Social Love: Meta-Elements

The purpose of defining social love is to isolate the elements that occur in various situations of loving. My definition of social love has five elements that seem common to the experience of loving:
1. Someone is reaching out to another, and this other stands out in the beholder's eyes from his surroundings. He may reach out from need or desire in wanting the other.
2. The "other" accepts the one who desires him. He makes a gesture of recognition, suggesting complicity and compliance.
3. There is a display of shared affection. It becomes a sense of becoming at one with the other, of bonding.
4. There is a recognition of participation in the unfolding event by each party involved. Each comes to understand what the other is willing to do to help retain the relationship as meaningful and vital.
5. There is a feeling of anticipation of further sharing, an awareness that each can reach out for the other at some future time. At first this feeling is intense and consuming, but over time as each adjusts to the other, it lessens though the bonding effects tend to be lasting and are oftimes irreversible.

Interestingly, the bonding in loving is not dissimilar to engaging in a social contract, merely that there need be nothing verbal in the act of loving. A social contract requires a meeting of the minds; and social loving is based on a bonding between lovers; for he who accepts the reaching out of someone, enters in participation in the experience. And, just as there are visible consequences to the fulfilling of a social contract, so there are significant behavioral consequences to a social love relationship.

So, to say as some rejected persons do, "You don't love me!" is to recognize there is no sharing between the would-be participants in the experience of loving.

Social Love: Format

In this series of posts, I am doing research on the topic of "social love." The term has been coined by Irving Spring in his book The Pursuit of Love, 1994. It expresses the common sense notion that human loving is a social phenomenon, having important social consequences, not the least of which is new life.

As in the study of the social contract, which inaugurated this set of applying concepts to a variety of social contexts, the purpose of this study is to demonstrate how the concept's use, viz., social love, can make human conduct more rational, i.e., justified with good reasons.

The social situations that the term can be appropriately applied is open-ended. There are as many contexts that can fit the definition, as the creative mind can reasonably allude to! I will use the types of loving cast into certain life experiences as a guide for noting situations of loving---loving between a baby and a mother, loving between a child and his parents, friendship loving, and loving between (or, among) partners. I will present a paradigm of loving in that particular context. Because love is an emotional state, I will cast the experience in situ, depicting the experience as it occurs, wherever it occurs.

I have reviewed the literature on the topic of love, from Plato to modern times. There is a rich discussion, needless to say.

But I think by placing the experience in the social context, we can appreciate how the phenomenon functions in the culture. Fundamentally, it is a method for behavior modification. Companies, for one, have encouraged close relationships among their employees whenever they need especial effort to a) relieve the boredom of a job; b) make demanding deadlines of projects; and c) do the impossible by taking risks and by making sacrifices. Of course, the military promotes loving relationships for much the same reason. But enough of this so as to introduce the social dimension of love. On with the show!