Beyond Friendship and Eros

WHY ANOTHER

INTERPRETATION

OF LOVE?

this book is the culmination of our over-twenty-year attempt to

articulate the meaning of a dialogical love relationship between a

man and a woman who are married, but not to each other. We will articulate

the meaning of dialogical love throughout this book by reflecting

on concrete examples, seeking the meaning of this relationship in light

of the thought of scholars, and by dialogue between the authors. For

now, we will merely identify dialogical love as love that grows out of

personal interaction that is initiated by the presence of the other and

responds directly to that presence. It contrasts with “love” in which persons

use each other to meet personal and sexual needs and employ cultural

prescriptions to dictate the relationship between the sexes. Dialogical

love is not a thing that can be used or had but is a “love that is lived in

. . . and within the light of which” we live (Eliot 1959, 88).

We are attempting to initiate a way of thinking about relationships

between men and women that is already coming into being in our

so-called postmodern era. By postmodern we do not necessarily mean

the many assertions that are now being associated with the word postmodern.

Our meaning of postmodern comes from the time before most

of contemporary postmodern talk. It came from philosophies of history

such as those of Arnold Toynbee, Oswald Spengler, and Pitirim Sorokin.

By postmodern we mean that the modern age is collapsing, and we are

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in a period of confusion and promise much like the Renaissance. In our

time, many of the traditional ways of being are being challenged and

new ways are being envisioned.

The new understanding of women and their place in the world is

certainly an example of such change. Looking at women in a new way

requires a new understanding of the relationship of men and women.

Amazingly, John Stuart Mill and his friend (and later, wife) Harriet Taylor,

understood this in the...