Love Transforms Us Little by Little

2024-05-05 · philosophy

Love has the power to transform us little by little. In fact, this incremental change is one of the fascinating features of love when put in the context of transformative experience. Smiling at a new acquaintance is not transformative, nor is grabbing coffee with them. Once you’ve had coffee, eating dinner together is not transformative either. On and on each step goes. Yet, by the end of things, when you look back at a relationship that’s decades long, you realize that you could not have imagined what it would be like to bond with another person in such an intimate way. The way you approached life, the preferences and life projects you developed, and the way love’s rose-tinted glasses filtered the way you see the world have radically changed you.

On the flip side, ending this sort of relationship is also wildly transformative, especially if you’ve formed a sense of identity that revolves around your beloved. Furthermore, because it’s not clear that reason ever requires that you love someone in a romantic way, it’s difficult to explain how choosing love or rejecting it could be done rationally. Thus, opening oneself up to love or boldly ending it invites transformation and raises questions about whether doing so could ever be defended rationally.