Love is infatuation

The argument

Infatuation is a core part of the cultural depiction of love. The mental capacity of human beings to be totally enamoured with another person knows no bounds when infatuation comes into play - just think of Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, or John Hinkley Jr's assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan to try to impress Jodie Foster. Pinker argues that opposed to lust and commitment, which are driven by testosterone and oxytocin respectively, infatuation is the most important part of love as it directly affects the dopamine system causing obsession and intense desire. Humans are capable of feeling extraordinarily intense feelings of infatuation. This is pivotal to understanding how we culturally construct love, and to what it really is.

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.