This paper explores the relationship between romantic love and polyamory. Our central question is whether traditional norms of monogamy can be excised from romantic love so as to harmonize with polyamory’s ethical dimensions (as we construe them). How one answers this question bears on another: whether ‘polyamory’ should principally be understood in terms of romantic love or instead some alternative conception(s). Our efforts to address these questions begin by briefly motivating our favored approach to romantic love, a “narratival” one inspired (...) by 1930s cultural theorist Denis de Rougemont, wherein such love is exclusive, supernatural or promising transcendence, painful, impeded, and, ultimately, fatal. We maintain that, even once exclusivity is removed as an official component, tensions with polyamory’s ethical dimensions remain: romantic love’s other elements rationalize acting and feeling in ways that privilege a singular beloved above others. A tempting solution is to further revise romantic love. However, we are skeptical that this leaves space for distinctively romantic love. Our tentative proposal, then, is that polyamory’s ethical dimensions favor rejecting romantic love as ultimately desirable. (shrink)

The idea that love changes who we are is widely shared, and has been mostly explored from a stance in the middle stage of love (i.e., when people already love each other). But how do we get there? And what happens when love ends? In this chapter, I explore how self-understanding may be shaped in different ways at different stages of love through the notions of narrative and existential feeling. As I will argue, love gains narrative momentum at the beginning, (...) which is maintained during the middle, and ultimately extinguished at the end. This momentum is triggered and later sustained by the existential feeling that ‘things make sense’, which keeps the lovers oriented towards each other. (shrink)

In this article, I show that the experience of addictive desires, which I also refer to as cravings, is similar to the experience of the state of being in love or of limerence. In other words, I argue that some part of the experience of addiction resembles some part of the experience of romantic love. Many in the literature have tried to show that one can be addicted to love in the way that love constitutes an addiction. Yet, none seem (...) to have taken the opposite route, which takes love not as an object of addiction, nor as something that can be reduced to it, but rather as a model from which we can understand addiction. This is odd, as such a perspective is warranted by first-person accounts of addiction. Therefore, in my view, addiction is like love, and not the other way around. Nevertheless, it is not addiction as a whole that is similar to love; love in itself cannot be compared to addiction: it is precisely the experience of addictive cravings in addiction that is like limerence. In order to put forward the similarities between experiences of cravings and experiences of limerence, I go through the basic components of limerence as described by Dorothy Tennov (1979), and prove that they are found in the experience of cravings. This comparison between the two phenomena allows me to introduce the notion of reciprocation in the addiction literature. (shrink)