Love Is Evil

[bricolage]

hg7qdowoemo

I saw this Zizek clip on youtube and thought it was quite interesting although I didn't really get the whole thing. How I understand it is he is saying love entails placing something above something else so love is in a way discriminatory to what you don't love, is this right? I also remember someone I know talking about how love should be confined to personal relationships where it might be legitimate to place someone or something above something else but not beyond that and certainly not in the political (note; I know this is a bad distinction between personal and political and I don't actually think it is one we should adhere to but I hope it is clear what I mean by it here).

What do other people think about this idea of love as evil? Also Zizek talks about 'hating the world' in the clip, does anyone have a view on that?

One last point on that youtube video someone wrote he jacked the idea from Hegel, is this true?

So many questions...

Cheers.

[Hit The North]

Oh, Slavoj!

Your mother should've breast-fed you and your father give you a clip around the ear 'ole more often.

[Dean]

Nah, Zizek is interesting but irrational often.

Love is affirmation of humanness, and quite contrary to what he says, is a broad-reaching, unconditional practice which necessarily is not exclusory.

[Red Saxon]

This guy really needs to see the play Fuenteovejuna, the point of the play was exactly the topic he's speaking on.

[Die Rote Fahne]

Zizek is awesome.

[Lacrimi de Chiciură]

Well I think there is a possibility to feel ambivalence towards something... but that is not evil. I mean, you can't love what you don't know anything about. Would emotional static be better than love? I don't think so. We need to go through ups and downs to feel anything at all. And then again, I think hatred can be justified in some cases if one hates that which goes against love.

[anticap]

someone wrote he jacked the idea from Hegel, is this true?

The basic idea predates Hegel by at least two millennia. For example, see chapter 2 of the Tao Te Ching: http://duhtao.com/

[spiltteeth]

He means love separates - it is diabolical in the literal sense - it cuts a couple off from the rest of humanity in that it raises them to a higher status.

[Number 16 Bus Shelter]

Thankfully, It works the same way with hate. Yay! Now hate is not only frowned upon, it's also evil! I do love to hate!:cursing:

[Meridian]

He formulates himself in interesting manners but I doubt there is much beneath the surface. What, for example, does he mean by 'evil'? Love, in examples of the common usage of the word, is not closely related to how the word evil is used. In fact, they seem to be rather different.

[RED DAVE]

"The passage from feudalism to Protestantism is not of the same nature as the passage from Protestantism to bourgeois everyday life with its privatized religion. The first passage concerns "content" (under the guise of preserving the religious form or even its strengthening, the crucial shift - the assertion of the ascetic acquisitive stance in economic activity as the domain of manifestation of Grace - takes place), whereas the second passage is a purely formal act, a change of form (as soon as Protestantism is realized as the ascetic acquisitive stance, it can fall off as form)" (For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor).Given the clip in the OP and quotes like this, how can anyone take this man seriously?

RED DAVE

[black magick hustla]

lol he is a baffoon. i'd rather take the dadaists over him because they were self conscious of their baffoonery, while this guy is taken seriously by illiterate lacanians

[spiltteeth]

Perhaps this will help, Zizek says :


Christian notion of love is something basically very violent and unilateral, it's totally different for me from the pagan notion where love is this kind of universal balance, you love the whole universe, you say yes to everything—no! Love—you find this in Christianity—is one-sided, unilateral. Love means "I love you more than everything": love is precisely what Buddhists would have called the origin of evil. Love is a kind of radical imbalance.

Western/Christian modern love separates instead of unifying, it cuts the "oneness" of the world into pieces etc

[saad]

Love isn't evil.

Slajov is half right--when I declare I love her, I am actually implying that I chose her over the billions of other women that are alive on earth. Love is not discriminatory, because you can love anything so long as you, well, love them (I don't feel like explaining what I think love is.)

Evil is an opinion, not something that exists in reality. He clearly believes that choosing the women he loves over some other women he shares no interest in is Evil--is his own opinion, not everyone's.

[Number 16 Bus Shelter]

Perhaps this will help, Zizek says :


Christian notion of love is something basically very violent and unilateral, it's totally different for me from the pagan notion where love is this kind of universal balance, you love the whole universe, you say yes to everything—no! Love—you find this in Christianity—is one-sided, unilateral. Love means "I love you more than everything": love is precisely what Buddhists would have called the origin of evil. Love is a kind of radical imbalance.


Western/Christian modern love separates instead of unifying, it cuts the "oneness" of the world into pieces etc

That's actually very good. Hear, Hear Splitteeth.
It's not Love that's the problem, it's our definition and actions in the name of Love, definitions handed down by religious conservative ancestors. Marriage is the product of Love. Marriage is inherently evil. I have absolutely no qualms about that.

So not love, but our abuse of it, is evil

[Sleeper]

Evil is an opinion, not something that exists in reality. He clearly believes that choosing the women he loves over some other women he shares no interest in is Evil--is his own opinion, not everyone's.



I agree with your overall conclusion that love is not inherently evil, but let us not forget that a zealous love for something can occasionally lead to acts which are generally (societally) construed as evil. A quick and dirty example would be a guy killing someone that was sleeping with his wife, who he loved.

The statement quoted above I disagree with though, because while I agree that evil does not exist in reality, strictly speaking, your statement seems to imply that love does which it does not. That is because love is an abstraction which is only verifiable to the same extent that someone (we'll use a theist as an example) such as a theist can internally, "Verify," that there is a God. There are many Theists, of course, who will openly state that they merely believe there is a God, but there are those still that profess it to be absolutely so.

We can easily establish that the concept of love, in and of itself, is not physical, and it is for that reason that love cannot be measured in quantifiable terms. Of course, that leaves us only with qualifiable terms to decide whether or not we love something or someone, or whether or not love exists at all.

It is because love is qualifiable and not quantifiable as well as the fact that whether or not we do love, or can love, is a decision arrived at solely upon introspection and comparison to those who we believe do love that love is no more a matter of opinion than whether or not something is evil.

[Number 16 Bus Shelter]

The post above is very valuable, thanks sleeper.
It is important to regard both love and evil as opinions not fact.
However I think this thread has highlighted the importance to question the status quo in regards to love.
How do we see love, why do we accept it the way it is? Can we change our view on it to make it more a more healthy emotion?

[Sleeper]

How do we see love, why do we accept it the way it is? Can we change our view on it to make it more a more healthy emotion?

I think that the majority of people recognize that (at least, in my opinion) love is a matter of opinion, which is going to make love itself different for everyone because what constitutes love is going to be different for everyone. Because of that, I think that it is difficult not to accept love the way that it is in terms of ourselves because it is simply what we feel. Also, when another person says that they, "Love," something or someone, since we inherently realize that their concept of love may differ from ours, it would be nothing short of arrogant not to accept what they say as so, except in cases where the contrary is obviously the case.

When it comes to making love a healthy emotion, I'm afraid that I don't necessarily follow the question and I will explain why. I personally believe that love is either a derivative of an emotion (when felt strongly) or a culmination of multiple emotions. In my opinion, then, love is not an emotion in and of itself. The reason I believe this is because emotions generally have clearer (though not by any means crystal clear) definitions, both internally and externally, as well as clearer lines. For example, if I see someone laughing heartily (not snickering or chuckling) I can generally assume pretty safely that the person is happy, but just because I see a guy put his arm around his girlfriend (or any combination of sexes) and kiss her, it would be an unsafe assertion for me to state, "He is in love."

When I talk about emotions having clear lines, what I mean is that the particular emotion an individual is experiencing at any given time can change more rapidly than love. In other words, someone might go from happy to content to upset to angry all in the matter of a couple of minutes. On the other hand, with love, it usually does not change its' status in that short a timeframe, which is not to say that love is unchanging because it clearly is.

[Number 16 Bus Shelter]

First off, let me say I also hold the opinion that love is different for everybody. However I assume the experience is not too unique per person.
The reason for this is our environment. Love is a integral part of our lives, and society acknowledges this. Love is sold to us at every opportunity. Take cinema for example. Cinema shows us what love is, the love we should desire - society defines love for us. When we grow up in a world that is constantly feeding us images of the type of love we should want, it is difficult to imagine anything else.

We are taught that lust in not love. Why not? What is Love?
It seems to me that lust is more powerful emotion than love anyway. It makes us betray our wives and husbands, It is passionate and thrilling.

Is love staying faithful to your partner? But what if, by having an affair, you could be happier, and therefore be a better partner?

Why can love not be defined as the arguments you have with your partner?

I'll think further on whether love is an emotion or not - However ...


Emotion Definition:
1. A mental state that arises spontaneously rather than through conscious effort and is often accompanied by physiological changes; a feeling: the emotions of joy, sorrow, reverence, hate, and love.
2. A state of mental agitation or disturbance: spoke unsteadily in a voice that betrayed his emotion. See Synonyms at feeling.
3. The part of the consciousness that involves feeling; sensibility: "The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect" (Isaac Bashevis Singer).

It seems as if Love does fulfil the the first criteria.

[Sleeper]

#16 Bus Shelter

I apologize, but I will have to respond to this post tomorrow.

I typed quite a lengthly response to your post, but I forgot to scroll over it and, "Copy," it and for whatever reason I was automatically logged out so I lost it all.

It was quite a good response too, I hope I can remember it all.

[9]

Hahaha… what. He sounds like my grandfather on a stoned tirade. What is it, exactly, that he’s even trying to say? I assumed, before watching the clip, from some of the comments here that it would be something along the lines of “love is evil because it discriminates”, but that’s not what I got from watching it… It sounded more like “love is evil because it’s stupid because I hate the world”.
Am I missing something here?

[Number 16 Bus Shelter]

Here is pretty much the script as I heard it.
Feel free to repost with changes.

There is nothing, basically, I mean it quite literally, but then how to things emerge? Here I feel a kind of spontaneous affinity with quantum physics where you know the idea out there is that the universe is a void, but a kind of positively charged void. And then, particular things appear when the balance of the void is disturbed. And I like this idea of spontaneity very much, the fact thats its all just nothing, things are out there, it means something went terribly wrong, that what we call creation is a kind of cosmic imbalance, cosmic catastrophe that things exist by mistake, and I'm even ready to go to the end and to claim that the only way to counteract this is to assume the mistake ,and go to the end and we have a name for this its called love. Isn't love precisely this kind of a cosmic balance? I was always disgusted with this notion of 'I love the world, universal love', I don't like the world, I don't know, I basically, I'm somewhere in between "I hate the world" or 'I'm indifferent towards it', but the whole of reality is just it, its stupid it is out there i don't care about it, love for me is an extremely violent act, love is not "I love you" at all. love means I pick out something, and its again this structure of imbalance. even if this something is just a small detail, a fragile individual person, I say I love you more than anything else. In this quite formal sense, love is evil!

[Hiero]

Hahaha… what. He sounds like my grandfather on a stoned tirade. What is it, exactly, that he’s even trying to say? I assumed, before watching the clip, from some of the comments here that it would be something along the lines of “love is evil because it discriminates”, but that’s not what I got from watching it… It sounded more like “love is evil because it’s stupid because I hate the world”.
Am I missing something here?

The quote is from the movie Zizek!, which is an interesting and funny movie however it is lacking in consistant theoritical content. It is a biography style mixed with opinions and beliefs of Zizek, not neccassarily his core philosophical topics. Alot of the content from Zizek in the movie is meant to be taken as polemic.

A better movie is Perverts Guide to Cinema, which is more indepth and has a consistent arguement runing through the film, that being a focus on desire in a capitalist world (post-modern) and hollywood as example.

I would take the "Love is evil" comment as a opinion spoken on the moment.

[Number 16 Bus Shelter]

Hahaha… what. He sounds like my grandfather on a stoned tirade. What is it, exactly, that he’s even trying to say? I assumed, before watching the clip, from some of the comments here that it would be something along the lines of “love is evil because it discriminates”, but that’s not what I got from watching it… It sounded more like “love is evil because it’s stupid because I hate the world”.
Am I missing something here?

That's the main sticking point of the Lacanian-Hegelian view. :laugh:

You might say love is discrimination. It's assumed that if you love everything, love becomes meaningless. So you have to choose something particular, single out something and reject the majority. To love you must hold [it] above all else. Irrational. Thus, cosmic imbalance. :thumbup:

[nuisance]

This guy seems to beable to chat utter shit and yet people still lap it up.
That's my indepth analysis of the piece.

[bricolage]

A better movie is Perverts Guide to Cinema, which is more indepth and has a consistent arguement runing through the film, that being a focus on desire in a capitalist world (post-modern) and hollywood as example.

I also though Examined Life, which he, amongst others, is in, was pretty good even if I didn't agree with the philosophical ideas they were all putting forward.

[Sleeper]

First off, let me say I also hold the opinion that love is different for everybody. However I assume the experience is not too unique per person.

I agree that the experience of loving another person is not tremendously unique as far as other people are concerned, or even loving an animal for that matter. What about loving some other thing, though?

For instance, I believe we may have bantered a little bit in the thread about that guy marrying a video game character. He clearly loves that video game character, which I would suggest is a unique experience of love because I have never personally heard of that before.


The reason for this is our environment. Love is a integral part of our lives, and society acknowledges this. Love is sold to us at every opportunity. Take cinema for example. Cinema shows us what love is, the love we should desire - society defines love for us. When we grow up in a world that is constantly feeding us images of the type of love we should want, it is difficult to imagine anything else.

Agreed.



We are taught that lust in not love. Why not? What is Love?
It seems to me that lust is more powerful emotion than love anyway. It makes us betray our wives and husbands, It is passionate and thrilling.


Lust in and of itself is not love, in my opinion, but I think that an intense enough degree of lust can result in actual love, albeit temporarily.

That kind of goes along with my thinking that love, in and of itself, is not an emotion, though. For instance, let's think about a guy that feels lust for a co-worker, now this guy loves his wife and the mere feeling of lust might not override that. Imagine if this co-worker gets him alone in a locked office and starts putting the moves on him, though. I think that the feeling of lust may then become so strong that his actual love for his wife is replaced by a temporary love (driven entirely by lust) for the co-worker.


Is love staying faithful to your partner? But what if, by having an affair, you could be happier, and therefore be a better partner?

I think that it may seem you are a better partner, but to me, love between two partners is something of a contract either spoken or unspoken. So, if it is accepted in a relationship that the two people may have other partners for purely sexual purposes, then yeah maybe, because that may be what works for that particular relationship. However, if the relationship is entered into and maintained with the understanding that there be no other sexual partners, then I think a person who chooses to violate that understanding, by definition, does not become a better partner.


Why can love not be defined as the arguments you have with your partner?

I think that the arguments are part of it, in a sense. I mean, the very fact that something can be argued about between two people indicates that both parties care about the subject as well as the opinion of the other on that subject.





1. A mental state that arises spontaneously rather than through conscious effort and is often accompanied by physiological changes; a feeling: the emotions of joy, sorrow, reverence, hate, and love.


It seems as if Love does fulfil the the first criteria.


"Love at first sight," is a cute little term, but I don't think that love actually rises spontaneously which causes it to fail, per the definition outlined. I'm going to use an inanimate object to describe what I mean: Consider a book that I might say that I love, now, I did not suddenly love this book as it first required me to read it, reading the book is not spontaneous and does require conscious thought.

Like I said before, love is a culmination of multiple emotions, or it is an intense experience of just one emotion, with the former being the more common case. However, it is a spontaneous affiar for a person to feel an emotion, but love takes some degree of reflection upon those emotions. In any case, I think the word, "Spontaneous," causes the definition to fail, but I'd be interested in an argument to the contrary.

[Pogue]

This guy seems to beable to chat utter shit and yet people still lap it up.
That's my indepth analysis of the piece.

i love you now more than ever

i saw this guy live at marxism, nerds like holden caulfield were wetting themselves over it, all i cud think was BLAND

[Number 16 Bus Shelter]

That is a good argument, Sleeper. :cool:
I think that to agree with Zizek, you must use a specific type of love as your argument. Zizek's argument crumbles when faced with the many different 'flavours' of love.



"Love at first sight," is a cute little term, but I don't think that love actually rises spontaneously which causes it to fail, per the definition outlined. I'm going to use an inanimate object to describe what I mean: Consider a book that I might say that I love, now, I did not suddenly love this book as it first required me to read it, reading the book is not spontaneous and does require conscious thought.

Like I said before, love is a culmination of multiple emotions, or it is an intense experience of just one emotion, with the former being the more common case. However, it is a spontaneous affiar for a person to feel an emotion, but love takes some degree of reflection upon those emotions. In any case, I think the word, "Spontaneous," causes the definition to fail, but I'd be interested in an argument to the contrary.

You're saying is that love in the culmination of different emotions - And as you have said before,

When I talk about emotions having clear lines, what I mean is that the particular emotion an individual is experiencing at any given time can change more rapidly than love. In other words, someone might go from happy to content to upset to angry all in the matter of a couple of minutes. On the other hand, with love, it usually does not change its' status in that short a timeframe, which is not to say that love is unchanging because it clearly is.

-Emotions are flux.

So Love is the long-lasting product of several more ephemeral emotions, If I am understanding you correctly. These emotions by their very nature die and (are replaced?) by other emotions, and the cycle continues. I suppose this can be shown in the way love 'evolves' over time as the time spent with your lover increases.

It is also true that love does not appear to be spontaneous. You must feel other emotions before you reach love.

However I do have some doubts. It is hard to imagine, that by mixing a cocktail of certain emotions, something different is formed.
So perhaps you reach love when certain criteria are met. Meaning love is the collective name for a certain group of emotions.

However you seem to have a different view,

Lust in and of itself is not love, in my opinion, but I think that an intense enough degree of lust can result in actual love, albeit temporarily.
I'm not sure how that would work. Could you explain that?

[Sleeper]

I think that to agree with Zizek, you must use a specific type of love as your argument. Zizek's argument crumbles when faced with the many different 'flavours' of love.


I think that is absolutely right, which is why Zizek should not have used, "Love," as a generalization, but rather should have emphasized what sort of love he was meaning.

Even then, though, different sorts of love are experienced differently by different sorts of people. Then, when you throw in the various conceptions of exactly, "What is evil?" that a person may have and the question of whether or not anything is inherently evil, you end up with a total mess.




-Emotions are flux.

So Love is the long-lasting product of several more ephemeral emotions, If I am understanding you correctly. These emotions by their very nature die and (are replaced?) by other emotions, and the cycle continues. I suppose this can be shown in the way love 'evolves' over time as the time spent with your lover increases.


I think that is usually the case, but not always. I did like how you mention that a certain emotion can die, but love maintains, that was a nice touch. For example, I love my wife but may not always experience lust in regards to my wife, sometimes I do, though and that temporarily changes exactly what my love for my wife is.

Anyway, some argue that the lust dies and some argue that the lust is simply not manifesting itself at a present time, but is always there. As far as I'm concerned that's not really the point, the point is that sometimes you are experiencing the lust (in which case it factors in) and sometimes you are not experiencing the lust (in which case it does not factor in)

For example, if I am feeling particularly lustful at a given moment and someone asks me to tell them about my wife, the first thing I might do is start giving a physical description. If I am not feeling lustful, then the first thing I do if someone asks me to describe my wife is talk about her intelligence and kindness.



It is also true that love does not appear to be spontaneous. You must feel other emotions before you reach love.

Absolutely, or at the very least, you must feel an intense amount of one kind of an emotion.



However I do have some doubts. It is hard to imagine, that by mixing a cocktail of certain emotions, something different is formed.
So perhaps you reach love when certain criteria are met. Meaning love is the collective name for a certain group of emotions.


The reason that I don't think that is so is because there is not a specific distribution of emotions required to equal love. If there were, we would be talking about something readily quantifiable. For example, let's look at lust again, I often feel lust with regards to my wife, so at that time, the lust is part of my love for her. When we go back to that book I love, though, I do not feel any lust for the book, but I still love it. That is indicative of the fact that lust can be one of the emotions that factor into love, but that it does not have to be.

The fact that love can exist either with or without lust indicates that lust is not necessarily a criteria contributing to love, but that it can be a criteria that contributes to love.

On the other hand, love is a matter of opinion and perspective so I suppose, in that sense, an individual may have a certain criteria by which love can exist and will exist anytime those criteria are met. I tend to doubt that there is any specific criteria, but I see where one could make that argument if so inclined.



However you seem to have a different view,

I'm not sure how that would work. Could you explain that?


The lust is a tough one to come up with another example, so let's talk about me loving a certain joke. A joke serves no purpose other than making a person happy because it makes them laugh (at least, if the person thinks it is a good joke), yet you will hear many people before telling a joke say, "I love this one," and mean it quite literally. It is because the extent of the happiness they derive from the joke is such that it causes them to literally love the joke.

That's essentially what I mean when I say that enough of, which is to say a great intensity of, one single emotion can result in love.

With respect to all those who may be offended, have you ever had sex with someone (that at any other time) you knew you did not love, but the sex was so out of this world that, just for a second, you did actually love them?

[Number 16 Bus Shelter]

The lust is a tough one to come up with another example, so let's talk about me loving a certain joke. A joke serves no purpose other than making a person happy because it makes them laugh (at least, if the person thinks it is a good joke), yet you will hear many people before telling a joke say, "I love this one," and mean it quite literally. It is because the extent of the happiness they derive from the joke is such that it causes them to literally love the joke.

That's essentially what I mean when I say that enough of, which is to say a great intensity of, one single emotion can result in love.

With respect to all those who may be offended, have you ever had sex with someone (that at any other time) you knew you did not love, but the sex was so out of this world that, just for a second, you did actually love them?

I think I understand what you mean now. So the emotion itself is not love, but you feel the particular emotion so intensely, that you love the object that makes you feel the emotion?

wow.

[Sleeper]

That's my belief. Of course, that would reduce love from being something unknown and mysticial to a subjectively driven qualifying term, but I'm cool with that.

[bricolage]

i love you now more than ever

i saw this guy live at marxism, nerds like holden caulfield were wetting themselves over it, all i cud think was BLAND

Was that in the 'what does it mean to be a revolutionary' debate? I thought he made some good points there actually and was a hell of a lot better than Callinicos who just repeated the same tired lines he'd been repeating a year earlier against Holloway.

[Led Zeppelin]

Zizek uses the method of over-analyzing to come over as smart or profound when in reality he's just saying things that are common knowledge to any person with basic knowledge of philosophy. He uses language to distort reality and in doing so creates the fiction that he understands it, when in reality he's only obscuring it.

I think that Marx said something about this: "The philosophers have only to dissolve their language into the ordinary language, from which it is abstracted, in order to recognise it, as the distorted language of the actual world [...]". Yeah.

What Zizek said, in essence, can be summed up in one sentence: I believe the notion of "love" is inherently wrong and irrational if it refers to universality, because the world is imperfect, and I believe it is inherently wrong and irrational if it refers to specific things as well because that creates an imbalance when put in the context of the universality, which you can't ignore.

Or to put it even more simply; I don't like the notion of love because the world is imperfect, and I don't want to pick and choose things to love in such a world because if I do I'm ignoring reality, which I don't want to do.

[CELMX]

well, this really depends also not only the defintion of love, but also the definition of "evil" (sorry if this was already posted, too lazy to look)
imo, evil is just what goes against your morals (which do NOT have to be western, religions, wtv)
so, if you are a christian, love would not really go against your morals

however, i think if you follow anarchist morality, love (according to zizek) goes against principles of solidarity and "do unto others as others would unto you" since love is to a few particular objects, humans, animals, etc.
therefore, yes, i think love, show extreme liking to a few things is "evil," but if you love everyone, then it isn't "evil" (except fascists lol)
when i say everyone, i mean all comrades, the 99% that get barely anything.

[The New Consciousness]

Love, as most people understand it, and in the sense he is using it, refers to object-obsession, i.e. when conciousness creates a gap or separation between ourselves (thus becoming subject) and the object. This gap is the cause of all human emotion and suffering, including this kind of love - which is really just lust; a kind of frenzied obsession over an object of consciousness, in this case another human being. Because humans are in a state of flux the object, when it changes, can easily become disgusting to the subject enamoured by it leading to suffering, violence, divorce, blame-games...et cetera...et cetera...et cetera...

[spiltteeth]

Love, as most people understand it, and in the sense he is using it, refers to object-obsession, i.e. when conciousness creates a gap or separation between ourselves (thus becoming subject) and the object. This gap is the cause of all human emotion and suffering, including this kind of love - which is really just lust; a kind of frenzied obsession over an object of consciousness, in this case another human being. Because humans are in a state of flux the object, when it changes, can easily become disgusting to the subject enamoured by it leading to suffering, violence, divorce, blame-games...et cetera...et cetera...et cetera...

Actually, Zizek, Lacan, and most of philosophy, would say the gap causes consciousness, not vice-versa; which is the cause of duality and subjectivity - both things considered good in the western Christian tradition and bad in eastern forms of mysticism.
Although yr right, he's not talking about the love of a child for a parent or familial love, but romantic love between a couple, which isn't just lust since it does beyond sexual attraction and is an element in every relationship.