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There's a tie 13 likes on a comment saying that it is a social construct and 13 likes saying it isn't. I forgot this market was still up so I didn't do what was in the description but I decided to resolve to NO because it seems to be the most popular argument overall. Though I think it is a social construct.

@Simon1551 thank you all for participating

@Simon1551 Good times, and well-judged. Though I wonder what you would write on the topic?

There are many people who claim to be both allosexual and alloplatonic but also aromantic. How can this be explained if love is merely a social construct?

@MaxNiederman I had to look up those words, (and maybe that was your intent?) because they seem like recent additions to the vernacular.

It sounds like you're saying that many people say that they experience sexual and platonic attractions, but not romantic ones. But wouldn't that be the normal state of most people if romantic love were a construct? If it weren't real, wouldn't you expect most people to not say they experience it?

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@MaxNiederman Ah, so the evidence for romance being a non-construct is rooted in others' experiences, not in your own. Fair enough, but I think your question was backward, i.e., How do we explain other people identifying as romantic, in a way that sharply contrasts with your own experiences?

Dating doesn't really appeal to me either, it's kind of anxiety-inviting. As far as physical intimacy, what, do you mean kissing? Not a lot that doesn't fall into platonic OR sexual, there.

@TylerColeman I don't experience primary sexual attraction - should we be trying to question whether people really find other people sexually attractive without knowing each other or just believe them?

@Imuli To be clear, I did in fact think people were making it up for quite a long time.

@MaxNiederman Actually, I did have a pretty romantic dance with someone, once, at a family wedding, that first got me thinking I wanted to date her. That's probably the sort of thing you meant.

@Imuli Heh, yeah, I tend to take people at their word, so long as it doesn't contrast with my own experiences too strongly. Your unusual condition must have led you to some major confusion, until you understood what was going on in yourself, am I right?

BTW, I'm feeling more confident in the NO answer, now. (Though I'm still not putting any more mana than I have to on what essentially just resolves to a poll.)

@MaxNiederman To answer your first comment, in my opinion that isn't a good enough argument to explain why it isn't a social construct because there are instances where something is a social construct but not everyone experiences it the same way or at all. For example gender roles, it varies across cultures and time periods. Some people experience and adhere to traditional gender roles, while others reject or challenge them.

@MaxNiederman forget what I said above I just realized why this was such a difficult question that could be interpreted in different ways. I think you're answer is probably valid but not for the actual question I was asking.

In psychology, studies on romantic love / attraction typically study either

1. (Sexual) attraction, attractiveness, or

2. Liking, general, the same as liking toward family, friends, and even objects and words.

So pretty much romantic / matrimonial love is the same love and liking we have toward other things, plus sexual attraction, to which Robert Sternberg also added commitment.

The differentiation between romantic, and other general familial or friendly love in the modern thought is the sexual attraction part. For example, a racing heart, often interpreted as a sign of romantic attraction in the modern time, is actually a sign of sexual attraction, as shown by studies like Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron's bridge experiment -- and many more better-designed experiments than that.

Misattribution of arousal happens when for example my heart races, perhaps due to nervousness or previous activities / exercise / movement, but I attribute it to that I am attracted to a person near me.

Now I think there is another layer of misattribution, misattributing sexual attraction to the social construct of romantic attraction. While romantic attraction is generally characterized by some uniqueness and exclusivity, at least at one point in time, sexual attraction is not limited to one person. Faster heart beat / faster breath / dilated pupils are signs of sexual attraction. As to romantic attraction / love, my explanation is that it simply does not exist naturally, but is completely a social construct.

I am not even trading in this market, so I'll write this much for now. Happy to answer further questions.

Perhaps it can be said that romantic love is the beautified, embellished, painted version of sexual attraction. And the social construct mixed in other good things like general liking / familial and friendly love. While commitment is an aspect of a relationship, the modern thought / social construct of romantic love seems to ignore it, viewing romantic love more as a feeling, the essence of which I believe is just sexual attraction.

@XComhghall By your explanation, romantic asexuals cannot possibly exist. But they do.

@Sophia Possible explanations:

1. They similarly misattribute sexual attraction to romantic love, however they conceive and define it, but experience less intense sexual attraction, or have less sexual desire.

2. They do not experience sexual attraction, only general liking/love, and their conception of romantic love contribute to shape their relationship.

Like expectancy effect, what we think romantic love is or how it should be affects how we act -- we fool ourselves. But there is no feature or element of romantic love as defined by modern culture that can be clearly identified as uniquely romantic, apart from sexual attraction and general liking/love, the latter two of which are extensively studied.

@XComhghall Okay I don't normally do this, but could you cite your sources? OP has posted a video with an actual expert taking the biological view who makes the argument that romantic attachment is related to but ultimately separate from sexual attraction (specifically relating romantic feelings to dopamine and sexual attraction to testosterone). As far as I'm aware this would be a more standard way of looking at it - it's certainly the view I've seen in the literature I've read, which has sexual attraction as the strongest predictor of reported romantic attraction but not at all the only one. And that position would better explain demisexuals, fwb relationships, aromantic allosexuals, and one night stands.

I will also point out that experiments like Kinsey's, which consistently do find apparently genuinely asexual people, seem to make explanation 1 (which requires that romantic asexuals have some level of sexual attraction) much less likely.

Explanation 2, again, seems suspect because romantic asexuals do report significant differences between romantic and platonic feelings.

I'd also point to articles "Asexuality: What It Is and Why It Matters", AF Bogaert, The Journal of Sex Research, 2015, which explicitly acknowledge a decoupling between romantic and sexual attraction in asexual people.

@Sophia I am happy to provide sources if you would like for any specific points. My claim of romantic love as a social construct was based on what I assume you know also -- sexual attraction and general liking/love -- and my reasoning. I cannot prove that something does not exist. I mean that I am not aware of its existence, or evidence that it exists. I am happy to review any evidence of the existence of something of which I am not aware.

1. Do asexuals hug each other? Kiss? If they report it as romantic, distinct from platonic, my guess is that some romantic actions, apart from sex, satisfy their sexual desire.

2. Without knowing the exact results of the study, my explanation is that they report so because they think so because of the social construct, or their own conception.

Thanks for the source. I'll happily take a look -- You mentioned 'experiments like Kinsey's'. What Kinsey's?

@Sophia Thanks for the reference again. Quoting it:

'Evidence from developmental psychology and evolutionary/neuroscience studies suggests that romantic/love and sexual attraction processes are distinct; for example, lust/sex systems have a phylogenetically older history and primarily reside in different brain structures than the phylogenetically younger romantic/love system (e.g., Diamond, Citation2003b; Fisher, Citation2004), which may have evolved relatively recently from our attachment processes/systems toward parents (e.g., Hazan & Shaver, Citation1987).'

You mentioned that 'romantic asexuals do report significant differences between romantic and platonic feelings'. I wonder how they define the former, and distinguish between the two. 'feelings of infatuation and emotional attachment' could very well be a mixture of general liking/love and what little sexual attraction/desire they have -- And on that matter, can kisses and hugs be considered sexual, or satisfy (perhaps some's?) sexual desire to an extent?

So, the first distinction I think needs to be made here is between a feeling and the expression of that feeling. If you smile at an orangutan, it will take that as a sign of aggression, and possibly try to kill you. But it would generally not be considered that orangutans cannot feel happiness. The expression of emotion has a different meaning, but the underlying emotion is shared. Likewise for love - undoubtedly expressions of love are to a large extent socially constructed - I could very easily find cultures where giving flowers or kisses on the lips were not considered romantic.

I think it's fairly clear that 'love' refers to the underlying emotion, and not the expression of it - humans can identify themselves or others as being ‘in love’ without the person in question having expressed their feelings towards the object of their affections in any way. Conversely, we are able to conceive of the idea that someone who acts out every common expression of romantic love towards someone is not actually in love with them. Which would only be a sensible concept if what we meant by ‘love’ was the underlying feeling, and not the emotional expression.

And this I think is the issue with the idea that people are considered ‘properly in love’ based on the formation of a monogamous lifelong bond. We rarely have access to people’s inner thoughts, so we of course identify emotions by their expression, and expect them to be expressed the way our culture tells us they should be expressed. But as we learn more about the thoughts and feelings of others, and about the social context in which they grew up, we are able to identify actions as expressions of ‘love’ that would not be expressions of love in our own culture.

The second thing I think needs to be dealt with is the idea of cultural variance. Culture is very powerful, and even with categories that probably aren’t social constructs, our culture may cause us to see a thing as either fitting into that category, or not. Even death, the ‘ultimate reality’ is fuzzy enough that those from different cultures may give slightly different answers to the question of when, exactly, someone is considered dead. Likewise, the aforementioned example of a smile. It is generally agreed that smiling is an evolved behaviour, not a culturally conditioned one. And yet, smiling is interpreted differently by people from different cultures

The given video identifies the ‘fruit’ category as a socially constructed one, and I think that’s a good one to use for illustration - a non-socially constructed category like ‘dead’ is attempting to track something underlying, and thus the orthodox cultural understanding can turn out to be wrong. A culture which held a coma to be the same as death would not be correctly describing the underlying thing we refer to with the word ‘death’. Whereas a socially constructed category is fundamentally not tracking any underlying objective reality, and thus can vary between cultures without one culture being wrong. A culture in which a tomato is considered a fruit is no more or less correct than one in which it is not.

In the case of love, I would argue that cultures which thought that, say, love could only exist between people of the same race were completely incorrect in this belief - and for that to be the case, there would have to be an underlying truth about love which existed independent of society, and which those cultures were failing to track correctly.

Those things out of the way, let’s talk about why I think love isn’t a social construct. One of the surest ways of identifying a social construct is to look at disparate cultures, and see how their version of a concept differs. If a concept appears only in specific cultures, it’s almost certainly socially constructed. If it appears across cultures, but varies very significantly, that probably means it’s a social construct, but that it’s being influenced by some underlying objective reality. And if it appears in broadly the same form across cultures, that is generally a sign that a thing isn’t a social construct.

For example, take other basic emotions like anger or joy. People from different cultures have different ways of expressing the same emotion. They have different ways of interpreting and responding to them, and will even describe them differently based on the cultural norms they’re familiar with. And yet there is good reason not to consider them social constructs, because they exist across unconnected cultures in a consistent enough form that we are able to recognise them in four thousand year old texts.

Love is similar - it’s incredibly universal. It appears in spatially disconnected societies from the Roman Empire to their contemporaries in the Americas. Despite the lack of any kind of contact between the two. It appears all the way back to the Epic of Gilgamesh, and all the way up to the present day. And despite differences in expression, and some fuzziness around the edges, we can recognise things as ‘love’ that come from cultures almost completely divorced from our own. As far as I know, there’s no culture in which the concept of romantic love doesn’t exist, nor in which it differs significantly enough as not to be easily recognisable.

What’s more, the concept of romantic love persists even in societies and contexts in which it is actively considered taboo. There have been societies in which romantic love was utterly taboo, viewed as something shameful and even dangerous. The video mentions ancient China as an example. And yet, the concept does not appear to have been possible to stamp out entirely. Contrary to what we’d expect from a social construct. Nor, indeed, does it seem possible to significantly alter it - say to describe only heterosexuality. Even in cases where someone has been brought up in an extremely homophobic society, and taught that love must bee between a man and a women, people of the same sex still recognisably fall in love. “Sometimes women do like women.” as Virginia Woolf wrote in the famously egalitarian 1929. Which indicates very strongly that what is being tracked by the concept of ‘love’ is some underlying emotional reality, around which cultural rituals may develop.

I’d also bring up aromantic people. The video brings them up at one point as evidence of the social construct theory. But I very much have the opposite interpretation - I’d say that if two people are brought up in pretty much exactly the same culture, and only one of them feels romantic love, that’s a pretty good indication that something other than the social context is determining their differing experiences of romantic love. The same way that my own asexuality doesn’t really make me think that sexual attraction is a social construct. Kind of the opposite, in fact.

So yeah. I believe that ‘romantic love’ is the phrase that we use to describe a particular emotional state which exists independently of our society. Our responses to and expressions of that emotional state do vary according to social norms, but those things are simply not what is generally meant by the phrase ‘romantic love’.

Interesting video is that you @Simon1551? 😂

@YohanProYT LOL no it's not me

@Simon1551 that's what you'd say if it was ylu

@Dreamingpast That was a trick question I actually can't win 😭