Falling in Love

The phenomenon of falling in love is undoubtedly highly valued but at the same time is often viewed with skepticism. The “face-to-face” nature of romantic love, accompanied inevitably by a measure of obsession, seems to conflict with the more stable friendship-love, imagined as “side-by-side” and focused – as in Aristotle – on the cultivation of virtues of character. In this paper I argue that a more positive take on romantic love is made possible by a certain kind of metaphysics of the person. In particular, Feuerbach’s notion of the “inner life” constitutive of personhood, can be expanded beyond Feuerbach’s materialism to ground the possibility of fully transferring one’s self-love to the other person. Key to this interpretation is Rahner’s idea of the human being’s openness to an infinite horizon, corresponding to the infinite longing of romantic love, and not at all doomed to the frustration that Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, would have it. I draw on Aquinas’ distinction between love that is concupiscence and love that is friendship, to make this point.