Love is infatuation

The argument

The argument identifies love with infatuation on the grounds that infatuation is what the cultural depiction of love actually depicts. Whatever else accompanies a long attachment, the state that stories, songs and films treat as love is the overwhelming one, and proponents point out that the mental capacity of human beings to be totally enamoured with another person appears to know no bounds once infatuation comes into play. The examples offered are deliberately extreme: Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, and John Hinckley Jr's assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in an effort to impress Jodie Foster. Neither is presented as ordinary behaviour. They are offered to show how far the state can carry a person, and therefore how powerful it is. The biological case is what converts this observation into a claim about what love is. Pinker distinguishes infatuation from lust and from commitment, which are driven by testosterone and oxytocin respectively, and argues that infatuation is the most important part of love because of the system it acts on: it directly affects the dopamine system, producing obsession and intense desire. The distinction matters because the three components are not equivalent in their effects. Lust and commitment shape behaviour, but neither generates the fixation on one particular person that the word love is normally reserved for. The conclusion drawn is that infatuation is not a preliminary stage that love later outgrows but the component that makes love recognisable as itself. Humans are capable of feeling extraordinarily intense feelings of infatuation, and that intensity is pivotal both to how love is culturally constructed and to what it really is. On this account love is biological in a specific sense: the thing being described in the culture's depictions is a dopamine-driven state of obsession and desire, and the accounts that treat love as something other than a chemical process are describing its effects rather than its substance.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Infatuation is the phase of love least able to stand for the whole of it. It is, by common observation and on the argument's own dopaminergic account, intense and time-limited — the state that fades as a relationship matures. A definition of love that identifies it with infatuation implies that couples of forty years no longer love each other, which is a reductio rather than a finding, and it leaves parental and familial love, which the question's other positions raise, entirely unaccounted for. The supporting examples work against the case. Glenn Close's character in Fatal Attraction is a fictional depiction of pathology, and Hinckley's attempt on Reagan was the act of a man in the grip of a delusional fixation on someone he had never met. Both are drawn on to show what infatuation can reach, but what they actually illustrate is obsession detached from any relationship — the pathological limit of a state, not the essence of love. Citing them as evidence of love's nature assumes precisely what is contested. The appeal to Pinker also proves less than claimed. On the tripartite account the argument invokes, lust, attraction and attachment are three interacting systems; singling out one as 'the most important part' is an evaluative choice, not a result the neuroscience delivers, and the attachment system is the one that explains love's persistence. Even granting every step, the conclusion overreaches. That infatuation has a dopaminergic substrate shows love has biology, which nobody denies — every mental state does. If a neural correlate makes a phenomenon biological, then grief, patriotism and the enjoyment of music are biological too, and the claim stops distinguishing this position from any other.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Infatuation is a phase rather than the whole: it is characteristically intense and time-limited, so identifying love with it implies that long-married couples no longer love one another, and it leaves parental and familial love — raised by this question's other positions — unaccounted for. [Rejecting P2] On the tripartite account invoked, lust, attraction and attachment are interacting systems, and naming one 'the most important' is an evaluative choice the neuroscience does not deliver; attachment is the system that explains love's persistence, which is what the argument needs and omits. [Rejecting C] A dopaminergic substrate shows that love has biology, which is uncontested, not that love is reducible to it — every mental state has a neural correlate, so the inference would make grief, patriotism and musical pleasure biological in the same sense and stops distinguishing this position from its rivals. The supporting examples compound the problem, since a fictional character and a delusional fixation illustrate obsession detached from any relationship rather than love.