Authentic love requires reciprocal recognition of both partners’ freedoms

Evidence

Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms; each lover would then experience himself as himself and as the other; neither would abdicate his transcendence, they would not mutilate themselves; together they would both reveal values and ends in the world. For each of them, love would be the revelation of self through the gift of self and the enrichment of the universe. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1883

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘authentic love’ as the positive counterpart to the inauthentic love Beauvoir will diagnose throughout the chapter.
• XREF: This reciprocal-recognition ideal of love parallels Sartre’s mutual recognition in Being and Nothingness and anticipates Levinas’s ethics of the other. — connects to: The lover’s self-presentation demands the Other’s free recognition to succeed; Willing to be loved alienates the lover’s freedom into the body-for-others.; Love is the surface where domination logic punishes the lover who loves too much (+9 more)