Editor’s Note: This dialogue brings together two enthusiastic discussants of this blog, Orcanète and ImageNoise, and the blogger Stephen Leng to discuss the topic of uniqueness in romantic love. The main text was completed independently and sequentially by the three participants, while the comment section is expected to host further dialogue among the three; meanwhile, readers are also welcome to speak. You can also read discussions in Chinese here.
Orcanète: The “Uniqueness” of Romantic Love: A Logical Illusion
We are accustomed to bestowing a sublime status upon “romantic love,” believing it to be unique among all human emotional relationships, categorically different from friendship, kinship, or the superior-subordinate relationships in the workplace. However, this so-called “uniqueness” is often merely a generalized intuition, a blurred imagination, or one could even say, a cognitive illusion.
The Basic Structure of Love: A Combination of People and Relationships
From the perspective of common sense, love involves at least two independent individuals: the subject of love and the object being loved. Although we usually hope to love only one person at a time, it is undeniable that a person may fall in love with different objects successively throughout their life.
When we attempt to distinguish love from other social relationships (such as friendship or professional relationships), we are actually labeling this relationship as “particular”, which does not equate to the conclusion of its logical particularity.
What Exactly Does “Unique” Refer To?
When we declare a certain love to be “unique,” we might be referring to four different levels. Let us examine them one by one:
First, the uniqueness of the individuals. Everyone in this world is a unique atom. You as the subject and he as the object are, in themselves, irreplaceable individuals. However, this belongs to the biological or physical attributes of the individuals and has nothing to do with whether what arises between you is “love” or “friendship.”
Second, the traits of the beloved. Some believe that the uniqueness of love stems from that set of irreplaceable traits possessed by the other party. Philosophically, we can understand this as a specific permutation and combination of individual characteristics (i.e., certain traits and the specific relational structure between these traits). What we fall in love with is often not all of the other’s traits, but a portion of those traits and the unique structure they form. However, this “uniqueness” applies equally to friendship—your soulmate likewise possesses a unique combination of traits, yet we do not call friendship “romantic love” because of this.
Third, the relationship of “love” itself. If the connection of “love” itself were unique, it would mean that only one instance of love could exist in the world throughout history. Obviously, love, as a category of emotion, is a universal phenomenon that can occur between different people; it does not possess an exclusive uniqueness in itself.
Fourth, the holistic state when two individuals engage in a “love” relationship. This is the most deceptive view: believing that because a “unique you” encountered a “unique him,” the result woven by the two must be unique.
The Dissolution of Particularity
If we follow this last line of reasongning, we will end up with an awkward fact: all relationhips are unique—the friendship between you and a certain friend is unique, the cooperative relationship between you and a certain boss is unique, and even your acquaintance with a security guard downstairs is unique—because each of the individuals participating in the relationship is always unique.
Conclusion
The conclusion is then self-evident: if almost all relationships in the world logically possess this “individuality-based uniqueness,” then love, relative to friendship, kinship, or workplace relationships, does not actually have any essential special status.
When people talk about the “uniqueness” of love, they often do not know what specifically they are referring to. Once we attempt to precisely define this uniqueness, the particularity of love as a “sacred illusion” subsequently collapses.
ImageNoise
Whether love is a unique kind of relationship, we must first clarify why we are attempting to answer it. Simply put, it can be broken down into two levels of reasons: Spiritually, we want to experience an unparalleled sense of being cherished and an internal need for self-positioning; from a practical perspective, this facilitates the formation of a self-evident constraint between the two parties—that they are exclusive to each other during the establishment of the relationship. If viewed from the standpoint of “whatever exists is rational,” it seems unnecessary to question or even shatter these two actually existing needs regarding human nature and social conventions. However, considering that young people today advocate for being single, question love, and alleviate loneliness in “fast-food” relationships (if the recurring “monthly” features of Sanlian Lifeweek are truly not entirely alarmist), perhaps a defense can be made for it.
First, I need to declare that I do not believe love has some kind of “particularity” in the Romanticist sense—that is, as Orcanète believes, one must prove that the uniqueness of the individual, the relationship, or the “merged” state of the two achieves the particularity of love as a concept. In fact, my central view is that nothing in this is special, but I personally will actively choose to treat it with solemnity—that is, adopting the same attitude as I do toward my own life—and believe there is no middle ground to speak of here.
People are far less special than they imagine themselves to be. Oscar Wilde said long ago, “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” In Adam Curtis’s documentary The Century of the Self, people’s almost bloated desire to express their self-uniqueness allowed psychologists, governments, and corporations to collude and mass-produce commodities that highlight “individuality” (is the very question discussed in this article not generated because of this?).
Then, for us who are so ordinary, what kind of ideal are we attempting to realize in another person? And why should we always maintain such passion to explore this relationship?
Personally, I believe that things that cannot be essentially proven can rely on us doing our best to continuously construct them through action itself, and meaning becomes fulfilled and vivid during the process of construction.
So, what kind of action is this? First, we can use exclusivity to guarantee its particularity; this is the greatest affirmation of the lover as an individual. Perhaps it can be said: It is not that specialness makes the relationship exclusive; it’s that the exclusivity of the relationship justifies making it special.
Secondly, the specialness of love lies precisely in breaking the solidified self that considers itself special. This requires us to actively cede a part of the self in hopes of reaching a certain state of soul-splitting, and this is not always unpleasant. “It’s a fantasy of surrendered agency. Oddly, the thing we deplore in others, submission, is what we most want for ourselves.” (Graham Moore). The final point is: how do we resist jealousy and other forms of insecurity in this specially treated relationship (since we rarely encounter them in kinship or friendship)? To put it cruelly, one cannot completely possess the other. This is why Orcanète uses subsets to represent the traits of the person we love. I think confidence and reason will quickly rescue us when jealousy strikes. Moreover, the lover always appears lighter and freer than the beloved, because the latter is always worrying about when this love will be lost. This further strengthens our conviction to actively construct love.
Stephen Leng
Almost everyone who falls in love finds it difficult to reject statements such as these: I feel that the relationship I am currently experiencing is unique, my own love for the other is unique, and the other’s love for me is also unique.
In fact, those actions that merely make oneself appear special are also quite symbolic actions in dating and intimacy. For example, during a date, the mere tiny gesture of a man opening the car door for a woman and letting her get in first will make the woman feel she is being specially treated, and this feeling can further extend into the sense that she possesses uniqueness. However, these women might not necessarily think that this man has opened the car door like this for many women before.
Different from ImageNoise, I believe that uniqueness is indeed the core feeling in romantic love. And the most perfect feeling of romantic love seems to be this five-layered uniqueness: I am unique (Proposition A), this person before me is unique (Proposition B), my romantic love for this person is unique (Proposition C), this person’s romantic love for me is unique (Proposition D), and our relationship is unique (Proposition E). These five sub-propositions together constitute our core proposition: A romantic love possesses uniqueness. This is also the refined version of the fourth point mentioned by Orcanète, namely the integrated state.
And if it could be proven that the uniqueness of romantic love is false, then this would seem to cut the ground from under the legitimacy of romantic love—we see that Orcanète is sparing no effort to try to do this, while ImageNoise admits that this particularity does not exist ready-made but can be constructed.
Propositions A and B seem self-evident. Orcanète did not refute this point. Propositions C and D indeed face huge challenges in reality; regarding this, Orcanète mentioned that a person often does not love only one person in a lifetime, but loves different people at different times. However, we can also understand these two propositions this way: that a person only loves one person at the same period. After making such a note, I believe most people can still literally believe that Propositions C and D can hold true.
And if Propositions A, B, C, and D all hold true simultaneously, then Proposition E should follow. Since the participants are special, their love for each other is special, and their experiences and stories are special (Orcanète did not touch upon the narrative component in romantic love, while ImageNoise correctly emphasized this point), then why is this relationship not special?
Orcanète’s analogy of romantic love to friendship and nodding acquaintances completely ignores the special experiential components within romantic love, and it is precisely these components that make romantic love stand out from interpersonal relationships.
Orcanète also reminds us that romantic love “is a universal phenomenon that can occur between different people; it does not possess an exclusive uniqueness in itself.” But I think there is a language trap here. The uniqueness we speak of does not actually refer to the emotion of romantic love as being unique, but rather that a specific instance of romantic love is unique. This is why I have more precisely defined the proposition we are discussing as: A romantic love possesses uniqueness.
In this way, I have completed a preliminary defense of the uniqueness of romantic love.
What I am curious about is, why did Orcanète let go of Propositions A and B, which are the easiest to question, and instead attack other more solid propositions? ImageNoise correctly tells us: people are far less special than they imagine themselves to be. And I myself can only reluctantly defend Propositions A and B.
Front-line psychological counselors might have a more concrete understanding of the debate between the universality and particularity of human psychology. They deal every day with all sorts of weird problems from different people, but if these problems were truly and completely unique, then the work mode of these counselors would be more like that of a novelist than a doctor.
The particularity and universality of human psychology deserve more detailed exploration, but due to space limitations, it cannot be expanded upon here. However, how to understand the uniqueness of an individual will be a very interesting topic. But, forgive me for being unable to accept a popular view in contemporary philosophy: that the uniqueness of an individual comes from a specific combination of various traits. In my view, this perspective reflects a typical “Rational Conceit.” Perhaps we can draw some lessons from aesthetics. An outdated aesthetic view is that the essence of beauty is a specific proportion, and “the uniqueness of an individual comes from a specific combination of various traits” is simply identical to this long-discarded view in aesthetics.
What I believe for the time being is that everyone is unique in-itself, but the reality is that most people do not fully manifest their uniqueness, so they are not unique beings in-and-for-itself. And romantic love gives us such an opportunity: to let us fully feel our own uniqueness. If you choose romantic love, then you have chosen your own uniqueness.
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