How Love Develops Over Time
When we love someone, our love develops through shared experiences, accumulated memories, and mutual investment. Over time, the people we love become woven into the story we tell about ourselves. The relationship gradually becomes part of our identity.
A better question to answer is: “How did you come to love me?” This question does not ask for reasons for your decision to love the person. Rather, it asks for a story; how your experiences over time culminated in a loving relationship with a particular person. The frame shift solves the problem of providing reasons for love in two very important ways. First, it removes the universality challenge – that you would love anyone with those same qualities. Second, it removes the contingency challenge – that you would stop loving the person if they had lost those qualities.
Responding to this “how” question shows that your partner is important and special to you, because your response articulates how moments mattered, a relationship developed, and lives became intertwined. Just like the dinner conversation in the opening vignette, your answer will flow from memories shared to talks about the future.
The deepest explanations for love are rarely found in answers to “why.” They are most often found in understanding how your love took root and grew over time.
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