Falling out of love: what impact does falling out of love have on our sense of self? In this article, the authors explore this question and more.
Check out the abstract below, and then click through to the main article to learn more:
Lost without you: the Value of Falling out of Love
Peer-reviewed research by: Pilar Lopez-Cantero and Alfred Archer
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.
Click here to read the full open-access article, published in 2020 in the journal Ethical Theory and Moral Practice.
Full Reference //
Lopez-Cantero, P., Archer, A. (2020). Lost without you: The value of falling out of love. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 23: 515–529
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
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