Theories Of Love Research Articles

Rethinking Love as Union: “As if our boundaries were melting...”

This article reconsiders one of the most important theories of romantic love in contemporary philosophy, the theory of love as union. Drawing on observations from transpersonal research, the article raises the question whether it is not worthwhile to accept, at least partially, a strong sense of union in the context of love. Thus the article takes a position that is not taken by anyone in contemporary philosophy. In this context, the article also briefly analyses one of the most important variants of love as union, a union with God. At the end, the suggestion is made that it makes more sense to talk about connections rather than relations in the case of fulfilled love.

What Were You Thinking? Analyzing Thought Processes in The Presence of Brand Love

This study attempts to obtain a glimpse into the minds of consumers concerning how information is processed differently in the presence of brand love. Guided by the theories of brand love, attachment theory, and source credibility, two studies are conducted in which consumers were given various messages by various sources about a brand they identify love for. These consumers are then asked to provide thought listings, therefore providing a better understanding of how consumers process new information, and how likely they are to seek additional information under various circumstances involving brands they love. Similarly, the effects of brand love on source credibility are also examined. Results indicate that although message valence plays a role in tendencies to seek additional information and source credibility, the presence of brand love may alter this relationship.

THE IMPOSSIBLE LOVE IN VERCORS’S LE SILENCE DE LA MER AND IN PIERRE BOUTRON’S HOMONYMOUS FILM

Over the years, numerous studies have explored the interesting film adaptation of Vercors’s short story "Le Silence de la Mer" by Melville (1949), but few articles have taken into consideration the new, intriguing adaptation of this famous writing by Pierre Boutron (2004). This article aims to explore the theme of love between enemies in the visions of Vercors and Boutron, starting from the theories of impossible love articulated by Albert Farchadi.

The Bar Butch in the Attic

In an analysis of Jane Rule’s “In the Attic of the House” from her 1981 anthology Outlander, this article examines how Rule uses both the figure of the lesbian and the figure of the ghost to demonstrate the complex, temporal relationship between two lesbian generations in Canada in the late 1970s and the early 1980s. Rule’s “In the Attic of the House” follows an older butch lesbian, Alice, as she is haunted by both the unseen apparition of her dead, once closeted, femme lover and by the presence of younger lesbian feminists in the main floor of the house who begin to consume and rewrite Alice’s queer past. In analyzing three types of social hauntings within this short story, this article draws on both Avery Gordon’s theories of hauntology and Heather Love’s queer theory of “feeling backwards” to imagine how lesbian-feminists in 1970s-80s Canada conducted a “backward” haunting of femme-butch lesbian elders, hailing from the culture of the lesbian working-class bar. By drawing parallels between Rule’s short fiction and the real, historical events of lesbian communities in Canada, this article seeks to recenter the erasures (i.e., the ghostings) and the (in)visbilities of lesbian existence and embodiment in Canada. This paper ultimately analyzes how Rule as author calls upon her readers to consider and contemplate the historical tensions and intimacies between butch-femme elders of lesbian bar culture and the emerging lesbian-feminist collectives in the early 1980s.

Beyond sexual deviance: Elevating the expansive intimacies of Chicana lesbian life in Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About

In this article, I expand popular readings of Chicana lesbianism focused on sexuality by tending more deeply to the affective terrains of love and kinship represented in the 1991 anthology Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About edited by Carla Trujillo. Countering the (il)logics of white supremacy and Chicano nationalism which reduce Chicana lesbians to symbols of sexual deviance, I argue that Chicana Lesbians embodies an expansive matrix of intimacies that reconstruct the Chicana lesbian figure from a one-dimensional symbol of sexual deviance to a multi-faceted figure who redefines what it means to love one’s people and culture beyond colonial paradigms that privilege heterosexuality. Drawing upon theories of decolonial love and queer asexuality, I examine the expansive inner lives and intimacies of Chicana lesbians to construct a more thorough portrait of how we love and relate to each other. While many studies foreground the sexual lives and politics of Chicana lesbians as subversive to the heteronormative status quo, I elevate the equally powerful forces of love and kinship in our struggle to transform the legacies of colonialism and Chicano nationalism.

‘What life is there, what pleasure without golden Aphrodite?’ The pragmatics of courtly love

This article focuses on two major works: A. Veselovsky’s From the history of personality: The woman and medieval theories of love [Iz istorii lichnosti: zhenshchina i starinnye teorii lyubvi] and C. S. Lewis’s The Allegory of Love, a study of courtly love. Their comparative analysis offers a compelling vision of the pragmatics of courtly love, sheds light on its origins, and emphasises its immense influence on world literature. By examining the sources and characteristics of courtly love, the article sets out to describe its evolution in later periods — in works by Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and then Shakespeare, whose Troilus and Cressida seems to mark the ultimate demise of the tradition. Questioning the latter suggestion, the author attempts to establish whether the rules of courtly love still hold sway in our daily life. Tracing the vestiges of the tradition, the author hypothesises that the relationship between man and woman as we know it is determined by the same old courtesy.

Interpreting Magnolia through Badiou’s Axiomatic Judgment: The Visitation of the Idea that Humanity is Love

Alain Badiou’s interpretation of Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Magnolia is a paradigmatic example of his peculiar procedure of cinematic analysis called axiomatic judgment. According to the axiomatic judgment, to read a film is to inquire into the effects it has on thought. This essay reconstructs Badiou’s analysis of Magnolia to show how various cinematic elements—acting style, montage, music, and biblical references—are combined to arrange the visitation of a precise idea: that love is the fundamental precondition for humanity’s existence. Without love, the only experience of the world would be monadic. Examining Badiou’s interpretation of Magnolia does not simply aid our understanding of the film; it also clarifies Badiou’s theories of cinema and love.

Bearing the Intolerable: Analytic Love

This essay considers psychoanalytic theories of love in the work of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, and Jacques Lacan. Though there is no coherent theory of love in psychoanalysis, paying attention to love in the analytic situation—that is, to transference—allows us to read analytic love as a transformative practice through which subjects affiliate with one another as subjects rather than as objects. In considering the importance of love to solidarity, the work of Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Black feminist theory is mobilized to offer two short readings of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved and the autobiography of Dorothy Day. Across these theoretical and narrative works, the author formulates an account of analytic love as a site of negative plenitude that rearranges conventional accounts of identity and difference.

Sing, Unburied, Sing: The Dual Lack and Pursuit of Love and Identity among Black People

Jesmyn Ward’s third novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, however, is Ward’s second work to have won the National Book Award for fiction. It was Sing that laid a solid foundation for Ward’s reception from the American literary circle as a powerful new voice. Sing focuses on a black family in the American south, which was nearly torn apart by poverty, drugs, and racial discrimination; Apart from the estranged kinship in the black family, represented by ghost Richie, the black group in the novel also shows a seemingly strong desire for identity. Based on Erich Fromm’s alienation theory and his theories of love, this paper gives an analysis of the alienation of the protagonist at the level of love and racial identity and focuses on the struggle of the black group to survive in the white mainstream society, which resulted in their dual lack and dual pursuit of love and identity. This paper aims to reveal Ward’s fierce criticism of racist ideology that has caused the double dilemma of survival and spirit of black people in the American South and demonstrate her deep understanding as well as support for the ideals and actions of African Americans in terms of their eagerness to integrate into the mainstream society.

Analytical determination of non-local parameter value to investigate the axial buckling of nanoshells affected by the passing nanofluids and their velocities considering various modified cylindrical shell theories

We analytically determine the nonlocal parameter value to achieve a more accurate axial-buckling response of carbon nanoshells conveying nanofluids. To this end, the four plates/shells’ classical theories of Love, Flügge, Donnell, and Sanders are generalized using Eringen’s nonlocal elasticity theory. By combining these theories in cylindrical coordinates, a modified motion equation is presented to investigate the buckling behavior of the nanofluid-nanostructure-interaction problem. Herein, in addition to the small-scale effect of the structure and the passing fluid on the critical buckling strain, we discuss the effects of nanoflow velocity, fluid density (nano-liquid/nano-gas), half-wave numbers, aspect ratio, and nanoshell flexural rigidity. The analytical approach is used to discretize and solve the obtained relations to study the mentioned cases.

Theories of Inappropriate Love as Pointed Out in Sangam literature

The Ettutthokai (The Eight Anthologies) and the Pathuppaattu (The Ten Idylls) are considered to be the oldest literary works of the Tamil people. The literature that appeared thousands of years ago beautifully captures the feelings of human beings, their lifestyles, and their habits. If a generation exists, then it can be attributed to the existence of society by adhering to the principle laid down by the previous generation. Any relationship formed through love will last and live on. Similarly, in the Sangam literature, the basis of the true feelings of love is inappropriate love first, only after which the chastity life begins. So, inappropriate love, which forms the basis of love, is something that all creatures have in common. The purpose of this article is to explore the theft of the love route.

A Series before the TV Series: George Martin’s First Fantasy Story

In the article we concentrate our efforts on the detailed analysis of “The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr”, the first fantasy story written by George R. R. Martin in 1976. Before that, he had written science fiction; and by now, we know him as the creator of the famous Game of Thrones. In this very first manifestation of George Martin’s creativity we can see some kind of a draft for future worlds of his own guided by the power of the Seven. They do not represent as yet different avatars of one and the same deity; rather, they are separate gods. Those gods are envious, cruel, and persecutory, which characteristics remind us of Ancient Greek ones. They steal Laren Dorr’s memory and even his dreams. Once he opposed them, and now he sings his lonely songs in a castle. Forever, because he is immortal.As well as immortal is a girl named Sharra who travels between worlds, searching her lost lover. Ancient gods hated excessive happiness of humans, and so do the Seven. The girl must struggle through innumerable gates between innumerable worlds, and after such a struggle she occasionally enters the lonely world of Laren Dorr. He tries to soothe her by his songs and his compassion, so that inevitably two solitary rebels against gods fall in love with each other.But not for a long time, in her case. After a while, she feels remorse and longs to return to her endless and hopeless search. He sighs and shows her a gate in the neighboring tower, explaining that there is always a guardian. Some try to stop her with force, some with lies. Only he tried to detain her with love, but he was true and never sang her false. He shoves her to the door. Now, he sings his lonely loving songs about her.George Martin’s Shakespearian inspiration obvious in the Game of Thrones was not enough to interpret this early story. We had to actualize ancient theories of love, as well as some medieval ones originating from the 12th century. As we know, Martin always combines those types of imagination.In our analysis we used the following concepts: ethics, desire, truth, and sentimentality. The former two are Lacanian and postmodern, the latter two ones lead us to the metamodern world of today. We cannot ignore the date of 1976 which is too early for a conscious metamodern outlook, but we believe in some kind of the writer’s insight of the forthcoming revival of sentimental moods, sometimes silenced and ephemeral, but always true.

Irreplaceability and the Desire-Account of Love

Lovers do not relate to their beloveds as seats of valuable qualities that would be replaceable for anyone with relevantly similar or more valuable qualities. Instead, lovers take their beloveds to be irreplaceable. This has been noted frequently in the current debate on love and different theories of love have offered different explanations for the phenomenon. In this paper, I develop a more complex picture of what is involved in lovers taking their beloveds to be irreplaceable. I argue that in order to account for the beloved’s irreplaceability, a theory of love must meet two conditions: it must explain the subjective aspect as well as the moral aspect of the beloved’s irreplaceability. I show that current theories of love fail to meet these conditions, either one or both of them, and I offer an alternative account that does - an account according to which love is understood as a special kind of desire for the beloved as a person. The aim of this paper is twofold: first, to give a more nuanced picture of the beloved’s irreplaceability, acknowledging in particular that there is a moral aspect to the phenomenon that has not been attended to thus far; second, to introduce and motivate a new desire-based account of love.

The Syndrome of Love

What is love? In this paper I argue that love is a psychological syndrome, or an enormously complex cluster of psychological attitudes and dispositions that’s accompanied by a corresponding set of symptoms that flow from it. More specifically, I argue that love is an affectionate loyalty that takes different shapes across cases and that manifests itself in some set of behavioral and emotional expressions, where this set of expressions also varies across cases. After laying down three theoretical constraints that viable theories of love must satisfy, I sketch my syndrome theory of love in detail and then defend it. First, I argue that it has a strong yet defeasible claim to satisfying the three theoretical constraints. Then I defend my theory against two objections that target its extensional adequacy. I conclude that we have good grounds for being optimistic about the theory even though it calls for further development and scrutiny.

Bernard I. Murstein (1929–2020).

Presents the obituary of Bernard I. Murstein (1929-2020). Bernard earned his BS in psychology at the City College of New York, MS in psychology at the University of Miami (where he claimed to have been inducted into Psi Chi at a poolside ceremony), and PhD in clinical psychology at the University of Texas at Austin in 1955. Bernard taught at Louisiana State University, the University of Portland, OR, and the University of Connecticut before joining the faculty of Connecticut College in 1963. He remained there until his retirement in 1999, except for a year as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Louvain in Belgium. Bernard published seven academic books, including Theories of Attraction and Love (1971), Love, Sex, and Marriage through the Ages (1974), Who Will Marry Whom? (1976), and Paths to Marriage (1986). He also published more than 130 journal articles and book chapters on psychological testing, interpersonal attraction, marital choice, sexual behavior, relationship styles, and marital adjustment. He is best known for his stimulusvalue-role theory (1970) of relationship development, which is cited in most textbooks on social psychology and intimate relationships. Bernard was elected to Fellow status in the American Psychological Association (Divisions 8, 12, and 43) and the Society for Projective Techniques. The Spanish Psychological Association named him one of the most important psychologists of the 20th century; his book Theory and Research in Projective Techniques (1963) was listed by Basic Sources of Information in the Social Sciences among the 50 most important books on psychology. He is survived by his wife Nelly Kashy Murstein, the Hanna Hakesbrink Professor Emerita of French at Connecticut College, his daughters Danielle and Collette, and three granddaughters. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Proximate and Ultimate Perspectives on Romantic Love

Romantic love is a phenomenon of immense interest to the general public as well as to scholars in several disciplines. It is known to be present in almost all human societies and has been studied from a number of perspectives. In this integrative review, we bring together what is known about romantic love using Tinbergen’s “four questions” framework originating from evolutionary biology. Under the first question, related to mechanisms, we show that it is caused by social, psychological mate choice, genetic, neural, and endocrine mechanisms. The mechanisms regulating psychopathology, cognitive biases, and animal models provide further insights into the mechanisms that regulate romantic love. Under the second question, related to development, we show that romantic love exists across the human lifespan in both sexes. We summarize what is known about its development and the internal and external factors that influence it. We consider cross-cultural perspectives and raise the issue of evolutionary mismatch. Under the third question, related to function, we discuss the fitness-relevant benefits and costs of romantic love with reference to mate choice, courtship, sex, and pair-bonding. We outline three possible selective pressures and contend that romantic love is a suite of adaptions and by-products. Under the fourth question, related to phylogeny, we summarize theories of romantic love’s evolutionary history and show that romantic love probably evolved in concert with pair-bonds in our recent ancestors. We describe the mammalian antecedents to romantic love and the contribution of genes and culture to the expression of modern romantic love. We advance four potential scenarios for the evolution of romantic love. We conclude by summarizing what Tinbergen’s four questions tell us, highlighting outstanding questions as avenues of potential future research, and suggesting a novel ethologically informed working definition to accommodate the multi-faceted understanding of romantic love advanced in this review.

Extreme brand love: measuring and modelling the intensity of sports team love

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to advance the understanding of brand love by studying its intensity and the nature of extreme forms of it, rather than its presence or absence. The love of a sports team is a type of brand love and is a valuable context to study of brand love intensity because the intensity of love can become more extreme than for products; it has two distinctive features that are theoretically, management and policy relevant; and it is an under-researched context in marketing that is socially and economically significant.Design/methodology/approachThe authors empirically develop and test a multidimensional hierarchical higher-order measure of the intensity of team love and a model of its drivers and outcomes using a sample of supporter club members of a professional sports team who vary in their intensity of love for the team.FindingsThe results support our measurement model and its distinctive features, especially the importance of the perceived two-way bond fans have with their team. While overall intensity of team love is not related to social influence or on-field performance, as hypothesized, they are related to sub-dimensions of team love, reflecting its multidimensionality. As hypothesized, the intensity of team love and social influence are related to the intention to renew club membership even with increased costs and poor performance and social influence is directly related to word of mouth and game attendance.Research limitations/implicationsThe research is limited to the club members of one sports team in a particular sport in one country and one cultural context. Future research opportunities include: extending it to other sports and brand contexts, refining the methodology and addressing other issues highlighted by the research.Practical implicationsThe results indicate the limits of management control of team love intensity because it develops over time independently through social processes. However, firms can help facilitate these processes. The social dimensions indicate the need to develop socially, as well as individually-focussed relationship management strategies. Most devoted fans are valuable customers, but some hardcore elements can be dysfunctional and sabotage the brand.Social implicationsSport is personally, social and economically significant in most cultures and love of a sports team love can be an important glue that binds people and communities. However, the existence of extreme hardcore fans and heated rivalries can also be divisive and pose challenges for social policy. Hence, the need to better understand the factors driving more extreme forms of team love to better inform the development of social policy.Originality/valueThe authors focus on the intensity of brand love rather than its presence and absence as in prior research. The authors develop and test a new hierarchical measure of sports team love intensity and a model of its drivers and outcomes. The sports context is under-researched in marketing but reveals the important role played by dimensions that are obscured in studies of product brand love – its social nature and the perceived reciprocal relation with devoted fans. The results contribute to developing extended theories of brand love, open up new research opportunities and have management and policy implications.

Feeling Sideways: Shani Mootoo and Kai Cheng Thom’s Sustainable Affects

Drawing on feminist, queer, trans, and anti-racist theory, this article examines the transmission of affect between racialized queer and trans subjects as a mode of what I call feeling sideways. With this formulation, I seek to spark a discussion about the need to dislodge affect not only from gender and racial normative systems of power but also from linear understandings of growth and temporality. I here follow Kathryn Bond Stockton’s theories of sideways growth (2009) and Heather Love’s notion of backward feelings (2009) to unravel modes of feeling sideways as a potential form of what I call sustainable affect. As case studies, I put two transCanadian works beside each other: Shani Mootoo’s novel Moving Forward Sideways like a Crab (2014) and Kai Cheng Thom’s poetry collection a place called No Homeland (2017). In different but related ways, these texts illustrate how shame, anger, and empathy can become sustainable affects through touch and storytelling, with important ethical repercussions.

Lost without you: the Value of Falling out of Love

In this paper we develop a view about the disorientation attached to the process of falling out of love and explain its prudential and moral value. We start with a brief background on theories of love and situate our argument within the views concerned with the lovers’ identities. Namely, love changes who we are. In the context of our paper, we explain this common tenet in the philosophy of love as a change in the lovers’ self-concepts through a process of mutual shaping. This, however, is potentially dangerous for people involved in what we call ‘subsuming relationships’, who give up too much autonomy in the process of mutual shaping. We then move on to show how, through the relation between love and the self-concept, we can explain why the process of falling out of love with someone is so disorientating: when one is falling out of love, one loses an important point of reference for self-understanding. While this disorientating process is typically taken to be harmful to the person experiencing it, we will explain how it can also have moral and prudential value. By re-evaluating who we were in the relationship and who we are now, we can escape from oppressive practices in subsuming relationships. We finish by arguing that this gives us reason to be wary of seeking to re-orient ourselves -or others- too quickly after falling out of love.

The Disappearance of the Other: A Note on the Distortion of Love

Against the backdrop of contemporary sociological theories of love, this article explores the disappearance of the other in contemporary love relationships by focusing on the relationship between love and depression. The aim of the article is twofold: first, to provide a theoretical framework to be able to grasp in what ways the other is threatened with erosion in contemporary love relationships and why this may cause depression; second, to exemplify it with empirical data consisting of human documents such as novels, interviews, sms- and messenger-correspondence. The first section, excluding the introduction, consists of methodological reflections. The second section introduces Hegel’s thinking on love and discusses the perception of it by thinkers such as Honneth, Sartre, and Beauvoir, as well as its parallels with Giddens’s idea on confluent love as a new egalitarian paradigm for equality in intimate relationships. The third section is mainly devoted to Kristeva’s theory of the melancholic-depressive composite, but also introduces Illouz’s concept of autotelic desire. In the fourth section, Han’s idea of “the erosion of difference” and Bauman’s thinking on “the broken structure of desire” are discussed in relation to the use of Tinder in contemporary culture. The fifth section consists of an analysis of excerpts from contemporary love novels and interviews that illustrates the disappearance of the other in contemporary love relationships. In the sixth section, a number of longer passages from a messenger conversation, ranging over a couple of months in duration, is reproduced and interpreted, mainly by help of Kristeva’s thinking, in order to make visible the relation between the erosion of the other and melancholic depression. The article ends with a short conclusion.