My life is a mess. I think I am busier now than ever before. As opposed to previous times, when I suggested I might have been struggling for topics to discuss, I find myself in the opposite situation now. Having said that, there is a running theme between most of my topics, and so I will try to make this into a bit of a mini series.

The theme, as is revealed in my title, is sloppy language. It was said by one of my professors in philosophy that often times people debate and argue not because they have a difference of opinion, but because they have a problem with communication. Often times, they are saying the same thing, but perhaps the nuances with their understandings of certain words creates the conflict they are experiencing. This is what I’m referring to when I say sloppy language. However, from my own personal experiences, when these miscommunications take place, even once it has been established that the hurdle was conflicting understandings of words, often times the conflict simply changes into an argument regarding who’s interpretation of those words is correct.

Thus, everything I’m about to say is my interpretation, and I want to make that clear at the outset. If you are challenged by what I say, consider the possibility that I am interpreting words differently than you. I will do my best to acknowledge other interpretations and include brief discussion related to that. But ultimately, I understand as I understand, and so this and the subsequent posts are likely to cause some confusion as I go. I am trying my best here.

Quite some time ago, someone told me that “Doms cannot love their subs.” That is, in the case of dominant/submissive relationships, those in the position of dominant could not love their submissive. Unfortunately, as this information came to me third hand, there was no way for me to elaborate on why the person said what they said. No way to delve into the topic more deeply. And, admittedly, I might not have been in the best position at the time to analyze such statements either. I’ve come a long way since then.

To analyze this statement properly, I will first need to talk about one of my favorite topics: love. And while I feel pretty good about most of my previous posts on the topic, it turns out that even I have been sloppy. Because I have come to realize that there is no one kind of love.

To be fair, I did know there was several different interpretations of love before. However, I did not take the time to acknowledge those different interpretations. This makes me at fault for being sloppy in the precise manner I am criticizing right now. I will endeavor not to be so sloppy in the future.

While there are likely many more ways to interpret love than I am about to do, I am going to focus on three sorts of love in this post: true love, objective love, and feeling love. These are my own terms, so looking these up online is likely not going to help you. Where possible, I will try to establish common language where I can.

The first of these, what I call true love, is the sort of love I’ve been going on about in my previous blog posts. The ancient Greek word agape is fairly close to this interpretation. Trying to be brief with my interpretation, I describe this sort of love as being a willingness to sacrifice one’s own projects and to blindly adopt the projects of another. That is, to set aside my own interests and desires in favor of supporting the interests and desires of another, in such a manner that I make no judgments on the other’s interests or desires. It is possible I may not agree with the other’s projects, considering them silly or unreasonable, but I will adopt them into my own projects anyway, because this is what it is to love that other.

The reason agape does tend to fit well here is that agape is concerned with a sort of unconditional love. To love without restriction or judgment. I will love you regardless of what you say or do. And with that, I also wish you a sort of good will. I want what is best for you. I want you to be healthy and happy and safe. This sort of love is consistent with what I am calling true love. Because I imagine most people have among their own projects their own well being and happiness. Thus, if I am adopting your project of your happiness, I am supporting the goal of making you happy.

For a more detailed analysis of what I’m talking about, I would suggest you review my previous posts on love. In them, I go into much more detail. For now, I will move on to the other sorts of love that I have not really discussed before.

The next I refer to as objective love. By objective, I mean that this sort of love is concerned with objects. Where true love would seem to focus on subjects, as it is generally subjects that have projects, objects generally have no projects to speak of. Or, to be even more precise on this matter, whether objects have their own projects or not is not of concern to me. The object might as well have no interests or desires, because I’m going to treat it as such.

Objective love is the sort of love one might expect a person to have toward their car or a television show. When one considers their car to be their most prized possession, they may have objective love for their car. This sort of love manifests in a caring about the well being of the object, with respect to the object fulfilling some sort of benefit to me. This is an instrumental sort of love. If I love my car, it is of interest to me to maintain it so that it will continue to operate for a long, long time.

Thus, if I have objective love for an object, I will spend my time and effort in taking care of the object. I will clean it and repair it and maintain it. I will do everything I can to preserve it. Because the more effort I put into the object, the more function or benefit I can receive from that object. The car may last for decades before needing to be replaced.

With respect to a television show, I might demonstrate my objective love by reviewing it highly among other shows. I will tell other people to watch the television show, or I might rank it highly in surveys. If it is a film in a theater, I may attend the theater multiple times, adding to the profit of the film financially. By doing these sorts of things, I improve the probability that the show will continue or the film will have a sequel. I make it more likely that the show will be syndicated or the film be remastered.

It should hopefully be clear that with objective love I gain in the act. There is something in it for me. In the case of true love, there may be cases where I never receive a benefit, and I may even harm myself in the act. True love will often be viewed as a sort of selfless love. Objective love is the opposite. In objective love, I always receive a benefit. Even if I have to make some sacrifice for the objective love, I will always come out ahead with whatever I receive.

I am not aware of an ancient Greek analog to what I am describing as objective love, but I think eros might be similar. With eros, there is certainly a concern with my pleasure as it relates to the object of my love. The object of concern makes me feel good in some fashion. This can be the luxury of the car; the nice padded interior and the smoothness of the ride. With a television show, it could be the emotional euphoria I experience as the story unfolds. And this can also be related to another person, in how they make me feel pleasure as well. I find them attractive, and that pleases me.

Which leads me nicely into the third sort of love I wanted to discuss: feeling love. Feeling love is not really like these other loves I have been talking about. With true love or objective love, it is something like an active process. I project or send my love outward toward the subject or object of my love. With true love, I am extending my love outward as I acknowledge your autonomy as an independent entity as I try to discern your projects so that I can adopt them as my own. With objective love, I am extending my love outward as I spend my effort in maintaining the object. However, with feeling love, there is no extending outward.

With feeling love, it is internalized only. I feel it, as the term would imply. Meaning this sort of love is only about me. To be clear, I am not talking about self love, which again comes from the ancient Greeks. What I have in mind is more like a passive feeling that comes about within one’s self, similar to anger or sadness or jealousy. It is the feeling that I get that is possibly the most euphoric feeling there is. Like happiness, except better. Feeling love is an emotion. “Feeling love” is, well, “feeling” “love.”

The reason I am being this pedantic about this term is that this is the sort of love that I think most people confuse with true love or objective love. It is this feeling that they feel that suggests to them that they have found the love they seek. However, as it is simply a feeling, the source of that feeling can come from other places. As it is merely a feeling, it is also extremely transitory. It is something that comes and goes. It is often associated with the “honeymoon phase” of most relationships.

The big question that I am hoping my readers have already started to ask themselves at this point is whether these three loves are mutually exclusive. Whether one could feel more than one, or even all three, at the same time. And I want to say the answer is yes. I want to say yes, but I’m not completely confident saying that. I have not had enough time to contemplate this, so I will not mislead by saying that it is the case. I can say that feeling love is compatible with both true love and objective love, but I am not sure if true love is itself compatible with objective love. I think it is, but I will need to spend much more time considering this still.

Now that I’ve established these three sorts of love, I am now ready to tackle dominance and submission. However, I now need to delve into ideas of ethics and especially of Existentialism. It seems to me that what defines a dominant or a submissive is bound up in value theory. That is, to dominate is to assign value to things in the world, and then to expect the submissive to adopt those value assignments. In the case of the submissive, it is not their place to assign value themselves.

The assigning or adopting of values is the realm of ethics. And it is the Existentialists who suggest that nothing inherently has value. Whether value preexists in objects or subjects is less important to my discussion, because dominance is about assigning value regardless.

It seems to me that the dominant is in a position whereby they always assign value themselves. They decide what is important and what is unimportant themselves. I do not think they really adopt the values assigned by others, and instead may observe the values assigned by others and use those observations to help them come up with their own valuations. In other words, the dominant will assign value and never adopt existing assignments. Perhaps to phrase it differently, the dominant never blindly adopts existing value assignments; they may instead assess and judge the assignment of others before possibly adopting those valuations. A dominant is a bit of an egoist.

It seems to me that the submissive is in a position whereby they always adopt the values assigned by others. They avoid determining what is important or unimportant themselves. They seek others to present valuations of the world, and then adopt those valuations into their own schema. To press the point further, a submissive will blindly adopt value assignments, setting aside their own judgments and preconceptions. A submissive might disagree with the valuation that has been assigned, but it is not their place to criticize or contest what has been assigned. A submissive is a bit of a doormat.

I can hear my audience screaming and hollering right now. Many of those who identify themselves as either dominant or submissive are likely outraged by my descriptions, as they are far too restrictive and extreme. My response is simple: you are not completely dominant or submissive in this case. The descriptions I am offering are of the most dominant dominant and the most submissive submissive. And, as with most extremes on any spectrum, it is extremely rare for anyone to exist at the extreme itself. So I suggest that most of those identifying as dominant are not completely dominant, possessing some submissive tendencies under some circumstances. And similarly in the case of the submissive.

To properly address the statement I was told so long ago, the same one in the title of this blog, I need to view those extremes as they are. The pure dominant and the pure submissive. Because it is only in those extremes that the statement could possibly be viewed. Someone who is only partly dominant may still at least partly love, at least with respect to the statement itself.

However, as I have defined my terms, it becomes clear to me that a dominant could love their submissive, though only in particular sorts of love. Considering my definitions, the dominant would not be able to truly love their submissive, as that would require them to abandon their project of assigning values, and begin to adopt them in certain cases. To express true love, the dominant would have to cease their pursuit, ceasing expecting the submissive automatically and blindly adopt the dominant’s valuations. To express true love, the dominant would need to pursue adopting the valuations of the submissive, and this contradicts the definition of a dominant I have made above.

That all said, the dominant could still hold an objective love for the submissive. In fact, I think objective love would likely make a lot of sense for the dominant. In the case of objective love, it is of interest to the dominant to put an effort into maintaining the submissive, so that the submissive will continue to serve their purpose for as long as possible. The dominant is not really concerned about the desires and interest of the submissive, or as I suggested above, the submissive might as well have no interests or desires, because the dominant is going to treat them as such. The dominant is objectifying the submissive.

In the case of the submissive, I find another interesting fact emerges as well. A submissive, by their nature, always truly loves their dominant. The submissive’s acts of adopting the valuations of the dominant blindly is analogous to adopting the dominant’s projects with no judgment. The submissive behaves as a sort of sponge toward the dominant, pulling in all their interests and desires and making the interests and desires their own. The submissive becomes, over time, a sort of mirror of the dominant.

While considering the submissive, I also thought about in what way this sort of behavior differs from being a slave. A slave too adopts the projects of their master blindly, much as the submissive does. However, I think the slave does so unwillingly. That is, the slave would not adopt the master’s projects if they were not being forced to. Given the opportunity, the slave will chose otherwise. The submissive is willing. The submissive wants to obey. In this way, the submissive again is exhibiting true love for their dominant, something that the slave is not really doing.

I could continue on talking of all these things, but I feel I am beginning to ramble. I hope my point has been made clear. In the case of the statement “doms cannot love their subs” it seems clear to me that the statement is false. It may be true that a dominant cannot love their submissive in certain ways, however, they can love their submissive in other ways. A dominant can love their submissive as an object. And considering the nature of our current culture, especially in the part of the world where I live, I would suggest this happens a lot.