INTRODUCTION
There are two quite common reactions among people at hearing that I write about love. The first reaction is the question, "What is love?", and the second the doubt, "Can you really say anything about something as personal as love? Does not everyone mean different things with love?" Two things strike me as obviously wrong in these questions. The first is the underlying idea that there could be one answer to the question, "What is love?", the belief that there in some way could be one thing that we could identify as love in all the situations where we talk about love. The second is the thought that we can never really know what other people mean by love, that the meaning of love is inescapably private and tied up to our own personal experiences of love. In this essay, I want to show why thinking of love in this way is misleading but I also want to show in what ways there is something right in these questions and the concerns that give rise to them.

That love is personal seems to be indisputable; in some ways it may even be the most personal thing in our lives. Love touches on what lies deepest in our hearts, on what is most precious to us, on what is closest to our joy and fear, and how we come to meet love in our lives, what attitudes we may take towards it and what problems we will face in relation to it will in many ways be very personal. There is also much that goes under the name of love. Not only do we distinguish between the love of a thing or an activity, for our neighbour or our siblings, for our parents or children, our friends or lovers, but we also distinguish between the love we have in different relationships and for different people. Any attempt to single out what love is in the different instances seems to fall short at the infinity and indefiniteness of what can be an expression of love. We could well answer the question "What is love?" by describing several, as it would seem, totally different situations and say about all of them, "That is love".

Even if love is very personal in these senses, what we come to understand and mean with love is not personal or private. As Rush Rhees says, there could be no love without the language of love (Rhees 1997, 40-43). We could not understand what it is to love, were it not for the differet ways of talking about love in our life, reading books and poems about love, hearing songs and watching films about love, posing the question "What is love?", wondering about what it is to love or whether what we are feeling is really love. What we come to regard as love is not independent of these ways of speaking about love, rather they constitute our understanding of what it is to love and what we come to recognise as an ideal in love.

The answer to the question "What is love?" that this essay will offer is therefore not an answer in the sense of ‘love is a way of feeling’ or ‘love is a way of acting’. Rather it is a discussion of why love is not only a way of feeling or a way of acting, and of how it makes sense to talk about love as an emotion at all. The questions I am concerned with mostly circle around what is intelligible to say about love. What is an intelligible or appropriate object of love? What, if anything, may we say about the object that could be seen as a reason for love? What differences are there between the different forms of love? What is it to say ‘I love’?

EMOTION
In philosophical discussions of emotions love is often mentioned as an example of an emotion among other emotions such as fear, anger or joy. Nothing further is said about the peculiar place love seems to hold in relation to other emotions, and in accounts that are specifically concerned with love, the remark that love is an emotion is often passed by unnoticed. We do not need to challenge the view that love is an emotion, but we have reason to discuss in which respects we may understand love as an emotion and in which respects it makes more sense to talk about love as something else than ‘just a feeling’. Here it also seems to be necessary to discuss how we are to understand the word ‘emotion’ since it is used to cover a wide variety of things and tends to mean different things depending on the situation it is used in. In The Concept of Mind, for example, Gilbert Ryle argues that the word ‘emotion’, rather than being understood as a feeling or a succession of feelings, "is used to designate at least three or four different kinds of things [... which he, apart from ‘feelings’, calls] ‘inclinations’ (or ‘motives’), ‘moods’, ‘agitations’ (or commotions)" (Ryle 1955, 83). I will return to the implications this distinction between different kinds of emotions has on our understanding of love as an emotion. Before that, however, I will discuss some problems we can see in thinking of love as a feeling, in the sense of some physical going on. The implications of such an understanding of emotions seem to be especially grave when we talk about love. Instead of thinking about love as a feeling, I want to see what sense we can make of the remark Wittgenstein makes in Zettel, where he says, "Love is not a feeling. Love is put to the test, pain not. One
does not say: ‘That was not true pain, or it would not have gone off so quickly’." (Wittgenstein 1967, §504).

FEELING
We may have good reason for saying that love is not a feeling, but a certain care is still needed if we want to make this claim. The words ‘feeling’ and ‘feelings’ are often used in such a broad sense that there is no particular peculiarity in talking about love in connection with them. There is nothing wrong in saying that we feel love for someone, and if they ask us what our feelings for them are, they will probably consider ‘I love you’ or ‘I do not love you’ as important parts of our answer. There is, however, a narrower, perhaps more philosophical, use of the word ‘feeling’ that does not seem to correspond as well to our understanding
of what love is. Feelings in this sense can, according to Ryle, often be described as "thrills, twinges, pangs, throbs, wrenches, itches, prickings, chills, glows, loads, qualms, hankerings, curdlings, sinkings, tensions, gnawings and shocks" (Ryle 1955, 83). They have a certain duration and can often be located in certain body parts. We describe these feelings in the same way as we describe mere bodily sensations and if we report a thrill we might therefore also ask what caused it. We might feel a thrill of pleasure from listening to our favourite music or a thrill from the water drop rolling down our spine. "A man may wince from a
pricking of his conscience or from a pricking of his finger." (Ryle 1955, 84). Even if we also talk about bodily sensations as feelings, we do not only think of feelings as bodily sensations. We do not only separate different sensations, but we also understand a particular sensation in different ways depending on the situation it appears in. As Ryle says, we "distinguish a glow of pride from a glow of warmth" (Ryle 1955, 84). We do not merely feel or see a certain bodily sensation and its expression, we see or feel the pride or warmth.

If we look at feelings in this sense, it is not very difficult to point to feelings that seem to have something to do with love, and especially with falling in love. These feelings might even be the first things that spring to mind whenever we start thinking about love, and we might be tempted to say that this is what love is all about. We may, for example, think of the way we feel whenever we see the person we are in love with, ‘we have butterflies in our stomach’, ‘our heart takes a leap’ and so on. Undeniably this is part of being in love, we cannot imagine someone being in love without having any such feelings, but this does not mean that love is, for instance, ‘having butterflies in one’s stomach’. Having ‘butterflies’ in our stomach is first of all not enough for us to be in love. The ‘butterflies’ we have in our stomach before an important job interview, for example, usually have very little to do with the love in our life. It is only in certain situations that we talk about ‘butterflies in our stomach’ as ‘feelings of love’. We do not, for instance, mistake the ‘butterflies’ we feel when going to a job interview for the ‘butterflies’ we feel for our loved one, just as we, as in Ryle’s example, do not mistake a glow of pride for a glow of warmth. What feeling we have is dependent on the situation it appears in. How we understand the feeling is bound up with how we understand the situation, and if we, in some situation, are asked to explain why the ‘butterflies’ in our stomach are feelings of love rather than signs of nervousness, we can point to things in the situation that make the ‘butterflies’ feelings of love; that we saw someone we love, that we thought about them or remembered something they said or did. We do not doubt the kind of feelings that we have in the situation.

Even if we may talk about feelings of love in this specific sense, something seems to go seriously wrong if we think of love as a feeling in this sense. Saying, ‘I love you’, is not a matter of reporting the occurrence of a feeling. Loving someone does not mean that we can refer to some specific feeling, some specific going on in us, every time we say that we love them or that we are overcome with feelings every time we see them. The right way of answering the question, ‘Do you still love me?’, is not to check how we feel right now in the sense in which we do when we are answering the question, ‘Do you still feel pain?’, by checking how the sore part of our body feels right now. Pain, by contrast with love, has what Wittgenstein calls genuine duration; it has a beginning, a course and an end. In most cases we can say when the pain began and when it ended, we can ask, ‘When do you feel pain?’, or, ‘Do you feel pain right now?’. The question whether we feel love right now does not make sense in the same way. We may of course describe a feeling we have as a feeling of love, we could, for example, talk about a certain situation and say, ‘At that moment I felt a deep love for him’. When we started or stopped having this feeling or if we experience it right now, however, is not relevant to the question whether we love someone in the same way as it is relevant to the question whether we feel pain.

The difference between love and pain here is not simply that love may not have a beginning, a course and an end. In erotic love, for example, the couple can usually tell a story about how they met, developed feelings for each other and perhaps, sometimes, how they stopped having feelings for each other and eventually parted. Even if it is often more difficult to say exactly when a love began or ended than it is concerning a pain—it might for example be easier to mark the moment when we were first attracted to someone or realised that we loved or did not love them any more—the couple might even be able to give an exact
beginning or an end to their love. The difference between love and pain rather seems to lie in how the question of a beginning and an end enters into the two cases. We expect there to be an exact beginning or an end to a pain, and if someone is in pain we expect them to be able to say when the pain began or ended. If we do not know exactly when our love began or ended, it is not regarded as a failure on our part. This indefiniteness rather seems to be characteristic of love. Love is not something that suddenly appears and then disappears; it is not instantaneous as a pain might be but something that grows, and sometimes also
ends, over a period of time and that needs to be seen in connection with a relationship between two people. We cannot, for example, feel deep love for someone for a second, and the thought of something as ‘love at first sight’ only seems to be understandable when there is more to this love than that first sight. In some situations, we might of course be able to give an exact time for when we started or stopped loving someone, but even if we say, ‘That was when I started (or stopped) loving you’, we are not saying the same thing as we are when we say, ‘That was when I started (or stopped) having pain’.

To see the difference between the two cases, we might, for example, think of a person who, at a certain moment, when another person says or does something, sees that what he is feeling for the other person now is love. He might have cared for and felt affection for her before, but from now on he loves her. From this moment his attitude towards her changes. He reacts and behaves towards her and things concerning her in another way than before, and in this he and others can see the influence this moment has had on his life. That we can understand this instant as the moment he started loving her is dependent on things that
happened after this moment in a way pain is not. We need to tell a story, see the impact that the moment had on the person and the relationship to regard it as the moment that he first loved her. If nothing changes in him or in his attitudes towards the beloved we would not see the moment as the beginning of his love, meanwhile a pain might begin and end without affecting our life for a longer time than the duration of that pain. This could also be said about a situation where someone ceases to love somebody else. A person might, at a certain moment, see that he no longer loves another person, that the feelings he once had
for her are now gone or have turned into something else. What changes at that moment, however, is not only the way he feels for her but also the way he sees her, how he reacts and behaves towards her and things concerning her. The carefreeness he once appreciated in her might, for example, now only be seen as irresponsibility, and the manners that once were endearing may now only be irritating.

We can also easily imagine a more dramatic end to someone’s love. If something happens in a relationship, if a person, for example, finds out something about the other person that drastically changes the way he thinks of her and the relationship, that she in some way has betrayed him, this might lead him to say, ‘I do not love you any more’, or, ‘I cannot love you any more’. This moment could then be marked as the exact end of his love, and in many ways, it would be precisely that. Marking this moment as the end of his love is again not similar to marking the end of a pain. What comes to an end here is not necessarily a
feeling. The person who says, ‘I do not love you any more’, may still have feelings for the one he does not love. This may make parting this way much more difficult than the cases where the love the persons in the relationship had for each other has slowly gone away or maybe changed into something else. In those cases the persons may even part as friends and appreciate the time they shared together, even though they both notice that they are now different persons and better off outside the relationship than within it. In the first case, however, the person is forced to instantaneously re-evaluate his life and find other ways of
looking at it and the feelings he may still have than through the framework of the love relationship, maybe even with the bitter realisation that the whole relationship was built on a deception, on his or the other person’s part.

If we consider the example where someone ceases to love a person because they now know something that changes the way they think about the other person, in contrast to the cases where the love two people feel for each other turns into something else over a period of time, we can look at the former as a decision. This aspect does not apply to the case of pain. Making a decision is not enough to make the pain go away, but we can decide not to give another person the room in our life that we would normally give someone we love. This aspect also applies to some of the ways in which we come to love someone. Of course, we cannot decide that we are going to have feelings for someone, just as we cannot decide to start feeling pain, but in some situations we might look at our relation to our love as a decision. We can realise, discover or come to see that we love someone in different ways, in which case the idea of a decision can seem quite far-fetched, but we can also decide to let ourselves fall in love with someone, choose to look at our feelings as love and not just as an attraction or an infatuation, or accept that what we feel is love. In a way we can allow ourselves to feel a certain way for someone, or refuse to regard our feelings in that way. We are not only spectators to something that happens independently of us but active participants in how and what we feel.

WILL
When we are talking about love, in contrast to pain, we are not talking about something that is completely out of our control, we are also talking about the way we relate ourselves to what we are feeling, how we regard our feelings and the situation. This is one of the more paradoxical aspects of the ways we think about love. On the one hand, we think of love as something that is out of our control; we ‘are struck by lightning’, ‘cannot help falling in love’, ‘do not choose the person we fall in love with’. On the other hand, love is something for which we seem to accept full responsibility, we are disturbed by the thought that our love
might be something that does not depend on us. We may wonder how love can ever be commanded, as it is in the command to ‘love your neighbour’, or how we can promise to love someone for the rest of our lives, as we do in our wedding vows. Love does not seem to be subject to our will in that way. Willing to love somebody is not loving them, but still we do not think of our love as independent of us. We might feel guilty or bad for not falling in love with someone, not loving someone any more or being in love with someone with whom we know we should not be in love.

That we entertain notions of love that appear to be contradictory should not be taken as a sign that we are in some way mistaken about what is going on, or that we are wrong to react to the way we feel with, for instance, guilt or shame. Rather it seems to be wrong to think that we could rid ourselves of this paradox concerning love. What it is to love someone is not independent of these ways of thinking about love, of reacting to what we feel or do not feel with shame or guilt, or of talking about love as something that in some situations is a choice or something that can be commanded and in some situations is not. These ways of thinking and talking about love rather seem to show how we come into our love, how we are responsible and play a part in what it is that we are feeling. Loving someone is not only feeling a certain way about someone. We may, for example, not doubt the intensity of somebody’s feelings when he says, ‘I love you’, but still be inclined to say that he does not know what love is. What we want to say here may be that he does not see the consequences that loving someone should have in his life, that his love should show in other things in his life than in his words. Loving someone is not just having certain feelings but it is also recognising the demands our love makes on us. As Raimond Gaita says, we can "be required to love better. Love has its standards and lovers must try to rise to them." (Gaita 1999, 25).

What it means to recognise a demand in love can be seen more clearly if we look at the command to ‘love your neighbour’. The command to love our neighbour does not primarily seem to be concerned with feeling a certain way. The person who is so uplifted by his love for humankind that he does not see the human being lying in the gutter, cannot be said to love his neighbour in any sense of the word. To love our neighbour is rather to respond to a human being with compassion and concern, to see someone as a fellow human being who can make certain demands on us, and react to these demands in certain ways, to help
people if they are in need and so on. The command to ‘love your neighbour’ then seems to be a command to approach people in this way, to give them the attention that is needed for us to recognise them as fellow beings and respond to them with compassion and concern. In a similar way, we might say that what the mother is missing who does not love her child is not just a way of feeling about her child. The mother has not just failed her child by not feeling a certain way; there is a certain attention to the child as her child that she has failed to give. We might say that the love is something that she has neglected, that she would feel love for her child if she took the time to look at and be with the child in a certain way. In some situations, this attention, this effort on her side, might even be necessary for her to love her child. Something similar can also be said about the loves between friends and lovers. The husband who feels guilty about not loving his wife may of course feel guilty about not having certain feelings any more, but he may also feel guilty about not having given his wife the time and attention that she deserved as his wife and that might have created the possibility for him to go on feeling for her in the ways he did before.

Every human being is someone with whom we can come to stand in a relationship, and within this relationship we can come to see certain demands that the relationship makes on us. To love is to recognise the demands that these relationships make on us, and in that sense, love can be seen as something that we can be commanded to do. This does not mean that we may be commanded to feel certain ways for other people, but rather that we can be commanded to provide room for responding to people in certain ways, to give people the attention that is needed for love to survive and grow. To love is also to recognise our
responsibility for giving people the place in our lives in which we can come to respond to them in these ways. We can accept responsibility and also be blamed for not letting people get this place in our life, for ignoring them and the role they could play in it.

The kind of demands that we see within a relationship and the kind of attention and consideration that we need to give people will of course depend on the kind of relationship it is. The love of one’s neighbour, for example, usually seems to be a command to respond to someone in need, while our close relationships to friends, family and lovers seem to make much greater demands on us. We do not have to think about our fellow human beings all the time to love our neighbour, but we can feel as if we have failed our husband or wife if we realise that we have not thought about them in certain situations. This also means that there are ways in which we can fail friends and family in which we cannot fail strangers, and that there are ways in which we, in turn, can fail lovers in which we cannot fail friends or family. Even if we fail someone in our love it does not have to mean that we do not love them. We can love someone and still fail to live up to the demands that our love makes on us, we can be bad parents and children, brothers and sisters, friends and lovers, but still be loving parents and children, brothers and sisters, friends and lovers. If we love someone, however, it will be important for us to try to live up to these demands. As Gaita said, we can be "required to love better", but it is also important to note the ways in which we want to love better. It is in the light of our love and the relationship we have to another human being that we see these demands in love, and we want to meet these demands because we love.

This also concerns how the way we feel about what we are doing enters into love. The kind of attention to and consideration of people that love can be said to emand from us, does not directly involve feeling a certain way, but still the way we do things is important to how we come to regard the attention and consideration that we give to the people that we love. The question is only as to how these feelings come into our love. When I talked about the command to love our neighbour, and this can also be seen in relation to the other forms of love, I said that it is not a command to feel in certain ways but rather a command to
respond to people in certain ways. If we help other people only because it makes us feel good about ourselves we do not act out of love of our neighbour, but if we help only because we think that we have to do it, because we think that it is something that is demanded of us, it does not seem to be love either. We might say, ‘Do it, and do it willingly’, but the willingness with which we do things should not be seen as some feeling of willing to do what we are doing that accompanies our actions. Sometimes just doing something is what it is to love. There is a sense in which the question of what we are feeling does not
come in, rather it might be a question about how much we love if we are too conscious about what we are feeling, if our will to do something enters too much into our actions. We might, for example, not fully appreciate something typically romantic if we feel that the one who does it only does it because he thinks that it is expected of him. Still, it is a great leap to saying that this means that he does not really love. Our love shows itself in different ways in our actions, and how we feel about our actions will be important to how we come to regard them. The way our love comes into our actions, however, seems to be in the spirit, the
intention, in which we act rather than in some feelings that can be said to accompany our actions.

Our feelings for other people and the attention we give to them seem to be so closely intertwined that it is pointless to try to separate them. Sometimes loving someone just means giving them this attention and consideration, but love may also be what makes us give them this attention and consideration. Sometimes it may also be necessary to give people this attention and consideration to go on loving them. Still, giving people this attention and consideration may not be loving them, and someone may also be said to love even if they do not give their loved one this attention and consideration, although in that case we may want to say that they do not really love. Even so, what we feel for other people and the attention that we give to them seem to play different roles in the different stages of a relationship. In the beginning of a love relationship, for example, in the raptures of falling in love and getting to know another person, we quite naturally give the other attention and take them into consideration. We do not have to make a special effort to be interested in the one we love; rather we constantly want to be around them, want to know everything about them and so on. After the initial excitement has gone away, however, this interest in the other begins to lose its grip on us. We start to know the other person, we become used to having them around and as the relationship finds a fixed form the initial wonder that we felt towards them often gives way to more everyday matters. Nevertheless, if we want to maintain the feelings we first had, it is important to keep the interest that initially drew us to the other person alive. Otherwise we may wake up one day and ask ourselves what happened to the feelings we once had and what attracted us so much to the other person in the first place.

DISPOSITION
In the above discussion I wanted to show some problems in thinking about love as a feeling. Love is not just a physical occurrence. It is not something that strikes us or catches us unaware but something that we are actively involved in, something that we can allow or not allow ourselves to feel, something that we can feel shame, guilt and regret about. Saying that love is a feeling also has a peculiar sound to it. Several feelings, such as affection or desire, are certainly involved in our love for someone, but we do not need an additional feeling of love every time that we say that we love someone. The pang of jealousy
we may feel when another person is enjoying himself with somebody other than us or the longing we may feel when he is not around might show us that we are falling in love with him as much as the feeling of love we may have when he is close to us. The objection that love does not mean having a certain feeling all the time does not only apply to love but is also true for emotions such as fear and anger. That we are afraid of dogs does not mean that we constantly have a certain feeling, but that we tend to react with feeling fear and wanting to run away whenever we meet a dog. We can also be angry with someone for a longer period of time, although this anger is only expressed in our having certain feelings when we meet this person, think about what he has done to us and so on. In this respect love does not seem to differ very much from the other emotions. The problem rather seems to be in understanding emotions simply as a feeling or a succession of feelings.

The idea that emotions are all about feelings is one of the main concerns for Ryle. As I briefly stated in the beginning, he introduces a distinction between ‘feelings’, ‘inclinations’, ‘agitations’ and ‘moods’ to describe emotions, and concludes that none of the latter simply amounts are not what we think of as the interest. The interest the person has in the subject will rather show in the fact that he reads books on the subject, discusses and works on problems in the area and so on. The interest works as a motive for the person’s actions (Ryle 1955, 87). In a similar way, we can understand love as a motive for certain actions. As I have mentioned before, loving someone means taking an interest in the person that we love, and sometimes love can even be the reason for working up an interest when we do not directly feel it. Often it is also in these situations we need it the most; sometimes even the slightest effort can be of great importance. Taking an interest in the person we love also means taking an interest in what happens to that person. If we love someone we will be concerned about the well-being of that person, take them into consideration in our plans, plan things to be able to share our experiences with them and so on. A way of showing this consideration could be to try
to act in such a way that we do not give the loved one reason to be jealous. Another could be to get up early on a Sunday morning to make him breakfast. All these things can be seen as expressions of our love. The answer to why we do it might be ‘Because I love you’. We act ‘out of love’.

Agitations and moods, as Ryle sees them, are also connected to acting and behaving in certain ways but are closer to feelings than inclinations. A reason for taking them as feelings might be that we use the word ‘feel’ to describe them; we feel anxious, excited, upset (agitations), happy, angry and depressed (moods), but Ryle, again, wants to deny that what is going on when we say that we ‘feel’ this way is reporting the occurrence of a feeling. Agitations and moods go on for a longer period of time than feelings, they have a duration but are not located in certain body parts as feelings are, and should rather be seen as dispositions
to feel and behave in certain ways than the feelings themselves. Strong feelings are characteristic of agitations—to a great extent agitations are what we think of when we say that we are overcome by emotions—but Ryle wants to point out how this also affects our behaviour. We do not act and behave in the way we usually would, in a sense we do not know how to act. Agitations also presuppose inclinations; we feel agitated when our inclinations are conflicting or something is standing in the way of our inclinations. Our agitation at being far from the person we love, or finding out that the person we love is in love with someone else, might then be seen as a result of being prevented from realising our inclination, our want, to be, or be in a relationship, with that person.

Although we might make use of Ryle’s description of inclinations and agitations when we talk about love, it sounds strange to say that love is a mood. Saying, ‘I love him’, is, for example, quite a peculiar way of answering the question, ‘How are you doing?’. This peculiarity, however, seems to fade away when we move to talking about ‘being in love’. ‘I am in love’ could well be an answer to the question about how we are doing, just as ‘I am happy’ or ‘I am depressed’ could be an answer to it. We can easily picture the person or the couple in love; how they look at each other, light up when the other enters the room, are happier than usual, and sometimes also more miserable, how they tend to see the world through rose-coloured glasses. This ‘fall in love’ seems to be distinctive of erotic love, and especially of the beginning of that love, although a couple that have been together and loved each other for a longer time might experience falling in love with each other again. Anyhow, we do not find it in the loves between friends, siblings or parents and children, although some people might say that parents fall in love with their new born babies.

Moods colour all of a person’s actions and reactions and so does falling in love. We would have a hard time believing the person who says that he feels depressed if he says it in a cheerful voice, at the same time as he is joking and laughing with the people around him. In the same way, we might have difficulties in believing that a couple really are in love if they do not show any signs of it, if they do not light up when the other enters the room, or if they say they cannot stand being around the other person. In such a case we might wonder what to believe or whether they really know what they are saying. These questions are also related to whether we find it intelligible to ascribe a certain mood to a person at all. In some situations we might understand that someone is depressed or in  love even if this does not show in their behaviour, people may want to hide their emotions or not give them much expression, but there are things that it does not make sense to say or do if we want to say that we are in love. If someone who claims to be in love, for example, also complains about how empty and meaningless their life is, we would not know what it would be to understand them as saying that they are in love, since being in love seems to imply experiencing meaning in one’s life.

COMMITMENT
Ryle describes emotions as dispositions to behave, act and feel in certain ways, and to an extent we can also think of love in this way. That we tend to think, react, respond and feel in certain ways about the people we love, worry about them, miss them when they are away and be happy when they are around, be jealous in certain situations, is all part of what it is to love somebody. We would not know what love could be if these things were missing, and we might question whether it really is love if these things do not enter into the relationship. We can also come to understand that we love somebody from our ways of
behaving, or be told by others who have been observing our behaviour that we do. We can also contemplate how we would react or feel in certain situations to find out whether what we are feeling is love. However, saying that love is a disposition to behave, act and feel in certain ways still seems wrong. There is an indefiniteness in what we can come to regard as an act of love. Making someone breakfast on a Sunday morning may be an act of love in some situations and some relationships, but if we, for example, know that the other person had a rough night and needs to sleep or that he usually does not like to eat breakfast it does not seem to have much to do with love. What can be seen as an act of love can only be seen in relation to the situation and the relationship, and even if we could point to some actions that appear to be typical acts of love, just doing these things for someone does not count as loving them. Loving someone is not just acting like someone who loves, and we may also act towards the people we love in ways that we think are not consistent with love and still love them. If we love, our love will make a difference in the way we think, feel and act towards the one we love, but this difference cannot be reduced to a way of thinking, feeling and acting towards another human being.

What seems to be missing from the account of love as an emotion is that love is more than ‘going through the motions’. These ways of acting, feeling and behaving can be seen as expressions of our love, or conditions for it, but love is rather an attitude than an emotion. It is more of a readiness to react and feel about another human being than the reactions and feelings in themselves. It is a readiness that comes with the preciousness we see in other human beings and the relationships we have to them, with the ways in which people may matter to us and with our desire to be with and do what is good for them. To love is
to become involved in and be committed to another human being and the relationship that we have to them. In a sense, it a promise to allow another human being to have a certain place in our life and a responsibility for this promise and for the other human being.

This is also seen in Wittgenstein’s remark that "love is put to the test". This seems to be true of every love—there might come a time in all our relationships to other people when we need to show that our attitude towards the relationship is more than words—but especially true of erotic love. In every love relationship there are bound to be things that pose threats to the love, both from within the relationship and from the outside. If love were just a feeling it would seem like quite a fragile thing to counter these threats with, but when these obstacles are overcome, they only seem to make love stronger. Some of the obstacles we will face in a relationship will of course necessarily be personal, having to do with how to fit two people, two lives and two wills together and dealing with the personal problems and insecurities that each of us brings into it. There are, however, also problems that seem to be internal to the character of a relationship and that seem to reflect the kind of attitude we take towards it.

One of these threats, as I have already pointed out, is the ease with which we often become used to each other, and the risk of starting to take each other for granted. Although it might be a comfort, there is a great danger in thinking that we now know everything there is to know about the one we love. How we come to regard our loved ones is dependent on the attitude we adopt towards them. If we think that we already know all there is to know, we will not be open to seeing anything new in them, but if we take on the relationship with a realisation that we can never know everything there is to know about another person,
we will be able to see both old and new things about them. Furthermore, things that happen outside the relationship have a tendency of creeping into it. What concerns the one we love will concern us too, in a sense we do not only get the other person but also their life, and there is a risk that some of these things, such as the relationships we have to other people or our career, affects the relationship. Here it is again important to adopt a certain attitude towards the relationship, to remember what it is that really matters and not let other things acquire too great proportions or come between us and the one we love. Hardships are
bound to come in every relationship’s way and although they may break a love, they may also make it stronger. If a love does not survive the hardships that come in its way, we might react to it by joining Wittgenstein in saying that it was not true love.

OBJECT
In so far as love is an emotion, it is an emotion that always has an object. Our love is always a love of something; it is only the object of our love that varies. There is a love of things or activities, although in most cases we can take this as a strong word for liking something, and when it comes to the love we have for human beings, we also distinguish between the love we might have for a lover, a friend, a sister or a brother, a parent or a child. There is no such thing as an ‘objectless love’ as there, for instance, sometimes can be an objectless fear or depression.

This is the starting point for Gabriele Taylor’s article "Love", where she discusses the character of love in relation to other emotions that have an object. The question Taylor is primarily interested in is whether we can talk about love as ever being justified or not, as we can do when we talk about other emotions such as fear and anger. Taylor sees it as characteristic for the emotions that have an object that they involve certain beliefs about the object. If we are afraid of a bear, for example, we believe that the bear is dangerous, that it has this "determinable quality", as Taylor calls it. We can substantiate this belief by referring to other beliefs. We can point to some "determinate qualities" in the object that back our fear, such as the sharp claws and the malicious temperament of the bear. Connected with these beliefs, or as a consequence of them, we will also have certain wants and tendencies to react in a certain way in relation to the object. We want to run away from the bear because we believe it is dangerous. Taylor regards these beliefs and wants as necessary conditions for feeling the emotion, and since we can examine the accuracy of these beliefs we can also judge whether a certain emotion is in place in a certain situation. If it is true that the bear has sharp claws and a malicious temperament it is rational for us to believe that it is dangerous, and thus we are justified in being afraid of it. If this is not the case our beliefs can be said to be irrational and our fear unjustified. (Taylor 1979, 165-168)

After giving this general account of emotions with an object, Taylor goes on to discuss whether love can be seen as conforming to these principles. She recognises the difficulties we seem to encounter when we are trying to talk about love as being justified or unjustified, and does not give an affirmative answer in either direction about the possibility of doing this. Still, she does think that love is similar enough to the other emotions to raise the question of justification "in the form of questions of deficiency and of propriety" (Taylor 1979, 181). Love, as Taylor sees it, involves having certain beliefs about the object of our love and these beliefs might be misguided and in that way irrational. If a person loves somebody "he does so in virtue of certain determinate qualities which he believes [the beloved] to have" (Taylor 1979, 171). He will be able to point to certain characteristics in the beloved that he finds attractive and will also have wants concerning her that he believes she can fulfil. These wants can be described as a desire to benefit and cherish her and be benefited and cherished by her, and the lover may also be wrong to think that the beloved can meet these wants.

This is a very brief presentation of Taylor’s ideas, but there already seem to be many questions in the assumptions that form the basis of her argument. I will not straighten every question mark in her discussion here, but I intend to raise at least some of the questions that her discussion gives rise to. I have already discussed some reservations about talking about love as an emotion or as one way of understanding an emotion. I will now turn to how we are to understand the object, and the beliefs we may entertain about this object, in relation to our love. I will, however, begin with a more general discussion of Taylor’s account of
emotions and what it is for us to talk of an emotion as justified.

BELIEF
It seems to be clear that having certain emotions in some way involves having, or being able to state, certain beliefs about and wants towards the object. Not all beliefs and wants that we entertain about the object will of course do to justify our emotion. Taylor also takes notice of this. It is not enough that the beliefs we have about the object are true for us to talk about our emotion as justified. The bear might be brown and have four paws but this does not justify our fear if we cannot give any other reason or explanation for finding it dangerous or being afraid of it. Neither does the fact that the bear has sharp claws and a malicious temperament in itself justify our fear. It is only if we can give some reasons for thinking that it will attack us that it makes sense to refer to these qualities. If the bear is locked in a cage and has no possibility of reaching us, it does not matter that its claws are sharp and its temperament is malicious. The "determinate qualities" that Taylor talks about then only seem to matter if there is something else in the object that gives us reason to think that it is dangerous, that there is something bad in the situation that might happen to us.

When we start talking about what Taylor calls "determinable qualities", the connection between our beliefs about and wants towards the object and our emotion seems to become closer. That we are afraid of a situation means that we find it dangerous and do not want to be in it, although we can of course also see that a situation is dangerous without being afraid of it, if we, for example, know how to handle the danger in the situation. Having certain beliefs and wants then seems to play a significant part in having the emotion, but there is an important question as to exactly how these beliefs and wants are related to the emotion. Taylor seems to view the beliefs we have about the object as somehow underlying both the wants we have in relation to the object and the emotion, so that we can see the eligibility of the emotion by investigating the beliefs. Although this seems to be a clean-cut description of emotions it still feels as if it misses out on something, partially because it is so clean-cut. Describing having an emotion as first having certain beliefs about the object and then reacting on these beliefs by having certain wants and certain feelings does not seem to correspond to the complexity of our emotions. Part of what it is to be under the influence of an emotion is, for instance, not to be able to give a clear account of what beliefs and wants are involved in the emotion. In saying this, I am not denying that we do give reasons for feeling in a certain way, and that we do it in a way that seems to imply some kind of causality. We say, ‘I am afraid (I want to run away) because it is dangerous’, or, ‘I think it is dangerous because it has sharp claws’, but we might ask how the ‘because’ works in these sentences. The belief that something is
dangerous does not seem to be what gives rise to our fear, nor does the belief that it has sharp claws seem to give rise to our belief that it is dangerous. The reasons we give for being afraid or angry, ‘It is dangerous’, or, ‘He wronged me’, do not seem to be attempts to explain or describe as much why we have these feelings of fear or anger, as what it is we are feeling. Describing the situation in this way is not any different from describing what we are feeling. By saying that something is dangerous or that someone has wronged, we are saying that it is something that we are, or could be, afraid of, or that it is something that we are angry about. The reasons we give for our emotions, that something is dangerous, or that someone has wronged, also seem to be expressive of the emotions themselves. Being afraid partially is thinking that something is dangerous and wanting to run away from it, and being angry at someone is thinking that they in some way have wronged. The way we describe the situation and express what we feel are just two sides of looking at our emotion. Both display our perspective on the situation, a perspective that starts off in and is coloured by our emotion.

In saying that we are afraid, we are expressing the way we view the situation. This involves the thought that the situation is dangerous, and in saying that the situation is dangerous we are also saying that fear is a possible attitude towards it, that there might be a reason for being afraid of it, although we, as I have already said, in some situations can think that something is dangerous without being afraid. The connection between our emotion and our description of the situation then is internal. This internal connection is even clearer in situations that we describe as ‘horrifying’. If we say that something is horrifying, we are
implying that it is something that we are or would be afraid of, or then we describe the situation as horrifying because we are afraid of it. These ways of describing the situation are expressive of the emotion and not separate from it. We will not find a case of an emotion where these beliefs are not present, but this is not because the emotion follows on the beliefs, but because we would not ascribe the emotion to someone who did not have these beliefs and because at the point someone stops having these beliefs they also stop having the emotion.

Having come this far we begin to see the puzzle Taylor had in fitting love into her account of emotions that have an object. There does not seem to be any such "determinable quality" in love that is comparable to ‘dangerous’, and even less so to ‘horrifying’, in the case of fear. ‘Attractive’ or ‘loveable’ are likely candidates, but they lack the generality that ‘dangerous’ has. We can agree that something is dangerous, and if someone is not afraid of it we ask for an explanation as to why; that they, for example, recognise the danger in the situation but know how to control it. If they cannot give an explanation as to why they are not afraid, if they just do not think that it is dangerous, we might even find them foolish not to be afraid. However, we do not have to agree that someone is attractive, and if someone does not find somebody else attractive we do not usually ask why, although we might raise the question in some situations. Even if we agree that someone is attractive it does not mean that we love them, and we can also love someone even if we see that they are not attractive in the usual sense of the word. They can still be attractive to us, but if we stop loving someone because they stop being attractive in the way in which we first thought that they were, the way we stop being afraid of something if it turns out that what we thought was dangerous was not, we would not say that it was really love. For most of the time, it also seems as if we are quite happy to be the only ones who see what is ‘attractive’ or ‘loveable’ in our beloved.

JUSTIFICATION
An aspect that Taylor seems to overlook is that when we are discussing emotions, we are not only discussing whether an emotion is justified or not, but also whether we can ascribe a certain emotion to a person at all. There are situations where we can agree that a person is afraid, even if he claims to be afraid of something that we perceive of as totally harmless. We might see the object as an inappropriate object of fear and the reasons the person gives for feeling fear as irrational or unjustified, but even if we in a way do not understand the person’s fear, we could not, for example, be afraid of it ourselves, we can still see that the person is afraid, judging, for example, by the way he is acting in relation to this object. There are, however, also situations where we would have a problem in understanding what the person is saying when he says that he is afraid. If a person says that he is afraid of a dog because it is brown and cannot give any other explanation except that he is afraid of brown, or says that he is afraid at the same time as he is playing with the dog in an unconcerned way, we would have great difficulties in understanding this as fear. We would not only say that he is unjustified in being afraid; in a sense, we would not know what it is that he is saying at all.

n this respect, love does not seem to differ very much from other emotions. There are things, and this only seems to be true of things, that do not lend themselves as objects of our love and there are situations where we might wonder whether someone really loves or knows what love is. There are, however, differences in talking about love as being unintelligible in these two cases. It is quite easy to give examples of the former, we could not, for instance, understand someone who swore their undying love to a toothbrush or a number, while the latter seems to pose many more questions. We might find it unintelligible to say that someone loves if they are indifferent to what happens to the one they claim that they love or if their love does not show itself in any way in their life, but when can we, for example, say that someone’s behaviour shows that they do not love the one they claim to love, or that their understanding of love is deficient? As we have seen, we can come to understand different things as love in different relationships, and we can also fail to show our love without it ceasing to be love.

In some situations, however, we might not understand something as love just as we might not understand something as fear, anger or joy. In saying this, we do not recognise something as a particular emotion, but if we want to talk about an emotion as justified or unjustified we have to recognise it as the particular emotion before we can decide whether the emotion is in place in the particular situation or not. This often seems to be possible when we are talking about other emotions than love, but when we are talking about love there does not seem to be room for thinking about it as justified or unjustified or rational or irrational,
except in the sense that it makes us do irrational things. We can have reasons for being afraid, angry or happy, but if someone presented us with a reason for loving someone, if they, for instance, married for money or social status, we would not think that it was love. There is no such thing as a good reason for loving someone. This does not exclude that it in some situations can be a personal tragedy not to love where we could be said to see a ‘good reason’ to, especially if the one we do not love is in love with us. We may like someone, enjoy their company and maybe even be attracted to them but still not love them. This could,
for example, be the case in a situation where somebody does not want to marry or have children with the person they are in a love relationship with, since they do not see the place for that kind of commitment in the relationship.

That there are no ‘good reasons’ for loving somebody is connected with the internal relation that descriptions such as ‘It is dangerous’ or ‘It is horrifying’ has to fear and the lack of such a description in love. If something is dangerous or someone wrongs, this means that it is something for us to be afraid of or angry about. If something is dangerous or someone has been wronged, we do not need an additional explanation to understand why someone is afraid or angry, we do not, for instance, need to know that they also believe that it is dangerous or that they have been wronged. We usually only want an additional explanation if somebody does not feel this way about the situation, if they are not afraid or angry when we think that something is dangerous or that they have been wronged. If someone is not afraid of something that we think is dangerous, they must be able to give some reason for thinking that they can handle the danger in the situation, a reason for not regarding the situation as dangerous in a sense. In other words, they cannot regard the situation as dangerous and not be afraid of it. If someone is not angry when we think that they have been wronged, they must also be able to give some reason for thinking that they have not been wronged. They might, for example, say that the person who we think has wronged them did not do it on purpose, or that there are some other factors that excuse his actions. They cannot think that they have been wronged and not be angry about it. In that way, there are situations and things that we are, and should be, afraid, angry or happy about, and just as there are appropriate objects of our fear, anger or joy, there are also things that are inappropriate objects of our emotions, or that demand much explanation before we grant that they are intelligible objects of our emotion. It seems to be in these cases, where we do not find something an appropriate object of a particular emotion or the reasons for the emotion intelligible, that we talk about the emotion as unjustified, provided that we have agreed to ascribe this emotion to the person who claims to have it. We might, for example, tell somebody not to be afraid of a poodle because it is so small and harmless, because it is on a leash and cannot reach them. When we do this, we are pointing to characteristics in the object, in the poodle or the situation, that makes it an inappropriate object of fear, but when we are talking about love towards another human being there does not seem to be any object that, in the same sense, would be an inappropriate object of our love.

Sometimes we do of course tell people that they should not love someone who treats them badly or that they should not waste their time on someone who ‘does not deserve them’. This could be given as an example of a situation where we do talk about love as being unjustified. Still, when we say this, we are not saying the same thing as we are when we are telling somebody not to be afraid of something. When we tell someone that they should not love a person, we are not saying that this person has some characteristics that make him an inappropriate object of their love, or anybody else’s love. As long as we see a person as a human being, that possibility will be closed to us, since seeing someone as a human being in a sense is seeing them as possible objects of somebody’s love. As Gaita remarks, we often "learn that something is precious only when we see it in the light of someone’s love" (Gaita 1999, 24), and if we deny someone the possibility of being seen in the light of somebody else’s love, of being loved, we are also denying them their humanity. This does not mean that it is always good to be in a relationship with the one we love. Sometimes people who love each other may not be able to be in a relationship with each other, and what we are
pointing out when we tell someone that they should not love may be that they should see the bad consequences of their love and recognise that the particular relationship is not good for them.

REASONS
Whatever we say about there not being reasons for love, in some situations we do seem to give reasons for loving somebody. If someone asks us why we love a person, we can usually give a list of things we love about him; his smile, his intelligence, his good sense of humour. We might, however, also be unable to give an answer, or to give any good answers to the question why we love, or what it is that makes  us love a person, or we might say that we love everything about him.

Among the things that we might say about our beloved, not everything will of course do as a ‘reason’ for loving just as we do not accept everything that we might say about the object of our fear as a reason for being afraid. If we say that we love a person because he has dark hair and his name is Bill, we need to explain much more before anyone would really understand this as a ‘reason’ for our love. In contrast to this, talking about his beautiful smile, his intelligence and good sense of humour can be seen as a ‘reason’ for loving. These ways of speaking may, for example, reveal that we are in love, while talking about the
colour of someone’s hair or name does not have to say anything about what we feel for the person. Even so, this does not mean that we could love anyone who possessed these characteristics. Being introduced to someone who possesses the same characteristics as the one we love, we would not happily accept this other person as a substitute. Our reaction would rather be ‘But it’s not him (or her)!’.

To say that we love someone because of these characteristics, or as Taylor puts it, "in virtue of certain determinate qualities" (Taylor 1979, 171), therefore seems to be a mistake. What we are doing when we say these things does not seem to be answering the question why we love a person but rather saying ‘what it is we love about the person’. These ways of talking about our love and the object of it appear to be an attempt to describe what it is we feel for a person rather than an attempt to give reasons for what we feel. They also seem to be expressive of our love, just as saying or thinking, ‘He wronged me’, or, ‘It
is dangerous’, is expressive of o they just beautiful and funny to us, because they are part of the person we love? We may of course have a bit of both in this situation. Other people may agree
with us that they have a beautiful smile and a good sense of humour, but we might also be the only ones who see their smile as beautiful or their jokes as funny. Either way, whether we love someone because we see the wonderful persons that they are or see them as wonderful persons because we love them, it is not surprising that the lover might find it strange that other people do not see how fantastic her beloved one is. Loving someone means seeing all the things that we can love about them; it is seeing everything that is precious about a human being, everything that makes the person an appropriate objects of our love, without
for that sake excluding the possibility that other human beings are also appropriate objects of somebody’s love, if not ours.

Although we usually do not have a problem in picking out the beloved’s attractive traits, focusing on the beloved’s good characteristics seems to leave out the place that seeing the beloved’s bad characteristics, or reconciling to them in the light of our love, has in our love. Truly loving someone means being aware of their faults and shortcomings and loving them in spite of them, just as we are aware of our own faults and shortcomings and want the beloved to love us in spite of them. In this, there seems to be an essential difference between loving and falling in love. It is often claimed that love makes us blind, and in the case of falling in love this seems to be true. This stage of our love is characterised by a certain idealisation of the other person. We are mesmerised by the other and see only the good things about them. There is also a risk that we are projecting what we want into the other person, that we see what we want to see, and we might also try to give the other a better image of ourselves or try to be what we think that they want us to be. After the first rush has settled, however, the matter of seeing who the other one really is becomes more important and naturally finds its way into the relationship. This is the first test which is put to the couple in love. Only where the couple see that what they share is strong enough to include the less attractive features of the other will love have the possibility to grow, and when it does the couple are no longer blind, but in a way seeing.

AIM
One of the greatest problems about saying that we love someone in "virtue of certain determinate qualities" is that it leaves room for the idea that love is conditional. If we love someone because of some qualities they possess, it seems as if we might stop loving them if they did no longer possess these qualities. It is of course true that a love might end because the beloved turns out to be something other than the lover thought or because both lovers change, but saying that we love someone in virtue of certain qualities seems to overlook the fact that people change throughout their lives and that we often regard a love that persists in
spite of these changes as especially deep, while we usually would not say that something was love if it ended just because the other person changed. The idea that we might know what we want from a human being and a relationship from the beginning and that we would have a reason to end the relationship if we were not getting it, however, seems to convey a quite common misconception of what it is to be in a relationship with another human being. Some people do have a picture of what they want another human being and a relationship to be like, but if we only look for someone to fit into that picture, what we are looking
for is not love nor a relationship with another human being. Neither human beings nor relationships come set in that way; every relationship has to be seen against its own presuppositions and the two individuals that make part of it. Furthermore, it is important to notice the ways in which love and the relationship might call upon us to change and that we often regard this change as something for the better.

The important place Taylor gives to wants in her account of love also suggests that love is concerned with the satisfaction of certain wants and needs. The suggestion seems to be that we love someone because it is, in some way, worth while to love them (Cf. e.g. Taylor 1979, 174). This idea does not seem to be consistent with love. Loving someone is not something that we do because we think that it is worth while to do it. Rather we would not say that it was love if our reason for loving was that we thought that it was worthwhile to love or if we expected the beloved to fulfil some wants we have in connection with the
relationship, even if the only thing we wanted was for them to love us. As Frances Berenson points out, the notion of love as a give-and-take relationship that Taylor brings forward does not seem to be exclusively characteristic of love, but can be an aspect of every human relationship. It is also based on "a serious misconception of giving as involving sacrifice as the reward of taking". Berenson continues:

Love, above all, is about joyous giving of oneself, of one’s time, of one’s very concerns in life, one’s joys, and sorrows, one’s
understanding, humour, failures and successes, sadness and disappointments, one’s deepest concern for the other and of
spontaneous, sensitive responses, of life’s tenderness. Receiving, rather than taking, will take care of itself, it is at its most
poignant when what one receives is utterly unexpected. (Berenson 1991, 78)

If we love someone, we do of course want the person we love to return our love, and in that respect one could say that love is always self-interested. We are usually heartbroken to find out that the one we love does not love us or loves somebody else, although, in some situations, we may think that it is best for our love to remain unanswered. What is tragic about an unrequited love, however, is not that something that we thought was worth while to do turned out not to be. What is tragic is that the one we love does not love us too, and in that sense does not allow us to love them either. If we love, we want to give of ourselves
to the ones we love, and we want them to want what we have to give. What we want is for them to want us to love them, to accept the love that we want to give. We want them to accept our gift, to accept us, and we also want them to give of themselves to us, but freely, out of love, and not because we want them to. There is an inherent demand for reciprocity in love, but this reciprocity is better seen in two people wanting to give of themselves to the other, wanting to commit to and become involved in each other and the relationship, than in two people exchanging goods.

When we talk about love in relation to other emotions that have an object, it seems important to note that the object of our love of people necessarily is another human being. When we talk about emotions such as anger, joy or fear, we can usually point to something in the situation, the thing or the person that our emotion is directed at that gives us reason to think that something good or bad might happen or has happened to us. If something changes in the situation our emotion can also be expected to change with it. What we are committed to in love, however, is not a characteristic of a certain situation, nor any characteristics of the one we love, but the human being with whom we are in a relationship. Other human beings and the relationship we have to them may of course also come into our other emotions in different ways. We can, for example, not only be angry about what someone has done to us, but also about who did it to us. Even so, it is possible to be angry about what someone has done to us but still forgive the person who did it, or to be angry about some of the things someone has done but still be happy about some of the other things they have done. This is not a possibility in love. We may like some things about a person and dislike other
things, but we cannot love some parts of a person and not love some other parts. If we love, we love the whole person, although we may of course also dislike certain things about the one we love.

Love, then, is something that has to be seen within the context of a relationship between two people. Love, when it is reciprocated, is something that we build. It is something that comes with a notion of a shared life, where we enjoy each other’s company, share experiences, memories, and hopes for the future. Love in this sense is a particular relationship, and within this relationship the persons become irreplaceable. Every relationship is unique, and what the particular relationship becomes depends on what each of the persons brings into it, what the other person becomes in relation to us and what we become in
relation to them. In this relationship we do not only value the other person but also the relationship, and we want the other person to value us and the relationship in the same way as we do. We strive to find a unity with the other person, a unity where there is not just a you and a me but something more, a we. We find an expression of this unity in the fact that, when a relationship ends or we cannot for any reason be together, we do not miss only the other person but also the things we did together, the things we shared. What we are missing may not be only the other person but also what we ourselves become in relation to the other person.

RELATIONSHIP
In love it is not only the object that distinguishes the different loves from each other. The relationship we have to another human being seems to play an even more crucial part in what we understand as love. What it is to feel fear varies with the object of our fear, whether we are afraid of heights, bears or thunder, and in the same way what we see as love varies with the object of our love. The love we may be said to have for things, if we want to call it love, will depend on what kind of thing it is, and this love will in turn differ from the love we have for human beings. When we talk about the love we have for human beings, however, it is not only the object, the person, that will matter for the ways in which we can be said to love them. The same person may be loved in different ways by different people. As I said, love is a particular relationship and what will come to be seen as expressions of love in a relationship will depend on the individuals that are part of it. In that sense, there is a wide scope of acts that we may understand as love in the different relationships and no acts that we can rule out beforehand as inconsistent with love. The ways in which we can be said to love someone will also differ with the different kinds of relationships that we have to different people. The same person may be loved as a husband, a brother, a friend or a father, and what we will understand as love in the different cases will depend on the kind of relationship that he has to the other person. What questions it makes sense to ask about his love and what might be expected from him is determined by the kind of relationship he has to the person. In other words, if we only know that somebody loves somebody else, we do not know very much.

What kind of relationship we have towards another human being will also determine what kind of demands we will see in the relationship. As I have mentioned earlier, different relationships make different demands on us, and what might be seen as love in one relationship could even be seen as a lack of love or a failure of one’s love in another relationship. We can be expected to feel compassion and pity for a stranger, but no one would expect us to have the same kind of loyalty to him as we might be expected to show a friend, a lover or a family member. We would be blamed for not helping a person who has been in an
accident get to hospital and seeing to it that he gets proper care, but nobody would find us inconsiderate if after this we did not go to visit him or send him flowers, whereas this might be the case if the person in hospital were a friend of ours. This does not mean that we act unjustly to either the stranger or the friend but rather shows the place the notion of friendship has in our life and what it is to see someone as a friend. A friend is someone who ‘is there for you’, someone we can count on in times of trouble and so on, and being a friend means recognising the demands we see in that friendship and wanting to live up to them,
even if we may fail to live up to these demands and still be friends. In the same sense, being a parent, a child, a sister or brother, a husband or wife means recognising the demands seeing someone as our child, our parent, our brother or sister, our wife or husband makes on us and wanting to live up to these demands.

Talking about seeing someone as a friend or lover, a brother or sister, a parent or child, seems to mark an important distinction between the love we have in our close relationships to other people and the sense in which we may be said to love our neighbour. Loving our neighbour can be compared to seeing someone as a human being, but seeing someone as a human being is quite distinct from seeing someone as a friend, a lover or a family member. Seeing someone as a human being means seeing the preciousness of every individual and the claims that they may make on us in times of need, but seeing someone as a friend, a
lover, a parent or a child, a brother or a sister, is not only seeing the way in which every human being is precious. If we did no more than that, it would in many ways be a failure in our love. Seeing someone as our friend, our lover, our parent or child, our brother or sister means seeing the very personal ways in which another human being may matter to us, be precious to us and make claims on us in our daily life. The love we have in our close relationships is necessarily personal and dependent on the kind of relationship we have to another human being, whereas the love of one’s neighbour in an important sense seems to be
impersonal. The love of neighbour does not ask who the other human being is in relation to us, what we may think of them or how they may come to matter to us; it is directed at any human being that might be in need of our assistance. Our neighbour can be anyone, but the close relationships we have to other human beings are characterised by the fact that they are not just anyone, that they are irreplaceable.

There are of course also differences in how we come to see different demands in our other relationships. Just as we can command someone to love their neighbour, we can command someone to love their brother or sister, but it is not clear what it would be to command someone to be friends or lovers with somebody else. Whether we want it or not we are always in a relationship to the members of our family. There might, for example, be no love lost between two brothers or sisters, but they are still brothers or sisters. We may also be committed to members of our family even if the relations we have to them are not
particularly good. We may say that we love them because they are our children, our brothers or our sisters; we see a commitment to them that reaches beyond what they are, will become, or will do to us. This is also seen in the unconditional character that we often ascribe to a parent’s love. We do not see anything peculiar in the parents who love their children in spite of what the children are, what they do or whether or not they love their parents. Rather, as Gaita says, when this love is pure, "parents who love a child who has become a vicious and vile adult remind us that this person, whose deeds are evil and whose character appears irredeemably foul, is fully our fellow human being" (Gaita 1999, 24).

This unconditional character of love and the power of it to reveal to us the preciousness of every human being is of course not only characteristic of a parent’s love, but seems to be characteristic of every love when it is pure. No matter how terrible and vile someone might be, there are no acts that we could refer to as reasons for someone not to love another human being. In friendships and love relationships, however, there are situations where we expect someone to find it impossible to continue being friends or lovers with somebody else because of what the other person has done to them. We may of course love someone even if we at times fail to live up to the demands we see in the relationship, but if one of the persons in a love relationship or a friendship does not seem to love the other person, there is room to tell the other person not to stay in the relationship. Still, there does not seem to be room to tell a parent to stop loving their child, however much heartache their love causes them and however little the child seems to love them.

SEXUALITY
When it comes to the nature of different kinds of relationships, erotic love seems to distinguish itself from the other loves precisely in that it is sexual. Our sexuality and sexual desire naturally enter into this form of love, whereas they do not have a given place in the love we have in our close relationships with other people. We do not have sexual relations with members of our family and not only because it would be immoral, in the way it is immoral to have an adulterous affair. Rather it is part of our concept of a brother, a sister, a parent or a child that we do not engage in sexual relations with them. The objection to talking
about having sexual relations with members of our family as morally wrong is not, as Cora Diamond says, merely that it is too weak, it is in the wrong dimension. That we should not entertain sexual fantasies about, for example, a brother is one of the fundamental relations we have to a brother. It goes to determine the concept of a brother and the relationship we have to a brother, it sets the background for what questions we come to regard as moral in a narrower sense in the relationship (Diamond 1995, 323-325).

Something similar can also be said about a friend. A friendship is often characterised by the fact that it is not sexual. For example, we often define what kind of love we feel for someone based on the sexual attraction we feel or do not feel for the person, and if the question arises what kind of relationship we have to someone we can answer whether the relationship is sexual or not. The lines between sex and friendship are somewhat fuzzier than the ones between sex and members of our family though. Sex can come into a friendship in different forms and in ways that it does not come into our relationship with our family. Friendships can turn into erotic love and a friendship might also gain an extra dimension from the sexual attraction that exists between the friends. Two friends may also have sex with each other without for that sake ceasing to think of themselves as friends. Where sex enters into these friendships, however, it transforms the relationship. This is especially clear in the cases where friends become lovers, but even if the friends who have sex with each other stay friends, they are no longer ‘just friends’. Sex is not normally something that we have with our friends, particularly we do not have sex with all our friends, and by entering a sexual relationship with a friend we are altering our understanding of that friendship. Being friends and being lovers carry different expectations and obligations. They are two different things, even if we cannot say that one is better than the other.

Between lovers, however, sex plays an important part in their love for each other. We do not understand what it would be for two people to be lovers if their relationship were not sexual in some way. Even if a couple have decided not to have sex, we regard their choice as a form of abstinence, whereas we do not see a question in why two friends do not have sex. The question then arises as to how we are to view the relation between sex and erotic love. Is it something that is external to the love we feel for the other person or something that is an integral part of this love? Before saying more about this, I want to remark that I see no reason why we should be committed to regarding sex as either one with love or as completely separate from it. Sex, like love, can be many things, also within a love relationship, and just as there is love without sex, there is also sex that seems to be very far from anything we would think of as love. Nevertheless, sex seems to add another dimension to love and love another dimension to sex, and our interest should therefore be to see how sexual desire has come into our concept of love and how our conception of love in turn has transformed our understanding of our sexuality and the sexual attraction we feel for another human being.

In erotic love, our sexuality sets the ground for the love we may develop for another in a way that does not apply to the other forms of love. We ‘fall in love’ with lovers in a way we do not fall in love with friends or members of our family. In this love and relationship, there is a sexual attraction and arousal by another human being, a want to be close to them, get to know them, explore and savour them, that is not a part of the other loves. As I have mentioned, we might say of a mother or a father that they fall in love with their new born child and there is no need to deny the kind of sensuality that may lie in the relationship between parent and child. Neither should there be a problem in saying that we experience some kind of attraction to the people with whom we are friends. There is a variety of ways that attraction and sensuality may enter into our relationships with other people, and not all of them are or should be seen as sexual. Similarly, not all our need for bodily contact with other human beings is sexual. We can turn to another’s arms for comfort or find pleasure in the hugs and kisses of our family and friends without there being anything sexual in the picture. An act that was not intended as sexual in the first place may of course turn into something sexual, but what is sexual in an act is not determined by the act in itself but by the situation surrounding it. We only regard an act as sexual if there is something in the situation or the relationship that might lead up to something sexual. We might be shocked or surprised to find out that another person has seen something sexual in a situation that we have regarded as completely innocent, and this might lead us to re-evaluate what has happened with that person in other situations.

The attraction and desire for bodily contact that we have between lovers, however, are undoubtedly sexual. Just as it is true that all human contact is not sexual it seems to be as true that every contact with the object of our desire becomes sexual. Every word, gesture, touch and expression gets a meaning through our desire and gives rise to and adds to the attraction. Every feature of the beloved and what surrounds him or her is thus highlighted. There is over all a heightened sense of perception to falling in love. Everything in our world is seen in a new light through the eyes of our desire and love, and one of the challenges
for love is to sustain part of this perception when the relationship evolves.

Sex between lovers can also be an expression of the intimacy they share. Of course, sex does not always have to be intimate. In some situations it may even be very impersonal, in a way just because it in other ways is very personal. Exactly how sex will be related to the intimacy in a relationship will also vary with the situation. Sometimes sex can be seen as the complete union of two people, reflecting the intimacy at all levels of the relationship, but it can also reflect a more everyday closeness between the people in the relationship. At other times, sex might be a last desperate resort when all the other ways of being intimate in the
relationship seem to be closed or then it may be completely out of the question because of the lack of intimacy at other levels of the relationship. The variations are infinite, and one might want to say that it is the intimacy rather than the sex that is characteristic of erotic love. This may be true up to a point, but it seems to be more than metaphorical to say that the unity of lovers is a unity of body as well as soul.

The sexual character of erotic love also introduces elements and demands that we do not think of as necessary parts of the other loves. We do not usually think of jealousy as something that needs to be a part of the love we have between friends or parents and their children, and even if there can be jealousy in these relationships, we often think of a love that does not have this element of jealousy as a particularly pure one. Between lovers, however, jealousy is something that we come to expect in certain situations. There are of course possessive forms of jealousy that do not have anything to do with love, but in some situations the lack of jealousy may not mean that the love is especially pure, but rather that the love is not there any more. The place we give to jealousy in erotic love is tied up with the demand for exclusivity that we see in these relationships. In the love between friends and parents and children, we do not see a problem in feeling this way about more people than one. A parent can love all of his or her children, and love them in different ways, and in a similar way we can love several people as friends. We would not understand what it would be to ask for exclusivity in these relationships, but between lovers, our problem is rather to understand what it would be not to recognise this demand in the relationship.

The demand for exclusivity and fidelity in a love relationship is, as I said, often related to the place jealousy may have in this love. When we talk about fidelity it often sounds as if it is to avoid jealousy that we should be faithful to our lover. It almost sounds as if there were no problem in infidelity if the other one did not feel jealous. The question, however, is not only whether we could avoid being jealous or could overcome these feelings in some way. As Gaita suggests, we can also see "fidelity as an ideal in the light of whose requirements sexuality (and what we think to be natural to it) is transformed" (Gaita 1991, 84). Recognising the place fidelity has in a love relationship is also recognising the jealousy and hurt one’s unfaithfulness could cause the other, but we can only understand this jealousy and hurt in relation to the demand for fidelity that we recognise in the relationship. It might also be good to discuss the character of this demand and other demands that may come into a relationship.

Often when we talk about fidelity it sounds as if it were the other person in the relationship who makes this demand of fidelity on us, but it seems unclear what it would be to say that they are the ones who give rise to this demand. Saying, ‘I demand that you are faithful’, sounds empty, just as it sounds empty to demand that someone should trust us or love us. Fidelity, trust and love must all be given to us, there is nothing that we can say that commits another human being to be faithful to us, to trust us or to love us, if they do not recognise this as a demand in some other way. This does not mean that the other person’s wants and
feelings are irrelevant to what we come to see as a demand in a relationship. What the other wishes from us will be important for us if we love them, but not because they have the right to demand certain things from us, but because what is important to the ones we love is also important to us and because what they want is also what we want. If we love someone and they love us we have a responsibility for them and the relationship, and it will be important for us to live up to the demands that the relationship makes on us because we love. It also seems as if we could not free the other person in the relationship from the
demands that the relationship makes on us. We may, for example, renounce our right to be jealous, but even if we tell the other person that we will not feel betrayed if he is unfaithful to us, this does not mean that he cannot feel as if he has betrayed us if he is. The demand for exclusivity in erotic love and the other demands in this and the other loves, seem to be inherent to the character of the relationship, in the sense that, if we recognise what kind of relationship it is, we also recognise what kind of demands it makes on us.

'I LOVE YOU'
When I discussed love and feelings, I said that when we say ‘I love you’, we are not reporting the occurrence of a feeling. The question then arises as to what it is we are doing when we utter these three words. In conclusion, I will say something about this question, drawing on things that ave come up in the previous discussions.

What it is to love someone will, as I said, depend on the kind of relationship that obtains between two people, and what the words come to mean will of course also depend on the kind of relationship they are uttered in. It also seems as if the words had a different importance in differen kinds of relationship. A friendship may be very close and not lacking in anything, without the words ever being spoken. Normally we do not even think of them as a vital part of a friendship. We show our friendship by being friends, not by words, although we may of course also express our gratitude for having people as our friends and the importance they have in our life in different ways. Between parents and children, however, the words find a natural place in some situations and between lovers we would find it hard to even think of them as lovers if the words were not even uttered once. The question whether someone loves us or still loves us can be the source of great concern, and the questether we love or still love someone as great. We may ponder, doubt or question our love or the strength of our love for someone, as well as worry about the other’s love or the strength of their love.

What we come to mean by ‘I love you’ does not only depend on the relationship the words are uttered in, but also on the situation. We can declare, profess or confess our love for someone, and what meaning we will see in the words will depend on whether they are uttered for the first time in a relationship, whispered in our ear in a close moment or written as the last greeting in a letter, whether they are meant as an encouragement or as an attempt to persuade someone not to leave a relationship. In any case, what we are doing when we are saying ‘I love you’ is very seldom identifying something as a particular emotion. We may of course wonder whether what we are feeling is love and come to the conclusion that it is, buer we loved or still love may reappear, and although we at one point thought that something was love, we might later come to say that it was not really love.

What we are doing when we are saying ‘I love you’ is not simply giving voice to a feeling, we are expressing our attitude towards the situation and the relationship we have to another human being. In some situations a spontaneous ‘I love you’ may be an expression of our love, just as saying ‘I am afraid, angry or happy’ can be an expression of our fear, anger or joy—although we may of course also choose to hide our emotions or pretend that we do not feel what feel—but even if love is similar to the other emotions in this sense, it differs from them in another more important sense. If the object of our other emotions disappears or changes, if a situation that was dangerous, for instance, is not dangerous anymore, we expect our emotion to disappear or change with it, but love is not dependent on the object of our love being present or not changing over time. We do not, for example, find it very peculiar if a love survives the death of one of the persons in a relationship. Rather we would find it peculiar if the one who survives would no longer care for the one they loved.

In this we are again reminded of the importance our relationship to another human being has in love. Not loving someone any more is not, as we have seen, like not having a pain or not being afraid, angry or happy any more. What comes to an end in love is not only a feeling but a relationship, a life with another human being. A friendship may of course slowly come to an end without the friends taking an active part in either ending or sustaining the relationship or having any hard feelings about what has happened to it, and our relations to members of our family, in turn, seem to be characterised by the fact that, whether or not our relationships are loving, we are always in a relationship to our family. In erotic love, however, the persons have supposedly entered into the relationship out of love, and if this love ends, there does not seem to be any reason for staying in the relationship. Still, breaking up from any relationship is never easy, in most cases it is tragic, and even if we think that it is for the best, there will be questions as to what went wrong or if we could have done something differently. We might feel guilty for not loving the other any more, especially if they still love us, or feel as if we have failed, not only them but ourselves and the love we once had for them.

In saying that we love someone we are in that sense not only describing our feelings at the moment, we are also committing ourselves to continue feeling this way in the future. We are expressing our commitment to another human being and our responsibility for the one we love, their love for us and the relationship we have with them. We are recognising certain demands in the relationship, one of which is to go on loving, and declaring our desire to live up to these demands. What it is to say ‘I love you’ can therefore not be separated from what it is to be committed to and involved in another human being, from what it is to recognise a responsibility to sustain the relationship and adopt a certain attitude towards it and the other person. But we cannot separate it from all the ways in which another human being can come to matter to us either, from the joy and meaning they bring into our lives, from the preciousness we see in them and our will to be with and do what is good for them, which in some senses may make it sound strange to talk about seeing certain things in our relation to them as demands. We should also not forget that we may fail to live up to the demands our relationships make on us without ceasing to love. We may wonder whether we could love better and fail in our love in different ways, but still love.

All these things contribute to making a declaration of love something that may be very difficult, but more significantly, the vulnerability that comes with love seems to play a part in the difficulty some people have in admitting that they love. Loving someone means seeing everything that is precious about another human being, but love also reveals to us what it is for something to be precious. Love shows us what is most precious to us, but in its mature form it also carries the painful realisation that what we want the most is not in our control, that we may not get what we want or that what we have might be taken from us. As Robert C Solomon remarks, there is only one acceptable answer to ‘I love you’, that is, ‘I love you too’ (Solomon 1992, 30), but in declaring our love for someone there is no way to ensure that this is what the answer is going to be. However much we want to, we cannot make somebody love us. Love can only be given to us freely, and the only thing we have to give in return for this gift, which we want more than anything, is of ourselves, in erotic love the ultimate gift is ourselves, body and soul. In declaring our love, we are thus leaving ourselves in somebody else’s hands. We are admitting that our happiness is not in our hands but in theirs, and we can only hope that they will accept our gift and give themselves to us in return.

A declaration of love may not only carry complications for the one who makes it but also for the one who receives it. If we love someone and they reciprocate our love we have a responsibility towards them, but even if we do not reciprocate their love we have a responsibility towards the ones who love us. There is only one correct answer to ‘I love you’, and if we cannot give someone this answer we have a responsibility to try to decline the gift we are offered in the best possible way. A declaration of love is never uncomplicated; it carries with it a responsibility both for the one who makes it and for the one who receives it, and whether or not it is reciprocated, it irrevocably changes the nature of the relationship between the two people.

Looking at love is in many ways looking at aspects that seem to be paradoxical and meaningful at the same time. Moreover, it seems important not to try to rid ourselves of these paradoxes. Rather than being signs of conflict and contradiction they seem to be matters of contemplation; they contribute to and enrich our understanding of love, making it an object of wonder and not of rational explanation. Love involves having certain feelings, but having these feelings may not be love; love is also recognising certain demands in the relationships we have with other people. Still, living up to these demands may not be love and we may
also love even if we fail to live up to them. In a similar sense, wanting to love somebody is not to love, but love is something that we need to do willingly. If we want or choose to love, it is not love, but when we love it is something that we both want and choose; we may allow or deny ourselves to feel love or make room for love in our lives. Love is also something that we cannot have a reason for, but when we love it is something for which we seem to have every reason; the one we love is our reason. Although love means seeing certain demands, love may not be demanded, and even if love makes us realise what we want the
most, comprehending love means realising that it is not dependent on what we want. Love is something that can only be given to us freely, but when it is, it is the greatest gift we ever receive; it is a grace.

SWEDISH ABSTRACT: "DEN HÄR KONSTIGA SAKEN SOM KALLAS KÄRLEK"

Alla människor ställs väl någon gång inför frågan ‘Vad är kärlek?’. Vi kan fråga oss om något är kärlek eller inte, undra över vad det innebär att älska o.s.v. Hur de här frågorna kommer in i våra liv och vilka svar vi ger på dem kommer ofta att vara personligt, men det finns också en mer allmän fråga om vad det är vi menar med att kalla något kärlek. Vi kan fråga vad som begripligt kan sägas om vår kärlek, hur vi förhåller oss till den och till objektet för vår kärlek, i vilka situationer vi förstår något som kärlek och i vilka det är svårt att förstå vad någon menar med att tala om kärlek. Det är i hög grad de här frågorna som jag behandlar i min avhandling.

KÄNSLA
En av de främsta frågorna som jag berör är hur vi ska förstå kärlek i förhållande till andra känslor. Vi talar ofta om kärlek som en känsla, och även om det här inte behöver vara ett problem, kan det vara viktigt att se i vilka sammanhang det är förståeligt att tala om kärlek som en känsla och i vilka avseenden kärleken skiljer sig från de övriga känslorna. Speciellt verkar det skapa problem att tänka på kärlek som en känsla i en fysisk bemärkelse, som en kroppslig förnimmelse. Vissa förnimmelser spelar visserligen en roll i vad vi ser som kärlek och speciellt förälskelse, vi har ‘fjärilar i magen’, ‘vårt hjärta tar ett skutt’ o.s.v., men
att älska någon är inte att ständigt ha dessa känslor. Att säga ‘Jag älskar dig’ är inte att rapportera hur vi känner oss för ögonblicket, såsom vi kan känna efter hur det känns om någon frågar oss om vi har ont. Inte heller verkar frågan ‘När började du älska mig?’ ha samma mening som frågan ‘När började du ha ont?’. Vi förväntar oss att det ska finnas en exakt början och ett exakt slut på en smärta, men det är snarare karakteristiskt för kärlek att det inte finns en exakt början eller ett exakt slut på den, det är ingen brist att inte veta exakt när vi började älska. Även om det i vissa situationer också är möjligt att säga exakt när vi började eller slutade älska skiljer sig också det här från vårt tal om smärta. Vad som får sin början och sitt slut i kärlek är inte bara en känsla eller en förnimmelse, det är också ett sätt att se och förhålla sig till dem man älskar och till förhållandet till dem. Att börja och sluta älska är något som visar sig i den älskandes liv. Om inget förändras i en persons liv då han säger att han älskar är det svårt att se vad det är som är kärlek.

Problemet med att se kärlek som en förnimmelse eller en kroppslig känsla gäller inte bara kärlek utan också andra känslor. Att vara rädd för hundar betyder t.ex. inte att man är rädd hela tiden utan snarare att man reagerar med rädsla då man ser eller tänker på en hund. Det här fick Gilbert Ryle att tala om känslor, inte bara som vissa kroppsliga förnimmelser, utan även som en disposition att känna, handla och bete sig på ett visst sätt (Ryle 1955, 83). Han gör en indelning av känslor i benägenheter, sinnesrörelser och sinnesstämningar, och till en viss grad kan den här indelningen hjälpa oss att förstå kärlek som en känsla. Vi
kan se kärleken som en benägenhet att handla på vissa sätt, vi handlar av kärlek, som en sinnesrörelse och i vissa situationer, främst i anknytning till förälskelse, som en sinnesstämning. Att säga att kärlek är en disposition att känna, handla och bete sig på vissa sätt verkar ändå fel. Dessa känslor och handlingar kan ses som uttryck eller förutsättningar för vår kärlek, men kärleken kan inte reduceras till vissa sätt att känna eller handla. Det finns en mångfald känslor och handlingar som vi kan komma att se som uttryck för kärlek. Det är inte förutbestämt vad som kan vara ett uttryck för kärlek, samma känsla, handling och ord som i
en situation kan uttrycka kärlek kan i en annan uttrycka något annat. Vi kan även brista i att känna och handla på sätt som vi tycker överensstämmer med kärlek men ändå älska.

Det stora problemet med att tänka på kärlek som en känsla är att man lätt ser kärleken som något som vi inte är ansvariga för, den är något som kommer över oss och lätt försvinner igen. Vår kärlek är dock inte något som är oberoende av oss. Vi kan inte vilja eller välja att börja älska, men vi kan välja om vi vill tillåta eller förbjuda oss att känna kärlek, om vi vill göra rum för den i våra liv. Vi kan också känna oss skyldiga för att inte älska någon vi tycker att vi borde älska, inte älska någon längre eller älska någon vi inte borde älska, vi kan undra om vi älskar tillräckligt eller om vi kunde älska bättre. Att älska är att känna på
vissa sätt, att t.ex. känna glädje, ömhet och lust inför en annan människa, men att älska är också att se vissa krav i vårt förhållande till en annan människa och vilja leva upp till de här kraven.

Att älska är snarare en attityd, ett förhållningssätt, än en känsla, det är en beredskap att känna och handla på vissa sätt snarare än dessa känslor och handlingar i sig, men ännu mer är det en strävan att försöka leva upp till de krav vi ser i våra förhållanden till andra människor, att anta vissa attityder till dem och vårt förhållande. Det är en strävan som följer med det värde vi ser i andra människor och vårt förhållande till dem, med den glädje och mening de för in i våra liv och vår önskan att göra vad som är gott för dem, ett hopp om att kunna skänka dem något av den glädje de skänkt oss. Ibland brister vi förstås i vår strävan,
men att vi brister i vår kärlek behöver inte betyda att det inte är kärlek. "Kärleken", som Wittgenstein säger, "prövas, inte smärta." (Wittgenstein 1995, §504). Om kärleken var en känsla skulle den vara ett svagt försvar mot de prövningar ett förhållande ställs inför, men då kärleken övervinner dessa prövningar verkar den bara bli starkare.

OBJEKT
I den mån vi kan tala om kärleken som en känsla är den en känsla som alltid har ett objekt. Vi kan känna kärlek till vår nästa, vår familj, våra vänner och våra makar, men det är alltid någon eller, ibland, något som vi älskar. Det här utgör utgångspunkten för Gabriele Taylors diskussion om kärlek, där hon främst är intresserad av att se om vi någonsin kan tala om kärlek som berättigad eller oberättigad, rationell eller irrationell, såsom vi kan tala om andra känslor oberättigade och irrationella i vissa situationer. Taylor ger en beskrivning av känslor som bygger på att det i vår känsla ingår en övertygelse om objektet som t.ex. farligt, och att vi, eftersom vi kan bedöma om denna övertygelse är riktig, om objektet är farligt eller inte, också kan avgöra om känslan är på sin plats. I kärlek är det visserligen svårare att hitta någon övertygelse som skulle ha samma plats som ‘Det är farligt’ i rädsla, men Taylor menar ändå att man i vissa fall kan tala om kärlek som oberättigad eller irrationell, eftersom vi kan sägas älska någon på grund av vissa egenskaper och förvänta oss vissa saker av dem som vi kanske gör fel i att tro att de kan ge oss. (Taylor 1979, 165-175)

Taylors beskrivning av känslor och kärlek är problematisk i flera avseenden. En sak som Taylor helt verkar förbise är att vi, då vi talar om känslor, inte bara talar om huruvida de är berättigade och rationella eller inte, utan även om huruvida vi kan tillskriva någon en viss känsla över huvud taget. I vissa situationer kan vi förstå något som en viss känsla även om vi inte tycker att personen har skäl för den, i vilket fall vi kan tala om känslan som oberättigad eller irrationell, men det finns också situationer där vi inte begriper vad det är för någon att säga sig ha en viss känsla. I det här fallet liknar kärleken de övriga känslorna, vi kan
t.ex. inte begripa vad det är att säga sig älska om man samtidigt är helt likgiltig inför vad som händer den älskade eller om objektet för ens kärlek är en tandborste. Däremot verkar det inte finnas skäl för att älska på samma sätt som vi kan ha skäl att ha andra känslor. Det finns värdiga och ovärdiga objekt för vår rädsla, men då vi talar om kärlek till andra människor verkar det inte i samma mening finnas några ovärdiga objekt. Att se någon som en människa är att se henne som ett möjligt objekt för någons kärlek.

Taylor verkar även förbise det interna samband som finns mellan de skäl vi ger för en känsla och vår känsla. Att beskriva en situation som farlig, eller skräckinjagande, är visserligen att ge skäl för att vara rädd, men vår beskrivning av situationen som farlig kan inte skiljas från eller sägas utgöra grunden för vår känsla. Vår beskrivning av situationen är i sig ett uttryck för vår känsla. Likaså kan de ‘skäl’ vi ger för att älska någon, om någon frågor oss varför vi älskar en person, ses som uttryck för vår kärlek. De är inte så mycket förklaringar till varför vi älskar, utan snarare försök att beskriva vad vi känner. T.ex. vore det inte
kärlek om vi kunde tänka oss att byta ut den vi älskar mot någon annan som hade samma egenskaper som vår älskade eller om vi slutade älska någon för att hans eller hennes egenskaper förändrats. Vi behöver inte heller vara ense med andra i vår beskrivning av den vi älskar. Snarare verkar det vara karakteristiskt för kärlek att den älskande ser saker i den älskade som inte alla ser.

Att säga att vi älskar någon på grund av vissa egenskaper verkar också göra kärleken villkorlig, som om vi skulle ha skäl att sluta älska någon om de upphörde att ha vissa egenskaper eller inte gav oss det som vi ville ha. Även om det är lätt att göra sig en bild av hur kärleken och den vi älskar ska se ut, finns det ingen plats för kärlek om vi bara försöker passa in någon i vår bild. Kärlek handlar, som Frances Berenson säger, inte heller om att ta utan om att ge (Berenson 1991, 78). Vårt intresse i kärleken är inte vi själva utan den andra. Det som är bra för den vi älskar är också bra för oss, vad de vill är vad vi vill. Vi vill förstås
också att de älskar oss, men detta krav på ömsesidighet kan bara ses i två människor som är engagerade och involverade i varandra och vill varandra väl.

FÖRHÅLLANDE
I kärlek är det viktigt att se att objektet för vår kärlek inte bara är vissa egenskaper i en situation eller en person utan en annan människa. Vi kan inte förstå vad det är att älska utan att förstå vad det är att vara engagerad i och ha ett förhållande till en annan människa. Den relation vi har till objektet för vår kärlek verkar också ofta ha en större betydelse för vad vi kommer att förstå som kärlek än objektet, personen. Vad som är ett uttryck för kärlek i ett förhållande kommer att bero på det specifika förhållandet, och vilket slag av förhållande vi har till en annan människa kommer också att vara avgörande för vad vi kommer att se som kärlek.

Vilket slag av kärlek vi talar om, om det är kärlek till vår nästa, vår familj, våra vänner eller vår make eller maka, inverkar också på vilka krav vi ser i förhållandet. Samma handling som i ett förhållande är ett tecken på kärlek kan i ett annat vara en brist i vår kärlek. Vilket slags förhållande vi har till en annan spelar också en roll i hur olika krav kommer in i förhållandet. Vi kan t.ex. känna förpliktelser mot medlemmar av vår familj för att de är vår familj, och också förstå om en förälder älskar sitt barn även om deras förhållande är dåligt eller om barnet inte älskar föräldern.

Erotisk kärlek karakteriseras även av dess sexuella karaktär medan våra förhållanden till vänner och familj snarast betecknas av att de inte är sexuella. Det finns en fysisk attraktion i erotisk kärlek, en lust och önskan att vara nära den andra som inte finns i de andra formerna av kärlek. Sex kan också vara ett uttryck för den närhet och intimitet som finns hos det älskande paret. Att förhållandet är sexuellt verkar även föra in aspekter och krav som inte finns i andra förhållanden. Vi ser t.ex. ett krav på exklusivitet i erotisk kärlek som inte är lika uppenbart i våra andra förhållanden. Detta krav på trohet förknippas ofta med svartsjuka, men den svartsjuka vi kan känna i ett kärleksförhållande är inte oberoende av kravet på trohet. Snarare är det i ljuset av detta krav som vi kan förstå den svartsjuka och smärta otrohet kan leda till.

Det är också viktigt att se på vilket sätt krav som trohet kommer in i våra olika förhållanden. Ofta talar man om kravet på trohet som om det är något som den andra kräver av oss, men trohet, liksom tillit och kärlek, är inte något vi kan kräva utan en gåva, och inte beroende av vad vi vill. Vad den andre vill och önskar av oss kommer att vara viktigt för oss om vi älskar, men inte för att han eller hon har rätt att kräva det, utan för att vi vill vad han eller hon vill. Vi vill leva upp till kraven, vilket ibland kan göra det konstigt att ens tala om krav i kärleken. Ibland är dessa ‘krav’ vår högsta önskan. Inte heller verkar vi kunna lösgöra oss från de krav vi ser i en relation. Kraven verkar ligga i förhållandets natur så att vi, om vi ser vilket slags förhållande det är, också ser vilka krav som finns i det.

Att säga att vi älskar någon är ett löfte att fortsätta älska, att ge utrymme för kärleken och försöka leva upp till de krav vi ser i förhållandet, även om vi kan misslyckas i det här och ändå älska. Kärleken medför ett ansvar för den som älskar oss och för vårt förhållande till honom eller henne, men den medför också en stor sårbarhet. Kärleken visar oss vad som är mest värdefullt för oss, vad vi mest av allt vill, men i sin mogna form bär den också med sig insikten om att det vi vill inte står i vår makt.Kärleken, att älskas och att älska, är alltid en gåva, men när den blir oss given är den den största gåvan vi kan få. Den är en nåd.