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The Love Defense: Does True Love Require Suffering?

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The Love Defense: Does True Love Require Suffering?

Aside from what we need just to survive, love is probably the single most important thing to us as human beings. So here's a question worth sitting with: can love be had without any cost at all? Or is there some part of real love that necessarily requires suffering? Let's consider it.

A Love Story

The moment I first saw my wife, a thought went through my head: "Oh — that's what the girl I'm going to marry looks like." We'd been talking on the phone for a couple of months before that — her step-sister's husband happened to be in my pilot training class, gave me her picture and number, and I laid down some game. I flew out to see her in person, and four months later we were engaged. Six months after that, we were married. We've now been married eighteen years.

People have told me over the years that "love at first sight" isn't real love — that true love only comes years into a marriage, after you've weathered things together. That got me thinking philosophically about a question that turns out to matter a great deal for the Problem of Evil: what actually is true love?

Aristotle's Three Loves

To answer that, it helps to go back to Aristotle (384–322 BC), who gave one of the most influential analyses of love and friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics (Book VIII–IX). Aristotle noticed that we use the word "love" for some pretty different things, and he sorted them into three categories:

  1. Friendship of Utility — you love someone because they're useful to you. I love the baristas at High Tide Coffee because they make great cappuccinos.
  2. Friendship of Pleasure — you love someone because they're enjoyable to be around. I had a friend in college who always planned the parties and was hilarious — I loved him because being around him was fun.
  3. Friendship of Virtue — you love someone because of their good character, and being around them makes you a better person. I had a professor in grad school who was so knowledgeable and dedicated to his craft that just being near him made me a better philosopher and a better person.

Notice what all three have in common: they're forms of self-interested love. You love the other person because of some benefit that flows back to you — usefulness, pleasure, or moral improvement. There's absolutely nothing wrong with any of this. When I first met my wife, I loved her this way, no question. She was beautiful and fun (pleasant), and she was a genuinely good person who made me want to be better (virtuous). I'm honestly not sure how "useful" she was, but two out of three isn't bad.

Aquinas and True Love

But is self-interested love the whole story? Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274 AD), working within an Aristotelian framework centuries later, argued that real, true love (what he'd call caritas in its highest form) is something more: the desire for the good of the beloved — full stop, for their own sake, not for what you get out of it.

Here's how I came to understand the difference personally. About five years ago I went through a period of severe anxiety attacks. My wife stayed awake with me until four in the morning, more than once, knowing she'd still have to get up with the kids a few hours later. She wasn't doing it because she expected anything back from me in that moment — she just wanted what was best for me. Similarly, I wanted to have children with her — not to "pay her back" for anything, but because I wanted to love her the way she'd loved me: by willing something good for her, for its own sake. That, I think, is true love.

One objection worth flagging: some philosophers doubt that truly selfless love — love with zero self-interest woven into it anywhere — is even psychologically possible for creatures like us. That's a real debate (I get into it more on the philosophy of love playlist). But even if pure selflessness turns out to be an ideal we only approximate, the key point survives: true love is centered on the good of the other person first, even if, in the end, pursuing their good is also what makes us most fulfilled.

Love as a Habit, Not a Feeling

Here's a question that might occur to you: wasn't that the same thing I had when I first saw my wife? If you'd asked twenty-two-year-old me, "Do you want good things or bad things to happen to her?" of course I'd have said good things. But that's not saying much — I hope good things happen to everybody. That's not yet the demanding, costly kind of love we're after.

The missing ingredient is desire in the active sense — not just wishing someone well, but being motivated to actually go out and pursue their good. And this is where Aquinas, following Aristotle, makes a crucial move: love isn't fundamentally a feeling you have — it's a habit, a matter of settled character, built through repeated action, the same way courage or any other virtue is built.

Think about how you get better at anything virtuous. You don't become courageous by feeling brave one time — you become courageous by repeatedly acting bravely until it becomes who you are. Same with physical fitness: you don't get strong from one trip to the gym; the habit is built through repetition, and often through resistance. True love works the same way: you continuously do what's best for the other person, and in doing so, you become the kind of person who wants to do those things. That settled disposition — not the initial spark of attraction — is true love.

Notice something important about this picture: it says nothing about how the other person makes you feel. When people get divorced today, you'll often hear something like "I'm just not happy anymore." But on the habit-based view of love, you don't get married to make yourself happy — you get married to make your spouse happy, and paradoxically, it's through that self-giving orientation that you become a happy person yourself. It's not the way someone else makes you feel that produces your happiness — it's the kind of person you become, through loving them, that does.

There's a philosophical cousin of this idea worth naming: Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), the Danish philosopher, argued in Works of Love (1847) that genuine love is fundamentally an act of will and duty — a commitment — rather than a mere feeling of erotic or romantic attraction. For Kierkegaard, love that's commanded ("you shall love") is actually more secure and more truly free than love that simply happens to you, because it's chosen and sustained rather than passively felt. This connects the Love Defense directly back to the Free Will Defense from Episode 8: love that is genuinely chosen — freely willed, over and over, especially when it's hard — is a categorically different, and arguably greater, good than love that is simply an automatic emotional reflex. A love that costs you nothing to give was never really a free gift in the first place.

Can This Love Be Built Without Anything Going Wrong?

Here's the question that connects all this to the Problem of Evil. My wife and I have gone through some genuinely difficult things in eighteen years of marriage. At each point, we've had to lean on and support each other. Ask yourself: if nothing had ever gone wrong — no hardship, no crisis, no lack, nothing to serve each other through — would we still love each other the way we do now?

Maybe, to some degree. But almost certainly not to the same depth. We've had to practice loving each other through difficulty, much the way you have to actually lift weights, under resistance, to get stronger. You can't build the muscle of self-giving love in a vacuum where nothing is ever needed.

The Argument

Putting this together:

  1. True love requires (or is greatly benefited by) serving the beloved.
  2. Serving someone presupposes that they lack some good they need.
  3. The lack of a needed good is itself a kind of evil (a privation, as we discussed in the Manichaean Defense video).
  4. So, true love requires (or is greatly benefited by) the existence of evil.
  5. True love is a great good.
  6. So, possibly, God allows evil for the sake of true love.

I'd actually tighten premise (1) slightly: rather than saying true love strictly requires serving the beloved, I think it's more accurate to say true love is greatly benefited by serving the beloved. That would shift (4) to say true love is greatly benefited by the existence of evil, rather than strictly requiring it. The overall conclusion doesn't change much either way — God would still be allowing evil, at least in part, for the sake of the deeper, more resilient love that grows through serving one another.

Objections

Objection 1: Why not just make us love without any suffering involved? This is a fair question, and I don't think it has a knockdown answer beyond this: love that is forged through serving another person in their need is a particular kind of beautiful thing — a costly, self-giving love — that simply isn't available any other way. If God values that specific kind of good (and I think there's reason to believe He does, given how central self-sacrificial love is across the moral and religious traditions we admire most), then allowing the conditions that make it possible is allowing something of real value into the world, even though it comes at a cost.

Objection 2: We don't always succeed at loving well. Sometimes when we're called to serve someone in need, we fail — we're selfish, we're absent, we mess it up. Doesn't that undercut the whole argument? Not necessarily. All the Love Defense needs is that evil creates the opportunity for this kind of love to be exercised. That we sometimes fail to take the opportunity doesn't mean the opportunity wasn't a genuine good — it just means love, like any virtue, can be practiced well or poorly.

Not the Whole Answer

I want to be clear, as always: this isn't meant to explain every instance of evil in the world. I don't think the Love Defense accounts for all suffering, and I'll keep exploring other angles in this series. But I do think it captures something real and important about why a loving God might allow at least some hardship into a world He's building people up in — because the deepest, most durable love we know isn't a feeling that falls on us. It's a habit forged in the furnace of actually needing each other.