Present and critically assess Kolodny's account of love - Essay Example

Kolodny selects appropriate relationships which can serve as reason for love according to three characteristics defined in his theory; he finds that appropriate relationships are ongoing, historical and existent between particular people. He also notes that love has a symmetrical nature and applies it to all kinds of relationships reviewed in his paper. I believe that his theory tries to simplify love by excluding degenerate kinds of love from it; the nature of love is complex and it can appear in the situations which are excluded by Kolodny (2003) in his theory.

The complexity of love is easy to prove. For instance, there is no clear definition of love shared by all people. Since love is often treated as a set of beliefs about valuable relationships, the definition of these relationships will also be individual. For example, in love relationships between two partners both participants do not necessarily define their finally valuable relationships similarly. For one person the present relationships can be fully appropriate because they meet all beliefs and expectations shared by this person.

The other person can be unsatisfied with present relationships because they fail to become a realization of all beliefs shared by this person. As a result, one person will consider these relationships to be appropriate to reason love while the other person will not treat them as love at all. Even though such relationships meet all criteria set by Kolodny (2003), they are not symmetrical in their realization. In this way, the proposed model fails to consider such a situation where people in relationships define their finally valuable relationships in different way.

There are even more examples of degenerate relationships which are excluded from Kolodnys theory, but they can reason love. For instance, Kolodny (2003) believes that the relationships between student and teacher are not