Written by Ceylin Dogan
I have never been very trusting of love’s public image. Even before I had any personal claim to the word, I distrusted the versions of it that circulated so effortlessly around me in films, in songs, in careless conversations. So often it appeared as spectacle, or appetite, or dependence mistaken for destiny. What passed under the name of love often looked, to me, like a species of vanity, where the self was made more radiant by being reflected in another’s eyes.
I did not yet know what love was. But I had already begun to suspect what it was not. Perhaps this suspicion came from my temperament, or perhaps out of arrogance. Or perhaps from the obscure but persistent intuition that if love were real, it could not possibly be as shallow as its common representations. I felt even then that love must involve a way of seeing, not merely a way of feeling. I did not yet have the language for any of this. I only had resistance, a private refusal of the counterfeit.
Then, long before romantic love arrived, I encountered something that now seems to me its necessary companion: a friendship formed out of sustained attention. We knew each other for years, and wandered through the landscapes of each other’s minds. There was an intimacy that did not yet require the language of romance: a kind of patient mutual reading, an interest in how the other thought, what they noticed, what they made of the world. If love is often imagined as a lightning strike, this was something slower and stranger. Like the gradual mapping of a country.
And yet when romantic love came, it did not come gradually at all.
It was immediate, disorienting, almost catastrophic, shaking the foundations of my inner architecture. It was all humiliating in its force. I did not enter love nobly.
This mattered to me because it complicated the suspicion with which I had begun. The public fictions of love had always seemed false because they reduced love to intensity, possession, drama. But then I felt something intense and possessive. I could no longer dismiss those elements so easily. And yet intensity, I think, is not the same as loving well. It is how love announces itself, but not the whole of it. The question of what love actually consists in (what it requires of you, what it asks you to do and become) is answered not in the moment of arrival but across time.
Having lived inside love for long enough now has confirmed what I had once only dimly suspected: that love does not end at feeling. It makes a demand, ongoing and difficult, which feelings alone cannot meet. This is one of the reasons Iris Murdoch feels so clarifying to me.
Murdoch, an Irish-British novelist and philosopher, is suspicious of the myth of the sovereign self—the glamorous fiction that human beings stand at the centre of their lives as rational agents who clearly see their options and freely choose among them. She describes the self as ordinarily enclosed, anxious, self-serving, and prone to fantasy. In The Sovereignty of Good, she writes that consciousness is often “a cloud of more or less fantastic reverie designed to protect the psyche from pain.” Murdoch does not imagine us as noble moral agents heroically choosing the good from a neutral vantage point. She imagines us as creatures ceaselessly tempted to falsify reality in order to protect ourselves from it.
This is why Murdoch matters not only for thinking about love, but also for thinking about morality. We are used to imagining morality as a matter of rules and decisions: what ought I do, what is permitted, what principles should govern this case? Murdoch does not deny that action matters, but she relocates the moral life deeper down, to the level at which reality is first encountered. The primary moral drama is not the moment of decision, but rather the quality of one’s attention. What do I see when I look at another person? Do I see them at all? Or do I see only the refracted image of my own needs, pains, and fears?
Murdoch says that anything which moves consciousness toward “unselfishness, objectivity and realism” belongs to virtue. In this view, morality begins not in action and not even in sincerity, but in the discipline of seeing.
Murdoch illustrates this with a sequence of examples. Learning a language, she suggests, is already a moral exercise: you submit to a structure that exists independently of you, and honesty is required at every step. Art demands something similar, though the ego has more room to corrupt the experience. But human relationships are the hardest of all.
In this light, love, I would argue, is morality’s most severe test. Here, the self has the most at stake, and so distorts most aggressively. Nowhere are we more tempted to falsify another person than when we desire them. Desire is not always false, but it is fertile soil for illusion.
To love someone well, then, is to resist the temptation to turn them into an idol of one’s own making.
This is what I had perceived (however imperfectly) in friendship before I recognized it in romance. Before there was disorientation, there was attention. Before there was passion, there was regard. And it is there, inside the passion and the disorientation, that the moral work begins: the moments of catching myself mid-projection, realising that I have been responding to a story rather than to the person, and choosing, again to look more carefully. These small corrections, repeated, are where love and morality become one.
This way of loving, of paying attention, can appear bloodless at first glance. But Murdoch’s concept of attention is not an impartial, cold observation. It is a charged, morally effortful form of regard. It means refusing reduction. It means allowing another person the density of their own being. It means seeing them as real even when reality becomes inconvenient to one’s fantasies.
Crucially, for Murdoch, this refinement does not come from willpower alone. Love is purified by being directed through the Good, toward what is genuinely real rather than a self-serving fiction. False love moves toward a false good. When love is even partially directed toward reality, its quality is automatically refined. As Murdoch puts it simply, “The real is the proper object of love.”
“The attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is”—this is Murdoch’s on Goodness. I read it also as a definition of love. Love is not the thickening of self. In love, another person begins to exist not as an accessory to one’s own story but as a world in their own right.
And love itself, Murdoch insists, is not automatically good. Love can degrade; it can become selfish, hungry, coercive, delusional. The mere fact of loving does not ennoble us. Yet when refined, according to Murdoch, love becomes “the energy and passion of the soul in its search for Good.” Murdoch herself doubted whether human love often achieves this. It is too possessive, too mechanical, she thought, to reliably be a place of clear vision. But the rarity of the achievement does not diminish the seriousness of the attempt.
Perhaps the strangest thing I have learned is that the opposite of love is not always indifference. Sometimes it is fantasy. Sometimes it is the refusal to let another person be real.
So when I define love as a moral act, I do not mean that love is mild and free of fever. I mean that love may contain all the old violence of feeling and still find its truth elsewhere, in the ethical labour of seeing, in allowing affection to become accuracy and accuracy to become justice.
I was suspicious of love before I ever lived it. In some ways, I am glad that I was. The suspicion was not wholly wise, but neither was it misplaced. To love well is not only to be moved. It is to discover that another person is more real than one’s own idea of them and to go on loving them through that discovery. If morality begins not in commandment but in vision, then love is one of its most severe forms: a discipline by which we learn, however briefly and however imperfectly, to look beyond ourselves.