AIM Framework glossary
Love
Canonical definition
Love is the desire for the Well-Being of another Individual, held at the high end of both readings the Individual takes of that other: Relatedness at its positive extreme, where the other's Well-Being counts as the Individual's own, and Salience at the positive extreme of its valence, where the other is approached. The Object of Love, the other's Well-Being, is not a Positional Object, so Love sets no two Individuals against each other. Love is indifferent to who supplies the other's Well-Being and not to whose Well-Being is in question; the want Love carries is met while that Well-Being holds and does not escalate; and the want is answerable to a Referent, the Appetitive and Intrinsic conditions of the other's life. Love runs under every subtype of the Collaborator reading. Romantic love is Love under the mating-pair subtype, accompanied by the Body Manager's sexual deficit term and an exclusive occupancy; falling in love is the earlier position of high positive Salience while Relatedness is still low. Absence lowers the Salience side of Love and not the Relatedness side, so the feeling Salience carries falls toward indifference while the Belief stands, and returns when the other is next in the field; missing an absent other is the Thinker's engagement with the other, which feeds the Scalar without the Observer. The lowercase term is vernacular.
Explanation
To love someone, in AIM's sense, is to want them to be well, with their good counting as your own, and to be drawn toward them. Both have to be high. Many people whose good matters to you are not people you seek out, and many people you are drawn to are people whose good you have not yet come to care about. The second case is how falling in love usually begins, and loving is where it arrives if the caring grows. Love is not a competition: their being well takes nothing from anyone else who wants it too, and wanting to be the only one, or the one who gets the credit for looking after them, is something else. Love is content for someone else to help, so long as the help is real. When someone you love is away for a long time the feeling can fade without the love being lost, because it is the belief that holds, and the feeling comes back when they do. Missing them is different: that is your mind holding them in view on its own, and it needs no sight of them. And because their wellbeing is a fact about their life, love can be wrong about what they need, and is corrected by listening to them.
Epistemic status
Framework-Specific Construct. Derived from Relatedness and Salience (Chapter 9, Section 9.15.1; Chapter 11, Section 11.13.1), Chapter 7, Section 7.1.2.1, Chapter 11, Section 11.20, Chapter 16, Section 16.10, the Relational Specificity Principle and the Care-Substitution Test.