Monday, November 27, 2006

Is friendship necessary for romantic love?

At AskPhilosophers there is a question about love and friendship .

Is friendship necessary for romantic love? Is sexual attraction necessary for romantic love?

Alan Soble answers it no and yes .


I think the "no" answer is right, but that is because I tend to think of friendship along the lines of perhaps Aristotle and C.S. Lewis, while my understanding of romantic love places more emphasis on the "romantic" than on the "love" (were that not the case, there might well be something pointed in the question after all). I might go farther and claim that friendship and romantic love are incompatible, or tend to diffuse or undermine each other.



Nicholas D. Smith says that yes it is necessary.

First, although I think there are probably many different instantiations of what we might reasonably call "romantic love," I am also inclined to think that these--like instantiations of "human being" might be flawed in certain ways. A flawed human being (morally, physically, aesthetically, or medically) is still a human being. But if one asks, do human beings have two legs, I think the right answer is still "yes" even if not all actual human beings happen to have two legs. That is because when a human being does not have two legs, we do not think of their condition as the ideal--all other things equal, we would all prefer to have two legs, rather than none, one, or more than two. So I take your question not to be about whether there could be some romantic relationships in which those in the relationship were not friends, but rather whether a romantic relationship in which those in the relationship were friends would be part of our description of an ideal version of such a relationship. So...yes, certainly, I think that friendship is necessary for (an ideal of) romantic love, and I would regard an example of a "romantic love" in which this was lacking as a flawed example of such love.



In my opinion , it is not necessary . Love is more than friendship .There are certain areas where friendship and love overlaps but love involves more than those areas.