Love Reciprocity
Published on Aug聽26, 2015 (updated Oct聽3, 2023), filed under misc. (Share this post, e.g., on Mastodon or on聽Bluesky.)
Love! What a wonderful topic. My mind would instantly turn into a good number of directions, from love in our personal lives to different forms of love, to the powers of love, to the possibly universal character of love. I don鈥檛 understand it and I鈥檓 a bit out of touch with it these days, despite modest attempts to examine or locate it. I wonder how you feel.
Here I want to go over an idea we best call love reciprocity (there aren鈥檛 an awful number of search results for this term precisely, but mutual love has clearly been discussed at length).
All You Need Is Love
The idea of love reciprocity, most notably around the romantic flavor of love, comes from the desire for mutual love. The idea stems from the wish that if we love someone, then that someone would love us back. That wish appears to be very strong, in my eyes well explaining why we鈥檇 seek it, and how we may want to believe in love reciprocity, too.
Love reciprocity makes us prefer not to love without being loved back. Evidently, that would violate the idea. If what we want is reciprocal love, and we love, but the recipient refuses to share some of their love, then that鈥檚 not reciprocal鈥攊t鈥檚 unilateral (and painful). And so there鈥檚 an odd twist then when on the receiving end, we do want to be loved without having to love back. The very same thing (response to love) that we wish from others is something we don鈥檛 want to, and probably cannot, guarantee them. (Maybe that鈥檚 the paradox of love reciprocity?)
And so we may make two points:
More often than enough, what we may be looking for is reciprocal, mutual love, which is different from and more specific than 鈥渏ust鈥澛爈ove.
We seem to catch ourselves with a double standard when not wanting to love, or not wanting to have to love, someone who loves us (which is understandable), but being all disappointed when someone we love doesn鈥檛 love us (which, too, is聽understandable).
As always there鈥檚 more, and yet I believe this makes for an interesting detail to consider when it comes to the wonderful topic of鈥攍ove. In consequence, maybe we should consider not making reciprocal love a goal, and learn how to better love actively, unconditionally, and鈥攗nilaterally? Even if that sounds all political now.
Update (July 11, 2020)
In the meantime I鈥檝e learnt that love knows no condition (that no conditionality exists), and that the idea of conditional love was an oxymoron.
About Me
I鈥檓 Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I鈥檓 an engineering lead, guerrilla philosopher, and indie publisher. I鈥檝e worked as a technical lead and engineering manager for companies you use every day (like Google) and companies you鈥檝e never heard of, I鈥檓 an occasional contributor to web standards (like HTML, CSS, WCAG), and I write and review books for O鈥橰eilly and Frontend Dogma.
I love trying things, not only in web development and engineering management, but also with respect to politics and philosophy. Here on meiert.com I talk about some of my experiences and perspectives. (Please share feedback: Interpret charitably, but do be critical.)