When you think of the word ‘love’ what comes to mind first is the idea of romantic love as expressed in art, literature, music and everyday life. For the majority of people, there are two types of love other than that of the romantic variety – that for friends and that for family. The goal of this essay is to show that our understating of love when it comes to interpersonal relationships beside friendship and family is made worse by entangling it with romantic concepts.
My main issue with those concepts is that they are idealistic in nature and so much so that within their framework, reality is sidelined when exploring the inner workings of the self or one’s partner or preferred partner. What serves the function of understanding the self and the other instead of an honest assessment, are idealistic notions. A very powerful one among them is that people are defined by how much they appear to fall into certain categories like ‘altruistic’, ‘caring’, ‘nurturing’, ‘positive’, ‘loving’, ‘pe ...