Why do you love me?

Transactional relationships and being “loved” for the wrong reasons

We all want to be valued by others, but we’re not neutral on what we want to be valued for, particularly when it comes to our primary romantic relationships. In The Desire to be Objectified I wrote about the ambivalent feelings many of us have around being valued for legible traits, like beauty or wealth, and how this relates to objectification. Essentially, we want to feel that we are objectively valuable, but while we might want our partner to reassure us of that objective value, we also want them to value us for more than our objectively valuable traits. We want them to value us for something deeper, for the traits that define who we really are. I think these tend to be the traits which we think are morally relevant, which make us proud of ourselves, or which we value in others, rather than those that we just happen to have, or which we’re worried we could lose. 

While we may want assurance that our partner would still love us if we were ugly, or poor, or whatever, we don’t actually expect them to love us no matter what. As I pointed out in my earlier piece: It’s much more common to ask, “would you still love me if I was ugly” than “would you still love me if I was deeply unkind.” Someone who loves you no matter what is completely undiscerning, there’s nothing left of you for them to love and so their love could only be of the impersonal variety. But most of us don’t want that Buddhist sort of “love” from our romantic partner. We want a particular and personal and maybe even a possessive sort of love. And we want our partner to be discerning enough so that receiving their love actually means something. Hence my conclusion that “no, they wouldn’t still love you if you were a worm. But that’s ok, because you probably wouldn’t want to be with them if they would.”

The tension here is that when we try to list out what makes us, personally, lovable, the list of traits we come up with are things that other people also have, and that many other people have much more of than we do! And the specter of this person, someone who has all the traits that make us lovable and then some, even if we never encounter them, still leaves us ultimately insecure. We don’t want our partner to leave us if they meet someone 20% better than we are, we want to be irreplaceable to them!

We want them to care about us, not only for what we are or what we can do for them, but simply because we are us. Which brings up the topic of my most recent post, where I discuss what makes a relationship non-transactional, differentiating this from unconditional relationships, which, as suggested above, I think are unrealistic and, actually, not even aspirational. In that post I pushed back on the claim that “all relationships are transactional”, differentiating transactional from non-transactional relationships as follows:

What makes a relationship or an interaction non-transactional, or at least not purely transactional, is that you value the welfare of the other person and consider how your actions will affect their welfare above and beyond self-interested concerns at any time scale. In my view, Scott Peck’s definition of love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth” is intimately related to non-transactional relationships.

Where love, as so defined, is present and is acted upon by both parties, the relationship ceases to be transactional. When one has a “will to extend oneself” to nurture “another’s spiritual growth” you have left the paradigm of attempting to maximize what you can personally get out of a series of interactions on a game theoretic basis. You’re now additionally motivated to bring about positive outcomes for the other person, the person who you love.

And after writing this, I started to think that our desire for non-transactional partnership and our non-neutrality around what we want to be valued for are likely connected. In addition to wanting to feel special and secure in our relationships, and wanting our partner to share our values (including in what they look for in a partner), I think we intuit that being valued for these classically “shallow” traits is unlikely to lead to “real love” and that without “real love” we’re likely to remain in a largely transactional relationship.

Basically, I think that we find it harder to imagine that physical beauty, or other “shallow traits”, relative to traits like intelligence or integrity, will generate “the will”, in our admirer or potential partner, “to extend [them]selves for the purpose of nurturing [our] spiritual growth”. And so, part of the reason we prefer not to be loved for our beauty (or other “shallow traits”) is that we don’t really believe that an appreciation of our physical beauty can inculcate the sort of love that we most desire, but rather, is more consistent with being valued in an instrumental way.

So, to summarize, I think that there’s at least three sorts of considerations that affect what we want our partner to value in us: those related to security, those related to our personal and ethical values, and those related to our view of love and transactional relationships:

1. Security: How does what they value us for impact how secure we feel in the relationship? If they value us for traits that we could, or will surely, lose it’s difficult to feel secure in the relationship, and if they value us for traits that are not particularly unique we worry that they’ll leave us if they find someone who has more of those traits (assuming such a person would also want to date them).

2. Values: Do they value us for things that we think someone should value in a partner? Or, relatedly, do they value us for things we value in ourselves? As I wrote in the original piece, we often want our partner “to appreciate, in particular, the characteristics which we are most proud of in ourselves”. And we also want what our partner looks for romantically to be consistent with the goal of building a stable, long-term, mutually beneficial relationship.

3. Love and lovability: Do we believe the things they value us for are things that can plausibly form the basis for a deep and loving bond? And how does that affect our view of how transactional the other person is likely to be in the relationship? I think we intuit that certain traits are both valuable and lovable, while others are only valuable, and we want our partner to appreciate our lovable traits especially because if they don’t, a non-transactional relationship is probably not possible.

Even in the realm of the more legible and objectively valuable traits, we generally prefer to be valued for things that are to some degree a reflection of characteristics we’re proud of and feel are core to us. So we might not want to be valued for money or earning power in and of itself, but we might, at the same time, want our partner to be proud of our career success. Success which we feel is proof of our intelligence, tenacity, personality etc., in other words, which is an external manifestation of our most lovable traits or perhaps of the traits we feel demonstrate our moral value.

After I wrote The Desire to be Objectified,

Richard Hanania

commented:

I’m puzzled by the idea [that] loving for beauty is seen as more ethically suspect than loving for some other trait. [...] Everyone knows that a young man won’t be attracted to an 80 year old woman for purely aesthetic reasons. So why can’t he admit to differentiating between women of his own age and his romantic attraction being based on that? 

And I think I have a better answer now than I did then, so I’ll conclude with that. Women know that men value physical beauty, and there’s nothing pathological about that, however physical beauty, on its own, is an unstable base to build a relationship on because:

• It fades. If your partner’s affection is based on your beauty then why would you expect it to last? How can this be a good basis for a long term relationship? Richard acknowledges that men won’t be attracted to an 80 year old for purely aesthetic reasons, and so to be neutral as to whether your partner loves you primarily for your looks vs. for other, more persistent, traits seems irrational. I think this position makes a lot more sense if you believe that there’s limited correlation between what your relationship is based on when you get married vs. decades later, which is not unreasonable given that arranged marriages can work out very well. But given the way relationships form in our culture I think being neutral to your partner valuing you mainly for your looks would be strange.

• It doesn’t feel core to most people’s sense of self, and so being “loved” for your beauty doesn’t provide the feeling of deep acceptance and understanding that being loved for (what you see as) your more defining traits does. Assuming you think this is a poor basis for a relationship, you might also look down upon people who place excessive weight on physical beauty when choosing a partner, since you think it reflects poor judgment, or at least values which are inconsistent with your own.

• And because, depending on what you mean by love or what you’re seeking in a romantic partnership, you might not think that your beauty, even if you’re aware that it’s something your partner values (or even if you’re delighted that it’s something they value), is a realistic candidate for forming the basis of “real love”. You might not believe that someone appreciating you aesthetically, on its own, is enough to engender the sort of love that you’d like your partner to feel for you. The sort of love that leads them to value your welfare as an end in itself rather than seeing the relationship in more purely transactional terms.

So with that, I’ll just say: whatever you most value in a partner, I hope you find someone who has it, and whatever you most want to be valued for, I hope you find someone who sees it in you.