What Love Is Quotes

“Calling ourselves objective doesn't make us any less biased (in fact, there is some evidence that it might make us more so). Being "normal" doesn't mean you have no perspective and no baggage, although it does mean you're less likely to notice these things. In any case, we can't make genuine philosophical progress on the hard questions by stuffing our personal baggage behind the sofa of "objectivity" and hoping nobody looks there.”
― Carrie Jenkins, What Love Is: And What It Could Be

“familiarity makes it so easy to mistake culture for nature.”
― Carrie S.I. Jenkins, What Love Is: And What It Could Be

“With love and with women, there is cultural potency to the idea that mysteriousness is part of what is special about them.”
― Carrie S.I. Jenkins, What Love Is: And What It Could Be

“To acquiesce or even revel in our own lack of understanding of love is not just intellectually unsatisfying, it exposes us to risk. It means refusing to arm ourselves with the knowledge and skills we need to stay safe and make good decisions. It means we are failing to understand a lot of what goes on around us day to day and are paying the price for that, whatever that price may be. Treating love as massively important yet totally incomprehensible shouldn't strike us as normal. It is a disaster. We are basing some of the key decisions of our lives on something we treat as an inexplicable mystery. Why aren't we more worried about this?”
― Carrie Jenkins, What Love Is: And What It Could Be

“Any kind of love that would not survive a long close look may not be such a wonderful thing to have in your life after all. Things that disappear when you look too closely often were never there in the first place. That's how illusions and tricks of the eye work. Perhaps you're thinking you'd rather be blissfully unaware, but ignorance is no guarantee of bliss. Illusions are unstable things that can crumble for all sorts of reasons and without warning, even if you studiously avoid looking at them.”
― Carrie Jenkins, What Love Is: And What It Could Be

“many people make their most significant life choices on the basis of whether they’re in love (or”
― Carrie Jenkins, What Love Is: And What It Could Be

“One's privilege can make it harder to get critical insights into the things affected by that privilege, for the simple reason that the workings of privilege are usually far easier to notice and understand when you are not their beneficiary. Beneficiaries of privilege often are not even aware of its existence: they have never needed to be. To compound this problem, it can be deeply uncomfortable to regard one's own favorable position within a social structure as due to privilege rather than solely one's own merits and efforts. So the beneficiaries of privilege can be strongly motivated to ignore it. If you are trying to figure out how romantic love works at a time when it is intimately bound up with sexism, heteronormativity, and other systematic oppressions, privilege is a philosophical hindrance.”
― Carrie Jenkins, What Love Is: And What It Could Be

“One's privilege can make it harder to get critical insights into the things affected by that privilege, for the simple reason that the workings of privilege are usually far easier to notice and understand when you are not their beneficiary.”
― Carrie Jenkins, What Love Is: And What It Could Be

“These days, instead of turning to myths and legends, we look to our own modern oracle: Google. And Google, in turn, looks back, watching what we ask for, tracking levels of public interest in “What is …” questions. Unsurprisingly, “What is love?” is constantly at or near the top of the list.”
― Carrie S.I. Jenkins, What Love Is: And What It Could Be

“Wikipedia can be a surprisingly good gauge of situations like this. To some extent, it tracks the pulse of our current state of public information. As of this writing,2 the Wikipedia entry for “love” describes exactly the choice I have in mind: “Biological models of love tend to see it as a mammalian drive, similar to hunger or thirst. Psychology sees love as more of a social and cultural phenomenon. Certainly love is influenced by hormones … and how people think and behave in love is influenced by their conceptions of love.”
― Carrie S.I. Jenkins, What Love Is: And What It Could Be