Love is a profound, complex feeling that people have toward other human beings. It isn’t just a feeling of affection or fondness or attachment, though those are important aspects of it as well. It’s a special kind of interdependence that exists between humans, and it can involve many other things as well, including caring for and valuing one another, giving to each other, and sharing a lot of different emotions with one another.
A lot of people have a pretty general idea of what love is, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a ton of variation in how we talk about and experience it. Those who think of love as romantic or sexual attraction tend to focus on the pleasures of being in the presence of the person we’re in love with, but others can feel frustration, exasperation, and anger as well. It’s not even just about how we feel about our partner, but how we treat them as a whole person.
So it’s not surprising that when philosophers talk about love, they have a variety of ways to describe and explain it. It’s not so easy, however, to classify particular theories into a coherent group. This is partly because they often eschew explicit reductionistic language, and so they don’t seem to belong to any of the usual categories (like “emotion proper” or “love as union”).
Some of these theories try to make progress on this by focusing on how love affects our sense of self and our relationship to other people. For instance, some philosophers like Helm argue that when you love someone you end up identifying with them as the sort of person they are. In this way you come to share their values and interests, which sounds a lot like union accounts of love.
Other philosophers like the 20th-century rabbi Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler define love from a Jewish point of view as a kind of mutual bestowal that doesn’t rely on exchange or reciprocity. They also want to stress the importance of a relationship that’s grounded in trust.
There are a few problems with this approach, however. One is that it seems to make the argument for love rather weak. It depends on particular historical facts about a loving relationship to justify it, and these facts may be idiosyncratic and subjective.
In addition, it may be hard to see how this form of love can be justified in any general or universal way, since it relies on a kind of value that is intermediate between appraisal and bestowal and which can’t be generated by merely recognizing already existing value.