to be loved is to be understood, but to be human is to change

Love is a profoundly social emotion.

At all stages of human development, love has in different forms been an integral part of culture.

Love is not in the least a private matter concerning only the two loving persons.

Love possesses a uniting element which is valuable to the collective.

There's an almost natural tendency for humans to assume that ideas are eternal and that words have stable, unchanging referents.

People have used the word 'love" for thousands of years, and so we assume naturally that there's one meaning underneath all these uses of love.

Yet it's clear that the concept of love does change.

In the 16th century, Machiavelli asked whether it was better to be feared or loved.

In the 2010s, several influential figures were saying it was better to be respected than loved.

Presently, I see people asking whether it is better to be loved or understood.

Because someone can love you, but not understand you at all.

While these questions are interesting in themselves, I think it's more fundamental and thus more interesting to observe that what people deem worthy of comparison to love changes.

Now, it's not that love itself changes.

There is no love in the abstract.

Love, like any social phenomenon, is interpreted, and so we might wonder what interpretation currently makes sense.

What is so valuable such that it can rival the significance of being loved?

That is a socio -historical question.

Why do many view understanding as belonging to the core of love instead of other adjacent qualities like tolerance, patience, or justice?

Addressing these questions give insight into current conceptions of love and our broader social structure.

During the Russian Civil War, Alexandra Kollontai observed the lack of emotional depth and commitment the revolutionaries gave their romantic relationships.

Not because the culture was particularly immature or because everyone had an avoidant attachment style.

Rather, the material conditions of revolution made it so that people had no time or energy for the deep feelings that typically accompany love.

Lying in bed for nights on end, unable to sleep as you yearn for your lover.

That's a loss of energy and focus that revolution couldn't afford.

"In face of the revolutionary threat, tender-winged Eros fled from the surface of life.

The fighting class could not have fallen under the power of winged Eros at a time when the clarion call of revolution was sounding."

However, once the revolution succeeded and the Soviet Republic was established, Soviet situationships fell out of favor.

People wanted something deeper, something longer lasting, because the material conditions allowed for that.

The material conditions changed and so too did people's relationship with love.

If we look at current material conditions, it makes sense why love and understanding are discussed together.

I want to be clear that, of course, I don't think our historical epoch is unique in wanting to be understood.

Everybody encounters a special and intimate psychological experience associated with what we call love.

But the interpretation of that experience changes depending on the social context.

Being respected may have felt like the right way to explain a special intimate feeling in the 1700s when respect was more rare.

But in our modern pluralist society, respect is kind of a baseline expectation to be able to move through the world.

So we have to consider the structure of current society to see why being understood is now the fitting term to interpret love.

What makes understanding so special for personal relationships in a way that other virtues aren't?

For one, the tremendous accessibility of products and services and the economic logic that mediates our relationships has devalued material instantiations of love.

You don't need someone to burn CDs for you when you've got a cheap streaming service that can play any song you want at the touch of a button.

Buying movie tickets for your partner loses value when you can watch anything at home.

I'm not saying these acts aren't loving anymore.

I would feel happy if someone made me mixtapes.

But the social value of these acts has diminished.

There are always convenient alternatives and we don't want love to be based in convenience.

We might still want loved ones to do these material acts for us, but there is no need to rely on them.

In fact, many think it is a virtue to be materially self-sufficient.

Techno-capitalism nurtures isolated individuals, making others more obsolete.

Under this system, it can feel like the only thing safe from obsolescence is our immaterial recognition of each other.

How I understand you literally cannot be bought or possessed or reproduced.

What matters then is not what our lover does, but whether what they do is responsive to US.

This means the standard for what counts as being understood has also increased.

The digital age makes it materially possible to know more about others than ever before.

You can know someone you've never met just by stalking their various social media accounts, their likes and following.

In the past, burning a perfect CD for your partner would require you to be attentive and present when you're together, so that you remember comments they make about music, or make complex inferences about their music taste based off of their general disposition.

Now, if you want to burn someone a CD, you don't have to be that attentive when you're together.

Even if you're on your phone half the time, you can always look at their Spotify listening history later, or check out their music highlights on Instagram.

An act that once required emotional attunement can now be accomplished by an act of data collection.

We also voluntarily hand out personal information for others to consume, posting our internal thoughts, photos of places we regularly frequent, clicking accept all to cookies which makes data brokers jump with glee.

Target can literally know you're pregnant before your own family does.

ChatGPT can give relationship advice tailored to your specific life details.

It doesn't mean much to know things about people anymore.

Knowing a lot of facts about someone might have constituted understanding in the past, but this is no longer sufficient.

Otherwise, AI chatbots would seem to understand us.

The standard for love must rise above what's ordinary.

The standard for love must be special.

Thus, to be loved is to be understood deeply, almost intuitively, as if to preserve a still uniquely human trait.

I saw this TikTok where this creator tied Jean-Paul Sartre's concept of the Look to the intimacy of being understood.

People say, I love you, when what they really mean is, I love the idea of you that I've already constructed in my head.

That version is rarely accurate and is often shaped by desire, timing and personal narrative, or by what the other person represents more than what they are.

She says when someone perceives you accurately, it's not generous, it's not romantic, but it's precise.

To be caught in someone's look is to be seen as who you really are.

But I wonder if there actually has to be a distinction between accuracy and romance, between precision and generosity.

I think of the philosopher Iris Murdoch and how for her, what is true IS what is good and beautiful.

Again, accuracy of knowledge is not special anymore.

That can be replicated by AI and by the business of data collection.

Thus, true understanding is not directed towards a single, accurate set of facts.

Rather understanding approaches people with a just and loving vision.

I don't care how normal you think you are, we all have our quirks or flaws that can rub people the wrong way.

Sometimes, I'm not the most honest person.

But it stems from a very complicated history of lying to maintain a sense of self, insecurity about presenting who I really am, etc, etc. When I am dishonest, a stranger may just perceive the objective fact of my lie and judge me.

But someone who loves me will want to interpret me charitably.

Generosity makes the lover's understanding more accurate.

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I tell you everything, every damn embarrassing thing.

You don't trust me.

Constantly talking isn't necessarily communicating.

I decided to make this video because I was torn between two thoughts.

On the one hand, it felt intuitive that love required understanding.

I mean, how could you claim to love someone if you can't remember little details about them?

Like whether they prefer apples peeled or not.

Like many, I saw this viral interview about how I remember you is more intimate than I love you.

A year later, we rematched on Hinge.

He was like, let me make you dinner.

And I was like, just reminding you, like, I'm celiac. And

he's like, oh, don't worry, I already got your favorite chickpea pasta.

In that moment, I felt very seen and very loved.

Because it wasn't just like, oh, he remembered I have an allergy.

We hadn't spoken in a year.

And there were still these details that he was like, those are worth holding on to.

Those details about you are worth something to me.

As I watched this, I thought, yeah, if someone I went on a date with still remembered a year later that I preferred iced over hot coffee, I would get butterflies.

But on the other hand, I felt unsure about how compatible love and this deep sense of understanding we want is.

It is a fact that everyone changes, often in huge and unpredictable ways.

If we're looking to be understood in a deep, almost intuitive way, how can that be reconciled with the dynamic nature of identity?

There are clearly some types of love that can and perhaps should persist in spite of understanding.

Parental love might require parents to love their child even if they don't understand their life choices.

Being a good political subject might require us to care about our community members' well-being even if we don't understand each other.

True religious love looks like loving thy neighbor even when they ascribe to a different religion.

But why does understanding feel so crucial to romantic relationships?

This might have to do with the fact that when we love someone, we love the particular individual, not just the combination of qualities they have.

Most philosophers of love reject the quality view of love because if we loved people based on their qualities, then we could just create love machines that churned out perfect lovers.

Or when you lost a loved one, you could simply replace them with someone with the same qualities.

To understand someone shows that you get me as a particular individual.

But this is where the tension between understanding and love becomes evident.

The unique particularity of each individual is precisely what gets in the way of understanding.

The individual is both a subject with the ability to change and an object constrained by static facts.

I am 5'3", living in Toronto as a student, born in 2002 to two parents.

I can't change many facts about myself and that restrains my freedom.

I'll never play in the WNBA no matter how strong my will is.

But as a subject, I have the power to interpret facts about my life in different ways.

An event that meant a lot to me at 20 years old may no longer feel that significant anymore.

An interest I used to be embarrassed of may now be reinterpreted as cool, giving me confidence that I never thought I would have.

By reinterpreting facts about the self, we change how we understand and carry ourselves.

But this process of reinterpretation doesn't happen alone.

Much of our identity and self-conception comes from seeing ourselves through the eyes of others.

Love's gaze sees us in a particularly intimate way.

It peeks through the barriers we usually put up for others.

"The other's look fashions my body in its nakedness, causes it to be born, sculptors it, produces it as it is, sees it as I shall never see it.

The other holds a secret, the secret of what I am."

Thus, love tends to change us often unexpectedly.

We may find behavior, habits interests and beliefs altered through a loving relationship.

Different facts about our lives become salient to us depending on the self-conception we ascribe to.

And our behavior will change to reflect new self-conceptions.

But this entails that being understood is never guaranteed.

Someone could understand you very well in the first few years of dating, but through loving each other, each person changes and actually comes to understand the other less.

Sometimes lovers outgrow each other, but they also couldn't have done that growing without each other.

The tension between our subjectivity and our objectivity makes it impossible to reduce people to some higher coherent principle that makes sense.

Individuals are full of contradiction and rich history.

"What if the other is irreducible, not only to my or our thought, but to thought as such?"

Put another way, is love reducible to a feature of the intellect, like understanding?

Or does love necessarily escape intellectual bounds?

Sartre thought love could never be confined by understanding, which made love a failed project.

Here's the dilemma. We

gain a stable conception of ourselves through our lover's perception.

Facing our subjectivity, our innate potential for change, that's scary. But in

that's scary. But in the eyes of love, we can escape subjectivity and feel understood as a coherent object.

We think of ourselves as funny or smart or kind because our lover's treatment of us affirms that we are those things.

Mundane facts like the veins on my hands, the way one's eyelashes curl, the slight gap between one's teeth.

The gaze of our lover gives these facts value and thus reasons to exist.

But here's the other scary part.

Our lover is a subject who can change.

Who's to say they will perceive me the same way forever or even tomorrow?

But if they change, then my sense of self also destabilizes.

Just tell me the truth!

Chase! You're

scaring me, Pearl.

But I also can't control them to stay the same, otherwise their perception of me is not genuine.

And again, I might also change through their perception of me.

If to be loved is to be understood, then will love always fail?

Call me a romantic, but I hate that conclusion.

I want love to succeed goddammit.

There are two ways we might move forward then.

One option is to just accept that no one can ever wholly understand each other, so we should accept love without understanding.

But this doesn't seem right.

This blanket disposal of understanding ignores how some people are prone to be more misunderstood than others due to socio-historical inequalities.

When a woman is cognizant of the unequal social position between her and her male partner, for example, she feels more vulnerable to domination instead of partnership.

Too many guys think they're a concept, or I complete them, or I'm gonna make them alive.

Being understood might matter more to the woman, because women's experiences are prone to systemic misunderstanding.

Many women grew up in patriarchal families where their needs were often misunderstood.

There is a disproportionate number of cases of women being dismissed by doctors for overreacting about their symptoms or not understanding their own bodies, only to later discover an actual serious medical issue. Thus,

medical issue. Thus, being understood can help reassure that these unjust patterns will not seep into her personal relationship.

Moreover we might also ask, who has the privilege of being loved without being understood?

For some, an intimate relationship is the only safe space to experience their true self.

The second option for how to move forward then, and the option I tentatively endorse, is to change what we expect out of understanding in love.

Being understood in love is not purely an intellectual activity.

It's not enough to remember facts like their favorite restaurant or artist, or even deeper information like their trauma.

Because humans are not stable objects, and we don't relate to our own facts in the same way at all times.

We are subjects who can and should be allowed to change.

That doesn't mean we should expect nothing from our lovers.

Of course, love also requires responsibility and commitment.

But perhaps the kind of understanding required for love includes being okay with not understanding sometimes.

Going back to what I said about Iris Murdoch earlier, one of the ways in which knowing and understanding might be different is that understanding is like a "just and loving" vision that makes you feel seen even if it clashes with "objective" facts.

Think about that feeling of reuniting with someone you loved after being separated for years, and still getting them as if they'd never left.

These estranged lovers don't know many facts about each other anymore.

Maybe they listen to different music now.

Maybe they hold different spiritual beliefs.

But those aren't necessary for seeing the other as a particular subject.

Understanding has to be flexible so that when love changes, you don't feel your sense of self being attacked or neglected.

To be loved is to be understood.

And to be understood is to SEE me, even when you struggle to recognize me.

With a topic like this, there is always more that I wish I could say, or things I wish I could clarify better.

But I guess that's your task to help me out in the comments.

What does being understood or being loved mean to you?

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What the heck is ideology?

In our Brain Nourishment series episode 6, we got Raymond Geuss's book chapter, Ideology. And also

Ideology. And also Susan Sontag's essay, The Artist as the Exemplary Sufferer.

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