Love is gifts and tributes

The argument

While anyone can say they're in love, it takes a certain amount of action to prove it. The best way to show this is through gifts, either to the person being courted or to their family. These differ widely across cultures. The best known example of this is a 'bride price', a custom in many cultures in which a groom and his family settles on a price paid to the family of his bride-to-be, or a dowry, the reverse. This is done to strengthen family ties, to provide for the bride's family (or the groom's family), and most importantly, to prove dedication of one party to another as a manifestation of love. More specific gifts or offerings are expected in other parts of the world. In Fiji, men may be expected to present the father of their betrothed with the tooth of a sperm whale. This represents good luck and means ‘I love you’ from the inside.” In Welsh custom, young women are presented by suitors with intricately carved wooden spoons called lovespoons. This is meant to demonstrate to the women's father that the man is adept at carving and able to provide for them. It is important to show love, not just to say it. Gifts and tributes form the basis of an authentic love; one in which one party is willing to sacrifice for the other.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that gifts and tributes are cultural conventions that may accompany love but do not constitute or prove it. Bride price and dowry are often economic and familial transactions — about property, alliance and status between families — and can occur in arranged matches with no romantic love at all, while people plainly in love may exchange no formal tributes. Conflating love with material display risks reducing it to a transaction and excludes those who cannot afford gifts. And if the position is that 'love is a verb,' the more general point is that loving action is care, attention, sacrifice and commitment over time, of which gift-giving is at most one narrow and culturally specific instance, not the basis of authentic love.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Gifts and tributes are cultural conventions that can accompany love but also occur without it — as economic bride-price transactions in loveless arranged matches — so they neither constitute nor prove love. [Rejecting P2] People plainly in love may exchange no formal tributes, and equating love with material display reduces it to a transaction and excludes those who cannot afford gifts. [Rejecting C] If love is a verb, its action is care, attention and sacrifice over time, of which gift-giving is at most one narrow, culture-specific instance rather than the basis of authentic love.