Lost without you: the Value of Falling out of Love
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Lost without you: the Value of Falling out of Love Pilar Lopez-Cantero 2 & Alfred Archer 1 Accepted: 5 February 2020/ # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract
In this paper we develop a view about the disorientation attached to the process of falling out of love and explain its prudential and moral value. We start with a brief background on theories of love and situate our argument within the views concerned with the lovers’ identities. Namely, love changes who we are. In the context of our paper, we explain this common tenet in the philosophy of love as a change in the lovers’ self-concepts through a process of mutual shaping. This, however, is potentially dangerous for people involved in what we call ‘subsuming relationships’, who give up too much autonomy in the process of mutual shaping. We then move on to show how, through the relation between love and the self-concept, we can explain why the process of falling out of love with someone is so disorientating: when one is falling out of love, one loses an important point of reference for self-understanding. While this disorientating process is typically taken to be harmful to the person experiencing it, we will explain how it can also have moral and prudential value. By re-evaluating who we were in the relationship and who we are now, we can escape from oppressive practices in subsuming relationships. We finish by arguing that this gives us reason to be wary of seeking to re-orient ourselves -or others- too quickly after falling out of love. Keywords Philosophy of love . Disorientation . Ethics of love . Ethics . Philosophy of emotion . Feminist philosophy
* Alfred Archer [email protected] Pilar Lopez-Cantero [email protected]
1
Department of Philosophy, Tilburg School of Humanities, Warandelaan 2, 5037 AB Tilburg, The Netherlands
2
Department of Philosophy, Delft University of Technology, Jaffalaan 5, Delft 2628 BX, The Netherlands
A. Archer, P. Lopez-Cantero
1 Introduction Falling out of love is a delicate and important business, and as necessary to the attainment of wisdom as the reverse experience. Stella Bowen (2002: 82). After being in a romantic partnership with someone, falling out of love with someone can be a painful experience. Sometimes, we fall out of love with a person that still loves us. The thought of hurting them may cause us emotional pain and feelings of guilt. At other times, we realise that we need to fall out of love with someone we still care about. This may also be a painful process filled with denial, anger and self-pity. Besides causing emotional pain, falling out of love with someone one is -or was - in a loving relationship with can be potentially disruptive for self-understanding. As a situating example, think about the following statement, made after losing her two lovers by Rebecca Bloom, of the TV show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: “I don’t know who I am without them. I know that’s pathetic. I know it’s pathetic, but it’s true. Who am I supposed to be now?” Rebecca’s statement reflects a feature of the end of relationships which h
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