And other philosophical abstractions

All day, every day, therapist, mother, maid
Nymph then virgin, nurse then a servant
Just an appendage, live to attend him
So that he never lifts a finger
24/7 baby machine
So he can live out his picket fence dreams
It’s not an act of love if you make her
You make me do too much labour  
(Paris Paloma, Labour)

The history of the philosophy of love can be read as a long narrative about human desire; but also, silently, as the history of inequality. In almost every era, love appears as a universal experience, although it is experienced in profoundly different ways. For men, it appears as one dimension among others: an occupation of existence. For women, it often becomes the very meaning of life. This difference does not arise from the feeling itself, but from the way culture has distributed freedom, time, and identity between the sexes.

In ancient times, love was already thought of from a male perspective. In Plato, eros leads the soul beyond the body, in an ascent towards beauty. The one who loves moves, seeks, overcomes. Love is a path, not a destination; an impulse that accompanies a life dedicated to philosophy, politics, action. Even when love takes centre stage, it does not devour the subject who loves. The lover remains focused on the world. When women appear, they occupy above all the place of symbolic objects: something that inspires, rarely something that thinks. From early on, therefore, love is structured as an active experience on the one hand and a contemplated presence on the other.

Centuries later, Christianity transforms love into devotion, but maintains the asymmetry. The feminine ideal becomes linked to care, purity, dedication. While men are divided between God, war, work, and thought, women are drawn to the intimate sphere, to bonds, to fidelity. Love becomes their central virtue. The distribution is already beginning to take shape: he loves, but he also builds; she loves and, through this, she exists. The distance between loving and being loved already heralds an asymmetry that would continue for centuries.

Modernity shifts love to the inner self. With the birth of Romanticism, this difference reaches its most delicate point. Love ceases to be merely a moral or spiritual issue and becomes a promise of completeness. Passion becomes the great drama of modern subjectivity. However, it is not distributed equally: for men, love appears as an intense episode among other projects: career, work, adventure, social recognition. For women, the same love is presented as the final destination, as the place where their identity finds fulfilment. Marriage, home and intimacy become the territory where she must accomplish what he can temporarily abandon. The home becomes the setting where love must prove its truth, and this setting has a gender.

This is where the thesis becomes visible: men are educated to have a life in which love fits; women, to have a life that fits within love.

Nietzsche, in criticising the romantic ideal, reveals something essential. For him, absolute passions can threaten the autonomy of the individual. The creative subject needs to keep his distance, to preserve his own strength. Although he does not formulate a feminist critique, his distrust of totalising love shows that the risk of fusion is to lose one’s own self. What Nietzsche describes as an existential danger becomes, for many women, a socially expected condition: to love until one disappears. Love, then, loses its innocence. It is no longer redemption; it is tension. Your critique opens up space to see that love is not necessarily liberating — it can also be a field of power.

Simone de Beauvoir accurately names this historical difference. In The Second Sex, she shows that men were constituted as subjects: those who act, work, create, move towards the world; while women were taught to seek recognition in the gaze of others. When love presents itself, therefore, it occupies different places. For him, love is one occupation among many. He can love deeply and still preserve a defined identity outside the relationship. For her, love often becomes an absolute project: the relationship ceases to be part of life and becomes the axis that organises all other parts.

Beauvoir describes this movement with almost painful clarity. A woman in love tends to transform the man into meaning, into a measure of value, into a justification for her own existence. She invests totality where he invests partiality. He loves without abandoning his world; she abandons her world to love. The imbalance is not in the intensity of the feeling, but in the structure that defines what each can lose.

Love, thus, ceases to be merely a sentimental theme and becomes a political problem. Beauvoir does not claim that women love more; she claims that they have been taught to exist through love. The loving union, so celebrated by romantic tradition, proves to be a trap when it requires one of the two to disappear in order for the couple to exist. To love, in these terms, is to lose oneself.

Psychoanalysis helps to understand the depth of this phenomenon. To love is to seek recognition, to desire to be chosen. But when an entire subjectivity is built around this choice, love becomes a permanent risk of annulment. The woman not only loves the other: she loves the possibility of existing through him. The man, on the contrary, usually loves from a place that is already socially secure; he does not need to put everything at stake to be recognised.

Freud and, later, Lacan describe love as an attempt to fill a structural void. The beloved is invested with idealizations that no human being can sustain. To love is also to project, to desire recognition, to negotiate one’s own incompleteness. Love is no longer destiny or virtue: it is the movement of desire, always unstable.

Contemporary feminist philosophy insists that this difference is not natural. It is taught, repeated, transmitted as if it were inevitable. Boys learn that love is one dimension of life; girls learn that it is the very story of life. One moves on even when he loves; the other is encouraged to stay, wait, sustain. Thus, love becomes an occupation for him and a vocation for her.

Bell hooks asks why love has been associated with female sacrifice and proposes thinking of it as an ethical practice, not as submission. Judith Butler shows that romantic roles are performative — repeated until they seem natural. Love ceases to be an essence and becomes a learned social language. If it was possible to teach women to live for love, perhaps it is possible to learn to love in another way.

Perhaps the most delicate point of this thesis is to admit that the problem is not love itself, but the inequality of freedom surrounding it. When a person has multiple projects, love can be experienced as a choice. When one’s entire identity is channelled into the bond, love becomes an ontological necessity. What is an experience for one is a foundation for the other.

The historical line of philosophy reveals, then, a kind of paradox: the more love was culturally idealised, the more it was associated with the feminine. And the more men were linked to action and creation, the more love became just one of their possible occupations. He can love without disappearing; she was taught to prove her love precisely through disappearance.

Today, when revisiting this trajectory, we realise that the central question is not whether men and women love differently, but why they were allowed to love in such unequal ways.

Perhaps the true philosophical transformation occurs when love ceases to be the meaning of life for only one side and becomes an encounter between two existences that already have meaning before they meet.