Just Not That into You And Other in-between Cases of Love Love can take time to ripen or die away, and it fluctuates dramatically in intensity

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Just Not That into You And Other in-between Cases of Love Love can take time to ripen or die away, and it fluctuates dramatically in intensity. If you flip channels five minutes before the end of your beau’s favorite show or make your next date night November 31, chances are you don’t feel that special buzz in the heart of your tummy. Newlyweds vow that they will love each other forever, that their love will never change, that they will feel as they do at that very moment for all of eternity. But they are deluded. Lust and romantic love always fade. Love has faded when seven years into your marriage you suddenly feel you are in bed with a relative. How do we account for shifts and changes in love? Can love transform into different kinds of love in the course of a relationship or does love come in degrees? If being in love is like being pregnant, then it doesn’t come in degrees. You cannot be a little bit pregnant. You are either pregnant or not. So if the notion of love is like that of pregnancy, then love is either on or off. There is no doubt that there are different species of love and that one kind can turn into a different one. Your passionate love for your perky young girlfriend may transform into a kind of friendship love over the years. However, in my humble opinion, citing transitions from one type of love to another does not explain all shifts and changes in our loving attitudes. Love is not an on/off affair; it’s a (fluctuating) point on a continuum rather than a member of a set of poles. In this respect, the concept is more like that of gender, not a binary, but a spectrum. Prototypes The first piece of evidence for rejecting the view that love is an on-off affair comes from prototype theory. Prototype theory as developed by the American psychologist Eleonor Rosch and colleagues (1977) is a theory of concepts that deviates from a traditional view that takes concepts to be analyzable in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. For example, for a number to be even it is necessary and sufficient that it is divisible by the number two. The traditional theory works well for mathematical concepts but is not super-promising for most non-mathematical concepts. Prototype theory is an extension of twentieth-century Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s well-known theory of family resemblance. Wittgenstein’s legendary example is that of a game. Wittgenstein thought that no definition could be given of the concept of a game that would capture both professional sports and child’s play. As a result of this, he suggested that something is a game if it resembles the most evident types of games closely enough—for example, soccer games, Trivial Pursuit, or hide-and-seek. Rosch and her colleagues suggested a theory of how we classify the world around us. On their view, the world doesn’t come divided into categories. Our basic understanding of the world, which is necessary for all decision making and action, consists in placing things into categories. As they put it: The world consists of a virtually infinite number of discriminably different stimuli. One of the most basic functions of all organisms is the cutting up of the environment into classifications by which non-identical stimuli can be treated as equivalent. (“Classification of Real-World Objects,” p. 383) We use prototypes to understand the world, they say. Prototypes are things that most clearly fall under a given concept according to our ordinary understanding of things. Soccer games are prototypes for game, chairs and sofas are prototypes for furniture, robins are prototypes for birds, and men are prototypes for humans (unfortunately). Whether something falls under the concept is determined by its resemblance to the prototype. Because loveseats resemble sofas, they fall under the category furniture. Whether something falls under a concept is a matter of degree. For example, when 200 Americans were asked to rank items of furniture in terms of how good they were as examples, the following ?items scored highest: chair/sofa, couch/table, easy chair, dresser, rocking chair, coffee table, rocker, love seat, chest of drawers, desk, and bed. At the very end of the list we find things like rug, pillow, wastebasket, sewing machine, stove, refrigerator, and telephone. The latter items do not fall under the concept of furniture to a very high degree. Most items belong to more than one category. For example, a telephone can be both an electrical device and a piece of furniture, even if it’s more of an electrical device than it is a piece of furniture. A prototype concept does not have determinate boundaries. There are items that definitely belong to a category and items that definitely do not. A chair clearly belongs to furniture; a gorilla clearly does not. But some items do not clearly belong to a category or clearly not belong to the category. For example, there is no determinate answer to the question of whether a walk-in closet or a carpet does or does not belong to the category furniture. When Rosch and her colleagues developed prototype theory, they were proposing the theory as a view of how we categorize concrete things in our external environments. It was not initially intended as a way of understanding emotions or other psychological states. But the theory naturally extends to emotions. As sadness, fear, anger, disgust, surprise, and joy are basic, universal emotions, they are among the best examples of the prototype concept emotion. We can also treat each example of the prototype concept emotion as its own prototype. If we were to conduct an experiment on how people understand the notion of anger, we might have an actor behave in different ways in front of a group of participants and ask them to rate how closely the actor’s behavior resembles anger on a scale from one to ten. If the actor yells and swears, we can hypothesize that participants would take that to be an excellent example of anger. If he merely displays a negative facial expression, this may not exemplify anger to a very high degree. We carried out an experiment like this with the prototype concepts in love, lust, compassionate love, and true love. We asked participants to determine to what degree scenes from well-known movies exemplified each of the four categories. We asked them to rate each scene on a scale from one to ten in terms of how good an example it was of each of the categories. We also asked them whether they had seen the movie. The scenes displayed included among others a sex scene from Fatal Attraction, the breakfast scene of Billy and Ted in Kramer vs. Kramer, Lori speaking to her husband Dave on the phone in the Baltimore convent in First Do No Harm, the final scene of Seth and Maggie after Maggie’s accident in City of Angels, the fake orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally, an email scene from You’ve Got Mail, Holly finding one of Gerry’s messages in PS. I Love You, the scene in which Jonah and Sam return for the backpack and meet Annie in Sleepless in Seattle, and Jesse and Céline walking around in the streets of Vienna in Before Sunrise. Unsurprisingly, parent-child scenes scored highest in the compassionate love category, and sex scenes scored highest in the lust category. Somewhat more surprisingly, typical Hollywood scenes, such as the final meeting between Annie and Sam in Sleepless in Seattle, and tragic love scenes, such as the final encounter between Seth and Maggie in City of Angles, scored highest for both the categories in love and true love. Deep-felt connections between spouses, such as Lori’s phone conversation with Dave in First Do No Harm, scored significantly lower in both of these categories. It made no significant difference whether participants reported having seen the movie or not. The results suggest that the beginning phases of love relationships and tragic love, virtually identical to a Shakespearean tragedy, are prototypes of the categories in love and true love. The more our state of love resembles these phases of love, the more likely it is to be understood as an instance of being in love and true love. “Love” Is Gradable Though the Hollywood depiction of true love differs from the emotional state that exists between people in real romantic relationships, the way we perceive this central emotion does correctly reflect that love is not an on-off affair. Failing to realize this aspect of love is likely one of ?the main triggers of that gnawing anxiety that most people experience in their romantic relationships. For example, in the beginning phases of a relationship, you may obsess about how your new crush feels about you, whether he or she is in love with you, whether you should say the “L” word, when you should say it, who should say it first, or what it means if one of you says it. During later phases you may be consumed with disturbing thoughts about whether your mate is still in love with you, whether she will fall out of love with you, whether she has fallen in love with others, whether she loves you more than her career, or why she can’t fully commit to you if she says she adores you. If love is not an on-off affair, most of these qualms are partially grounded in a failure to pay attention to the degree nature of love. How we use the word “love” gives us some valuable insights into the concept. “Love,” as it is used in the English language, is a gradable verb. Gradable verbs and adjectives are those verbs and adjectives that have a meaning that changes from context to context, that combine with degree modifiers and that give rise to indeterminate cases. Familiar examples are “tiny,” “rich,” “expensive,” and “bald.” One apartment can be tinier than another, an apartment that would be tiny if located in Beverly Hills may be quite sizable if located in Manhattan, and some apartments are neither clearly tiny nor not tiny. They are sort of in-between. “Love” works in quite the same way. This becomes apparent in constructions, such as “I love you more than anything else in the world,” “I love both of my children equally,” “I am a tiny bit in love with him,” “Henry is more in love with Rose now than he was last year,” “Jacky would have been more in love with Wolfgang if he hadn’t cheated on her,” “she doesn’t love me as much as I would like her to,” “Carly loves Paris more now than when they first got together,” and “He loves him a lot for someone with an avoidant attachment style.” If the word “love” in the English language picks out the relation of love, which we have good reasons to believe, then being in love is not an on-off affair. It is not like being pregnant, an unequivocal degree-less state. You can love one person more than another, you can love one woman a lot and another woman a bit less, you can love someone too much and you can be in that in-between phase where you neither definitely love someone nor do not love them. Likewise, an instance of love can be intense with respect to one person but not with respect to another. A consequence of this is that if someone sincerely denies that he loves you, he doesn’t love you in the full sense, but he may still have some affectionate feelings for you that may be somewhere amid that fuzzy gray zone. These lessons are good to remember when we think about our own or others’ emotional states. Love comes in degrees. There is no right degree of love. You can always love someone more or less than you do. Saying “I love you” is informative, but there are limits to how much information the three sappy words can provide. The meaning of “love” is fixed in context. You may correctly say that you love someone in a low-stakes context and yet deny it in a high-stakes context. For example, you may give your childhood friend a big hug and say, “I love you,” when she brings you Ding Dongs, your favorite treat. But if a lot more hung on your saying the three words, you may have said nothing at all. The idea that love comes in degrees gives us a way of understanding affection constituted by both conscious and unconscious elements. Suppose Lucy is aware that the sheer presence of her friend Angus has begun to make her feel more elated than usual, she is aware that her heart beats like a jungle drum when she is out with her comrades, but she is unaware that Angus is the underlying cause of this. When Lucy logs into her email account in the wee hours, she has an urge to scan her inbox to see if Angus wrote her before plowing through the other 230 tiresome messages. She usually feels inclined to chat with Angus rather than with her other pals at festivities, and occasionally she begins to giggle for no reason. She has taken no notice of these revealing changes in her behavior. Susan, her (best friend), has noticed a transformation in Lucy’s behavior and has asked her whether she has a crush on Angus. Lucy explicitly and adamantly denies it. Angus has been her pal since kindergarten. “Nonsense,” she says with naïve

straight-faced honesty. “Of course, I don’t have the hots for him.” She insists that while she thinks Angus is a handsome and darling guy that even her granny would approve of, she merely has brotherly feelings for him. In a case like this we can correctly say that Lucy is in love with Angus to some extent, even though she denies it and doesn’t have the full conscious experience of being in love. But we would not want to say that the extent to which Lucy is in love with Angus is the same as it would have been had she had the full conscious experience of affection. Lucy is in an in-between state that resembles the prototype well enough for it to be appropriate to say that Lucy is in love, but she is not in love to the degree she would be if her love had been fully consciously manifested. The idea that there are many shades of affection also helps us apprehend love that has grown old. When you and your significant other have settled down in suburbia with two kids, an SUV, a permanently half-full laundry basket, and a trip to Walmart and a movie from Netflix being the most exciting parts of your weekend, your love life doesn’t quite feel the same anymore. People prefer to say that the love that once filled their hearts has become a different kind of a love, a warmer, deeper, and more caring kind of love. This may be true in some cases. In other cases, love simply isn’t manifested to the same degree. A couple’s love for each other at four in the morning in their bourgeois hell when the new baby wails and needs a clean diaper for the third time that night needn’t be warmer, deeper, and more caring than the love they felt when they were walking down the aisle—free, bohemian, their whole life ahead of them. Bearing in mind that love comes in degrees can shed light on the mystery surrounding the fact that your hotshot hubby can insist that he loves you one day, then shamelessly cheat on you the next and pack his suitcases and walk away a week later, leaving only a few pieces of clothes behind like the Wicked Witch of the West. He may be a shady sort of fellow but he wasn’t necessarily being dishonest when he declared that he loved you. He may not even have changed his feelings toward you. He may simply have been fooled into thinking, or realized, that he loves his long-limbed, anorexic secretary more than he loves you. He’s Just Not That into You Despite the title of this chapter, my thoughts about in-between cases of love are only in partial agreement with those expressed by Greg Behrendt, a writer and stand-up comedian, and Liz Tuccillo, an American writer and actress, in their bestseller He’s Just Not That into You (2004). The message they want you to get is that if it isn’t obvious that a guy likes you, he probably doesn’t like you very much. This is indeed good advice and, if taken well, will save girls and boys from breaking into pieces like the snowman in Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee’s Frozen. If your beau is not calling, not asking you out, not getting back to you, does that mean that he is just not that into you? Yes, it could mean that. It certainly means that if five days in advance, he tells you he can’t make your birthday party because he is not in the mood. But there can be countless other reasons why he is not texting, calling, or serenading you. He may have an avoidant attachment style or suffer from crippling love shyness. He may have an anxious attachment style that led him to suffer from a ghastly breakup and consequently made him swear never to get into a romantic relationship again. Or he may not have fully realized on a conscious level that he really is into you. Of course, when a man (or woman) doesn’t call or doesn’t seem interested, the right thing to do is not to declare your unconditional love for him in an eternal torrent of text messages. Nor should you show up at his door at seven p.m. with takeout from the local Chinese joint and three romantic comedies, or tell him that his nurture giver who he sometimes refers to as “mother” squashed his emotional brain, or make an appointment with a marriage counselor and tell him that your counselor has promised you two tickets for a Yankees practice game, which have to be picked up PDQ. Don’t be a blood-sucking temptress. The right thing to do in all of these cases is to stay in touch with him (or her) as a friend, if possible, but leave your romantic and sexual advances out of it.