Alexandra Gustafson

In this thesis, I argue for the theoretical importance of love’s phenomenology. In particular, I utilize an experience I call ‘arrested attention’ to critically examine the role of relationships and reciprocity in romantic love: In the first chapter, I evaluate a family of views that I call ‘relationship-directed attitude’ views. These argue that love is partially constituted by an attitude toward a relationship, such as judging it to be valuable. I argue, however, that the experience of arrested attention cannot be successfully explained in terms of any relationship-directed attitude. Through a series of familiar cases, I demonstrate how arrested attention and the relationship-directed attitude always come apart. This surprising result should not only prompt philosophers of love to reconsider the fundamentality of relationship-directed attitudes—and relationships—to romantic love, but also to think again about the theoretical importance of love’s phenomenology. In the second chapter, I utilize resources from both philosophy and psychology to elaborate on the relationship between romantic love and attention. Employing the ‘dual-process model’ of human attention developed by cognitive neuroscientists and philosophers, I argue that each system is likely best associated with a distinct stage of love. In particular, I argue that, while in the earliest stage of love, our attention might become arrested by our beloved automatically, in the middle stage, we may have to self-direct our attention to sustain love. The end of love, I argue, crucially coincides with prolonged inattention. I conclude with a consideration of individual differences in attentional capacity. The result is a nuanced phenomenological picture of the constitutive role of attention in romantic love. Chapter three combines the insights from chapters one and two and applies them to the end of unrequited love. In particular, and by utilizing a variety of phenomenological data, I argue that, in order to move on from unwanted unrequited love, the unrequited lover ought to adjust their relevant second-order attitude. I consider a range of possible second-order attitudes an unrequited lover might adopt before ultimately recommending the attitude of ‘non-judgmental acceptance.’ This is because, although non-judgmental acceptance will not, in and of itself, cause us to stop loving, it alone avoids the worst problems associated with all other second-order attitudes.