ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on caring feelings and caring actions, the concern theory patterns romantic love on parental love. The concern theory of love leaves intact the lovers’ individuality and focuses instead on the specific caring attitudes and actions thought to characterize love. In concern theories, to love someone is to have a particular attitude toward them: wanting what is good for them, caring for them for their own sake. On this view, love affects a person’s reasons and motivations in a deep way, so that when they act for the other person, they are acting for their own reasons. The concern theory is also potentially one-sided: it seems to imply that love can be unreciprocated and be romantic love. In the concern theory, to love is to have a stable ongoing caring for the well-being of the beloved. The concern theory, like the union theory, erases the distinction between deferential and non-deferential behavior.
