Topics Love

Question Are there different intensitites of "falling in love" as there are in "liking", i.e. could a person fall in love with person A with a much higher intensity than with subsequent persons, B and C or is "falling in love" a specific state of intensity experienced by all?

Accepted:
May 24, 2009

Comments

How clear are we about the very idea of "falling in love"? When we talk about different cases of falling in love are we always talking about the same single kind of experience? Or are we perhaps talking about some quite complex pattern or syndrome of thoughts and feelings, which might come in different mixes in different cases (so that different instances of falling in love have a family resemblance to each other, though there perhaps needn't be any one core experience in common to all cases)?

Well, even if one person's own experiences might have a common thread, the anecdotes of friends and relations and the witness of however many novelists and poets do suggest that the experiences people call "falling in love" are indeed actually rather complex and many-stranded. And as a matter of fact, it seems that at least some of the components of these complex experiences come in degrees (so "falling in love" isn't really an all-or-nothing business).

Of course, noting this is, in part, to make a general empirical claim about the human psychology of pair-bonding rather than to advance a purely philosophical conceptual claim. But then it seems that the original question is, indeed, in part an empirical one, not simply to be settled by armchair reflection.

Question Are there different intensitites of "falling in love" as there are in "liking", i.e. could a person fall in love with person A with a much higher intensity than with subsequent persons, B and C or is "falling in love" a specific state of intensity experienced by all? Accepted:May 24, 2009