What does ‘I am in love with you’ mean?

When you tell me ‘you are in love with me,’ it seems to be saying something different. When I tell you ‘i am in love with you’, I also mean something different to ‘i love you‘. ‘I am in love with you‘ has a temporal aspect that ‘i love you‘ does not. The former seems to be a sort of report of what is happening right now, either in this instant, or a period of time that is close to the present. I seem to be saying something that is true now. Being in love with someone seems to be a much less stable state than loving someone, even though neither are as stable as we would like them to be. 

 

When I say ‘i love you’, I am claiming something that is somewhat epistemic[1]  in nature. It seems to be (at least reported as) something true irrespective of what is happening now. ‘I love you’ is much more ‘in my head’, internal to me. Lovers often confess their love for each other when they are on opposite ends of the earth. Most of the time, lovers confess their love even more readily when they are apart than when they are together. On the other hand, ‘i am in love with you’ is almost something that concerns the external. There is a physical shape and a tangible, visceral aspect to it. When I say ‘i am in love with you’, it seems to imply that something is happening now, there is action, there is tension and dynamism now. ‘Though i love you, I was not in love with you but now i am‘ seem to be in the background of every utterance of “i am in love with you“. Lovers seldom confess or feel that they are in love with each other when they are apart.

 

Love as an active attitude

 

To say ‘i love you’ is to say I hold a certain attitude towards you that is epistemic in nature, it is akin to saying i know that ‘i love you” and this is true. To say ‘i am in love with you’ is to say that that epistemic claim of attitude has force and that force is in-action now—it has pulled me in. Note, love is different to more impersonal attitudes like suspicion where it takes a certain sort of active commitment and trying on the part of the person that is suspicious. Love is different, love captures us and moves us. When we are in love, it is not the case that we pull ourselves into the state of loving, but that the very love we are in pulls us into it. When we love someone, loving them feels like floating along in a stream. It is easier to love than not love. 

 

Love as an emotion

 

Before diving into what we mean by ‘i am in love with you’, let’s first turn our attention to love. Assuming love is (or at least partly) an emotion, it is different to most other emotions, because this emotion is inherently tied with another. I can be happy without being happy about anything. I can just be happy or in the very least, it makes sense to say just I am happy without specifying the cause of my happiness or the subject that my happiness is directed towards. But this is not true of love. I cannot love without loving something, even if it is an elusive thing like a dream or an idealism, and it is true even in the case of self love. It is only possible to love yourself insofar as you see yourself as distinct from yourself in some way, respecting its wishes and desires, rights and worth. The only emotion that seems to share this characteristic of being inherently tied with a subject that it is directed toward is hate, an emotion that is often seen as the juxtaposing archetype. We cannot simply hate without there being something that the hate is directed towards or incited by. So, it seems love is not just an emotion. It is also inherently an attitude, which begs the existence of something else. A world in which only yourself exists has not possibility of love or hate. So ‘I love you’ means something like ‘I have an attitudinal emotion of love that is directed towards and centres around you’. Love is not just an emotion, but also an attitude. Like hate, it is an attitudinal emotion that in its very essence demands there to be something that it is projected onto or directed towards.

 

Two readings of ‘I am in love with you’ & challenges

 

It is peculiar that we distinguish between ‘i am loving you’ and ‘i am in love with you’. What do we mean by ‘in love’? When we say ‘i am in love’ do we mean something like ‘i am in Rome’, or ‘I am in shock’? Given what we’ve said about love before as an emotional and attitudinal state, it commonly means something similar to ‘I am in shock’. This is uncontroversial. Understood in this ways, when we add the object of love ‘I am in love with you’, we mean something like ‘I am in shock because of you’.  But I think we can understand love in both ways. Both in vein of ‘I am in shock with you’ and in the vein of ‘I am in Rome with you’. Under this second reading, Iove is a state much like a figurative place that one can be in. Under this interpretation, when we say ‘i am in love’, we mean something like I am inside and consumed by a love. How should we understand ‘i am in love with you’ under this reading? Does ‘with’ here mean the same as it does in ‘I am in Rome with you’ or ‘I am pleased with you’? Again, we have one interpretation that seems more commonsensical and another that is more eccentric. There are two ways in which I say ‘I am in love with you‘ and they can mean different things depending what that ‘love‘ we are in refers to. 

 

In the first reading, that love is my love for you. It says I am in, consumed by, standing inside my love for you, I am surrounded by that love. But notice an odd thing about the ways in which we use this phrase under this reading, which is the standard commonsensical reading. We can say to someone who doesn‘t love us back ‘i am in love with you’ even though they are not technically ‘in‘ that love since they don‘t love us at all. The love in the first under reading, is merely a love that I, the utterer, have for you, the uttered to. Under the first reading, ‘i am in love with you’ in fact means something like ‘I am in love with regards to you’, ‘I am standing inside and consumed by my love that is directed towards you’. This is a rather disappointing. Understood in this way the sentence ‘i am in love with you’ seems to loose all its magic and mystery, and romance. Even though I think this is literally what we mean by I am in love you—I am in love with regards to you, to say that this paints a complete image of how we should understand the phrase is incomplete, because even though this disappointingly sober interpretation is what we literally mean, it is not what we hope for it to mean. This is especially true, when we utter ‘i am in love with you’ someone who also loves us back. When we say ‘i am in love with you’ in these circumstances, this sentence seems to take on an additional meaning. To say that ‘i am in love with you‘ is categorically similar to ‘I am frustrated with you’, ‘I am obsessed with you’ is deeply unsatisfying. We are left wanting and this wanting seems to be fulfilled if we employ the understanding of ‘with’ under the second reading, which begs, allows and denotes a sort of togetherness. 

 

In the second reading, that love is something bigger, it is not merely a love that one has for another. But a love that both can be in. It says I am in, consumed by, standing inside, and surrounded by Love (to be distinguished from love) with you. Under this reading, unlike the first, we are both literally, as the sentence states, in that love. When we say ‘with’, it does not mean the same as when we say ‘I am obsessed with you’, ‘I am frustrated with you’ or ‘I am clueless with regards to you’. Unlike the first reading, it doesn‘t mean ‘with regards to’. ‘I am in love with you‘ here means something similar to ‘I am in Rome with you‘. ‘In’ here is a literal preposition.

 

There are two loves. There is my love that is directed towards you, but there is also a Love that I am in with you. And we have motivation for interpreting it both commonsensically and eccentrically because together they cohere with our common usage of the phrase and satisfy our intuitions of what being in love feels like. 

 

We have good reasons to allow the second interpretation, but to adopt it, we must confront many questions that aren’t so easy to answer: What is the love that we are in? What sort of love can accommodate the lover and the beloved like a place? Could it be the love that each has for the other such that they are both in their own love for the other as well as the other’s love for them? Though this seems to be the most intuitive answer, it begs a whole host of difficult metaphysical[2] problems. Firstly, how can love, an attitudinal emotion, something elusive, be something literal that encompasses people? Even if it could, how can each person’s love be big enough and be outside of oneself to encompass the person whose love it is? Even if it was possible, how can it also encompass the beloved who is metaphysically a whole other different being, distinct and separate? Even if it could, how can each person be in two places at once, both in their own love, and the love of the other too? Perhaps the two can merge their loves and perhaps they can overlap, but how and by what?

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These seems to be implausibly hard questions. We might be better off abandoning this project. There is however, a slightly easier way for Christians to avoid the turmoil of these metaphysical problems, a solution ‘served up to them’ one might even say. Though perhaps to the secular reader, it’ll probably seem like an even more unacceptable and irreconcilable position. Regardless of your position, allow me some time, bear with me:

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A Christian answer

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For Christians this greater love is God, this love is Jesus, this love is Love itself. Understanding the love that we are in this way gives us the hope means being in love with another can bring us into Love, and give us glimpses of what being in that Love is like. It means perhaps our marriage on earth is a portal through which we might understand and experience parts of what it means to be married to God in heaven. Understanding this love as Love means perhaps love need not be so fragile and perishable as it is often claimed to be.

 

Interpreting the second reading in such a Christian way seeks to takes the bible seriously (and quite literally) when it writes “God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him“ (1 John 4:16). So, when we tell another ‘I am in love with you’, it means I am in, consumed by, standing inside, and surrounded by Love (to be distinguished from love) with you. And that Love is God. 

 

So there is a sense in which i can be in love with you like ‘I am in Rome with you’ (that can be understood in a secular or Christian religious way) but to think think that they are categorically identical would be a mistake, because unlike being in love, being in Rome needn’t be causally related to the person one is in Rome with at all. There is a sense in which one’s love for another pulls one into the greater Love that one is now in. When we are in love with another, it brings us into Love, and reveals other dimensions of what it means to be in God.

 

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[1] epistemology/epistemic - philosopher’s jargon for knowledge.

[2] metaphysics/metaphysical - philosopher’s jargon for reality and truth, the content of which are independent of us. distinct from knowledge and perception which are dependent on the existence and capabilities of us (the knower and perceiver)