Love's a State of Mind

Love is one of the things that make life worth living. As such, it is of particular interest to me. I’ve written about the account of love we find in Plato before. But while I think there is much wisdom to be found in those ideas, sometimes I wonder whether there are other, perhaps simpler and more common, ways to think about and make sense of love. Don’t get me wrong, I love sophisticated, methodological philosophy. Yet, I often find myself playing around with simpler and more prima facie common-sensical explanations for the kinds of things that demand explanation and understanding. With that being said, I would like to share a few simple and crude thoughts I have recently been having about love.

We know from experimental psychology that framing has a huge influence on our decisions. The state of mind you’re in has a tremendous influence on your thoughts, reaction, and decision in response to new cognitive inputs. For example, when people were shown a picture of Rodin’s The Thinker (or in French, Le Penseur) before having to make a given choice, they were generally more careful and deliberate in making their choice than those who didn’t see the statue beforehand. These kinds of insights come from the work of psychologist Robert Cialdini, who has written extensively and persuasively on the topic—I highly recommend his book on what he calls pre-suasion. It’s quite clear, then, that our psychological state at the time of any given mental process has a tremendous influence on our subsequent cognition.

With this in mind, I find the idea of love being a state of mind worth exploring. Perhaps there is nothing more to falling in love than being in a certain psychological state—independent of the particular person or thing one falls in love with—at any given time. In Plato’s Symposium, it becomes quite clear that love is not an emotion, but a certain kind of relational state. With respect to the idea of framing, as discussed above, this would suggest that the lover’s psychological state plays a far greater role in her experience of love than we commonly think. And perhaps it even plays a greater role than the loved one or object of love does. This would seem to have deep consequences for how we think about loving. Rather than being dependent on one particular beloved to elicit our love, loving would turn out to be something primarily projected by the lover onto the beloved, without any necessary reliance on the beloved. In this way, a picture of love as a mere state of mind would seem to liberate us, as lovers, from dependence on some particular continually changing person or some external object or project. I think that while this picture of love might initially strike some as less romantic than the “two lovers seeking their other halves” story, we have reason to welcome this kind of story as it would seem to make for a more fulfilling love-life. A loving relation between two lovers on this account would be something at least partially controlled by each lover’s ability to manage their own psychological state and, moreover, would give a picture of a lover who is not at the mercy of another person who will invariably change over time in ways beyond the lover’s ability to predict. This strikes me as an attractive and liberating picture of love.