Philosopher Huge LaFollette is the author of "Personal Relationships: Love, Identity, and Morality" (1996). LaFollette studies close personal relationships. These are intimate or loving relationships.

LaFollette explains that close, personal relationships entail partners' commitment to making the interests and needs of one's partner become one's own interests and needs. These relationships are, therefore, close, personal, intimate, loving, and committed to mutualizing each other's interests and needs.

These relationships are intrinsically valuable. LaFollette also believes that such relationships are essential for self-knowledge and for increasing one's moral capacity. That's a remarkable claim, but it is not a new idea. Long ago Aristotle wrote about a necessary connection between moral capacity and close personal relationships. This connection is mutually causal -- moral capacity and rewarding experiences in close personal relationships cause each other. LaFollette has filled in many more details of Aristotle's understanding.

Using LaFollette's understanding, we can say we human beings discover and fulfill our very own personalities and moral capacity by means of creating intimacy and love in close personal relationships. LaFollette explains that when we voluntarily love someone, we do so because the beloved acts lovably. This is opposite to the idea that unconditional love is even possible, much less desirable, in voluntary love relationships. (These ideas do not apply, that is, to relationships such as those between parents and their children, where a parent's unconditional love for his or her child may be possible.)
There are good reasons why we love and are loved voluntarily. Those reasons have to with how we behave. Not only do we have to have good reasons for loving, others will have to have good reasons for loving us. As LaFollette explains, nobody wants to be told, "I don't love you because you are intelligent, sensitive, aesthetically tasteful, humorous, pleasantly disposed, or challenging. In fact, I don't like any of your traits. I just love you." If someone told you this, you would wonder if they really love YOU at all! The lover and the beloved want to be loved for good reasons, and those reasons have to do with how they behave.

So where can we find concrete guidance teaching us how to behave lovingly?

One source of guidance is the work by John Gottman, who studied how couples behave who have long-term satisfactory love relationships. Learn more about Gottman's work at www.gottman.com Another source of guidance is a book titled "We Love Each Other But" by Ellen Wachtel. There are many more good sources, of course.

From the two sources named above, we can learn quite a lot. From Gottman we learn, for instance, that it is important to have positive experiences that are more frequent than negative experiences -- by a ratio of at least 5 to 1! From Wachtel, we get the excellent advice to treat your beloved as if you were the president of his or her fan club!

At Jim's workshops at the Men's Center, he has presented these and many more ideas about intimate loving relationships that summarize some of the exciting recent findings on relationships as studied by these and other scholars of this most important subject. Please see his Feb. 4, 2004 workshop, detailed in the calendar.