As a situating example, think about the following statement, made after losing her two lovers by Rebecca Bloom, of the TV show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: “I don’t know who I am without them. This may also be a painful process filled with denial, anger and self-pity.īesides causing emotional pain, falling out of love with someone one is -or was - in a loving relationship with can be potentially disruptive for self-understanding. At other times, we realise that we need to fall out of love with someone we still care about. The thought of hurting them may cause us emotional pain and feelings of guilt. Sometimes, we fall out of love with a person that still loves us. We finish by arguing that this gives us reason to be wary of seeking to re-orient ourselves -or others- too quickly after falling out of love.įalling out of love is a delicate and important business, and as necessary to the attainment of wisdom as the reverse experience.Īfter being in a romantic partnership with someone, falling out of love with someone can be a painful experience. By re-evaluating who we were in the relationship and who we are now, we can escape from oppressive practices in subsuming relationships. While this disorientating process is typically taken to be harmful to the person experiencing it, we will explain how it can also have moral and prudential value.
We then move on to show how, through the relation between love and the self-concept, we can explain why the process of falling out of love with someone is so disorientating: when one is falling out of love, one loses an important point of reference for self-understanding.
This, however, is potentially dangerous for people involved in what we call ‘subsuming relationships’, who give up too much autonomy in the process of mutual shaping. In the context of our paper, we explain this common tenet in the philosophy of love as a change in the lovers’ self-concepts through a process of mutual shaping. We start with a brief background on theories of love and situate our argument within the views concerned with the lovers’ identities. In this paper we develop a view about the disorientation attached to the process of falling out of love and explain its prudential and moral value.
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