Love

How can a person love another without knowing him/her personally?

Comments

Depends upon what you mean by "love." It is hard to see how one could romantically love someone they didn't know. But if by "love" you mean something like "respect for the lives and interests of another," it seems to me one can do this for perfect strangers. Indeed, it seems to me that good people will habitually have this to offer to everyone they meet (and also to those they never meet).

On the other hand, when it comes to romantic love there is a sense in which too much knowledge might be thought to be a distraction. For example, we often compartmentalize our relationships with people, keeping separate different aspects of their personality in our minds because we suspect that were we to confront them fully we might have to change our relationship with them.

The interesting question perhaps is how much we should know about a person before we can say that we really love him or her, as compared to feel lust or friendship. And this raises another interesting question, which is how much should we know about ourselves before we can properly classify a relationship as based on love as compared with some other emotion.

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