Problems With Idealizing Love and Why Real Love Matters
This essay explores the problems that arise when love is idealized beyond the bounds of reason and everyday reality. Drawing on sociological, philosophical, and psychological sources, the paper argues that idealized love — whether romantic, sexual, spiritual, or platonic — disconnects individuals from the practical, other-centered nature of genuine love. The author traces Western concepts of love to the Hebrew Scriptures, contrasting their service-oriented model with modern media-driven romantic myths. The paper contends that real love is an act of the will and a cultivated habit, not a passive feeling awaited by the lover. Idealized love generates unrealistic expectations that, when unmet, produce frustration and emotional harm, while realistic, disciplined love fosters genuine satisfaction, purpose, and human flourishing.
- Introduction: Thesis: idealized love distracts from practical, real love
- The Idealization of Love: How love becomes unrealistic when placed on a pedestal
- The Habit of Love: Love as a cultivated daily habit rooted in Western tradition
- Unreal Expectations: Why Idealized Love Fails: Modern idealized love leads to frustration and self-centeredness
- Conclusion: Realistic, service-oriented love as humanity's truest expression
✍️ How to write this paper — guide, tools & examples ▾
What makes this paper effective
- The paper integrates sources from multiple disciplines — sociology, evolutionary psychology, philosophy, and cultural history — to build a multidimensional argument rather than relying on a single perspective.
- The distinction between "idealized love" and "ideal love" near the end of the essay is especially sharp and demonstrates careful conceptual differentiation, giving the argument analytical precision.
- The thesis is clearly stated in the introduction and consistently reinforced throughout each section, creating strong argumentative unity.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates effective use of definitional analysis as an argumentative strategy. By systematically defining what love is and is not — drawing on Levine's seven meanings, Lewis et al.'s mutuality model, May's historical account, and Sternberg's evolutionary framing — the author constructs a composite picture of realistic love before dismantling the idealized version. This method of establishing a conceptual baseline before critique is a hallmark of rigorous humanities argumentation.
Structure breakdown
The essay follows a classical five-part structure: an introduction that states the thesis, a section defining and critiquing idealization, a section proposing an alternative (love as cultivated habit), a section examining the consequences of unreal expectations, and a conclusion that synthesizes the argument in broader human terms. Each section builds logically on the last, and transitions between sections explicitly signal the argumentative progression.
Introduction
As Berardo and Owens point out, "sociologists agree that love is one of the most complex and elusive concepts to deal with from a scientific point of view" (1696). Yet love is one of the driving forces in culture — if not in all of history itself — if poets, artists, and cultural historians are any measure (Berardo and Owens). It is an underlying current of interactions, of community life, even of fighting and of wars: its presence makes people come together, and its absence draws them apart or pits them against one another, sometimes in vicious and cruel ways. Love is both practical and ideal, and its dimensions and manifestations are as diversely imagined and expressed as the history of the human race has been lived.
However, when love is idealized, the concept can often become situated in an unrealistic sphere that is hard — or even impossible — for people to understand, let alone put into practice. Love is not something that is meant to forever remain out of one's reach; rather, it is something that one can exercise daily, even if only in small ways, in one's own life. It is an attitude, a habit, a manner of being that one expresses to others, to oneself, and to God. Love that is idealized, however, can become blinding to the little realities that actually go into making love a possible and positive routine. Idealized love can cause people to lose sight of real love, which in practice is often far less romantic, far less picturesque, and far less poetic than its idealized counterpart. In the end, real love is the only kind that matters: the idealized sort functions more as a device that can be used for any number of purposes serving its creator. This paper argues that idealized love is problematic because it distracts people from making real love — practical love — an everyday habit.
Works Cited
Berardo, Felix, and Erica Owens. "Love." Encyclopedia of Sociology, edited by Edgar F. Borgatta and Rhonda Montgomery, Macmillan Reference USA, 2000, pp. 1696–1701.
Kluger, Jeffrey. "Why We Love." Time, vol. 171, no. 4, 28 Jan. 2008, pp. 54–60.
Levine, Stephen B. "What Is Love Anyway?" Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, vol. 31, no. 2, 2005, pp. 143–151.
Lewis, Thomas, et al. A General Theory of Love. Vintage Books, 2001.
May, Simon. Love: A History. Yale University Press, 2011.
Sternberg, Robert. Cupid's Arrow: The Course of Love through Time. Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Create your account
Always verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.