Love is a choice

The argument

Staying in love requires work. It means setting time aside to spend time with your loved one. It means accepting their personality flaws and looking past imperfections and choosing to love them regardless. Each of those is something a person does rather than something that happens to them, and the fact that love has to be maintained at all is what the argument builds on: a state that persists only through effort cannot adequately be described as a condition one falls into. To reduce love to a sensation, or a brain process, would be to make the agent (the lover) passive in the process when they are very active. That is the decisive objection to the alternative account. A sensation is undergone, and if love were only that, the lover would be its site rather than its author, with no more responsibility for it than for a change in the weather — which does not match what loving anybody actually involves. Love is behaviour. But it is also more than that, it is making a decision to stay in love and acting on it. The distinction matters because behaviour on its own could be mere habit; what is claimed here is a decision that is renewed and then carried out, so that the conduct expresses a choice rather than substituting for one. This applies to all kinds of love. A parent makes the conscious decision to love their child. There are times when the child may misbehave, disappoint, or embarrass. It may push the boundaries of acceptable behaviour throughout childhood and into adulthood but the loving parent chooses to give their love unconditionally or chooses to rescind it. The parental case is the strongest test of the claim, because it is the relationship most often described as automatic, and the point is that even there the love persists through conduct that would end an involuntary attachment — which it could only do if it were being chosen.

Context

When two people meet and “fall in love” they initially think about each other constantly. They want to spend every waking minute with each other. They shower each other in gifts and pine after one another. But these feelings are fleeting. They fade. Keeping those feelings alive and staying in love requires a concerted effort. It is not passive. It is not simply something that happens to us. We have to actively work at it.

Premises

Counter-arguments

This is not always true. We don't always have a choice. People do sometimes fall in love with someone they don't want to fall in love with or aren't supposed to. The whole Romeo and Juliet love story is based on a forbidden love that cannot be controlled or stifled. There are times when we are a passive agent. Any definition of love must adequately incorporate and explain these instances of uncontrollable and unexpected love.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Love isn't always a choice.