Is love a desire for union with another person? A special kind of care for their wellbeing? A form of awe and attention in front of another person’s moral presence? A shared project of agency and affect? Or, maybe, love is not a “thing” that allows for a (single) definition or theory. Countless philosophical discussions have been devoted to questions of the sort. Philosophers have, moreover, been asking themselves why we fall in love: because loving relationships promise us a home in the world, as Simon May has beautifully argued, or because, as Harry Frankfurt has famously claimed, love does not answer to reasons outside itself (moral or political ones) but generates its own. In my earlier work, I have somewhat (not entirely) dodged both lines of questioning (What is love? Why do we get into it?) and focused rather on the desirability of one specific type of loving bond, namely, eros. Against a background of contemporary skeptical, pessimist, post-Romantic convictions, I have tried to show that and how erotic love is “worth the trouble” when it moves us towards freedom: when, namely, it can invite and empower us to question the unfreedom of the world and to undo and redo ourselves and our social arrangements accordingly.
To love in this way is exhausting, I have come to realize lately. What I have come to realize, furthermore, is how little our philosophies of love have taken love’s own exhaustion as their object of inquiry.
How can we think about the end of love? What is unlove? I would say it is not a simple absence or lack, a void. Nor is it a static condition of alleged opposition to love (indifference, say, or hate). Let’s cast it, rather, as an affective and material (subjective and objective) movement, traversed by contradictions and uncertainty, the becoming-undone of a bond that used to be of (some kind of) love. Italian has a good word for this that English lacks: disamore. Amore undergoes a process characterized by some dis: dis-tinction, dis-stress, dis-entanglement, dis-attachment, dis-mantling, dis-solution?
In recent years, interesting pieces have come out on the phenomenology of breakups, betrayals, and separations: for instance, on the consequences these sorts of experiences have on our identity, on their potential for self-transformation. But few people ask a prior question: Why does the rupture happen in the first place? What are the reasons, if there are any, for falling out of love?
Let’s consider some recent literary, auto-fictional accounts of divorce, for example, those put forward by Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy, or Anahid Nersessian, and the drama they convey. Their main goal is to give a sense of the bundle of individual feelings that accompany the crumbling of a still-powerful social institution (marriage) and its aftermath—the asphyxiation, the shattering, the shame, the facing of social stigma, the rebirth—and they do it very insightfully. What drops out of the picture is, however, the changing dynamic between two (or more) people, the transformation of love into unlove that I have called disamore. In this recurrent “divorce plot,” it seems as though the marriage did not have a lot to do with erotic love to begin with (which, obviously, need not scandalize us; eros can be found outside of marriage too, and maybe it should). Such a divorce plot is, moreover, surely useful as a psychological defense mechanism (and I do not say it disparagingly): it is easier to cope with the end of a relationship if we disavow the former attachment as ever being joyful, intense, anything more than utilitarian or pragmatic.
There are probably other reasons why the reasons for unlove go unexamined. Part of why we skip over it, I suspect, is a stubborn cultural conviction that true love could never end. As Max Scheler put it, eternity belongs to love’s very essence. I think this is a mistake, and not a fully innocent one. The belief that love must be immortal sits uncomfortably close to violence. When a partner cannot accept that the other’s love has ended, the result (which Scheler had not envisioned) is too often manipulation, coercion, or worse. Aaron Ben-Ze’ev and Ruhama Goussinsky have convincingly shown how many men who commit femicide are driven by a felt entitlement to their partner’s endless loyalty.
Even if we know and accept that love, true love, might very well end, we might still conclude that we cannot speak of it, or grasp it, at all. “How does a love end?—Then it does end?” Roland Barthes asks in his A Lover’s Discourse, “To tell the truth, no one … ever knows anything about it.” The French author depicts the love (or lover?) “which is over and done with” as a ghost ship that “passes into another world” with “lights no longer winking”: the end of love is, by definition, beyond lovers’ language; its traces and signals cannot be put into words. Also for Berislav Marušić, we cannot “construct” (Barthes) or understand our love story to the end. In On the Temporality of Emotions, he argues (not following Barthes explicitly) that our self-understanding as lovers structurally forecloses any real anticipation of unlove: Commitment and trust give us a scaffolding that makes the end of love unthinkable from the inside. If we were to engage with the possibility of the end of love we would slip into, Marušić thinks, a problematic form of alienation.
What is problematic, I on the contrary believe, is actually not taking into account how and why love can end. Self-alienation—the split between a self who is falling out of love and a self who is still holding on to it—is undoubtedly painful. But it is a place—a space of passage—where philosophy can be useful.
Why does disamore happen? I want to sketch three hypotheses.
The first starts in wrongdoing. A partner cheats, lies, breaks a promise, humiliates, manipulates, or turns violent. Simply recognizing such acts as wrongs—even on a view, following Aristotle, that love requires seeking the beloved’s good, or bell hooks’s claim that violent domination and true love cannot coexist—is not enough to turn love into unlove. Cognition of the wrong could certainly generate reasons for leaving, but it does not per se dislodge attachment, which is exactly why leaving is so hard. What matters, I argue, is how the wrong is felt, how it shapes the subjectivity of the wronged lover. Things can take different paths. Love could act as a self-protecting shield: I know, at some level, that I have been wronged; I feel that something is seriously off, but a devotion to or an appreciation of certain qualities of my beloved, or of the relationship, leads me to dispel and disavow the specter of unlove. But love could also be kept alive, at least for a while, by turning the negative feelings (dislike, contempt, disgust, rage), which should be directed outward, against the self. I have been wronged, but I feel like I am the wrongdoer. I continue to seek out my abuser, carving myself out, harboring the belief that I am unworthy of love. The final sinking into depression (the blueprint here is Sigmund Freud’s account of melancholia in Mourning and Melancholia) is what this face of unlove looks like. Alternatively, the vague, diffuse hurt might crystallize into a specific fury, which does not simply teach me what love ought to be and should not be, but, more radically, intervenes on a deeper substratum of desire. I become truly enraged, and it transforms me: I start to want different things.
My second hypothesis considers how love can end when we stop desiring each other (without any wrongdoing having necessarily occurred). What do we want from each other, exactly? In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates notices that desire is always desire for what is lacking, for what we do not have or are not (yet?). Hegel, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, elaborates that what we truly desire in another is not an object to possess, consume, or enjoy, but the very quality that makes the other into a proper human: their irreducible freedom. I want my beloved to want me freely, of course, not compelled by external factors (be it convenience, blind lust, material or societal constraints), but I also want them to want me as I express and realize my freedom. My beloved wishes the same, or so I wish. Desire moves (us) within a dance between closeness and distance, presence and absence, fulfillment and anxiety. By dancing, we traverse the void at the core of ourselves, we discover what and how we could become, we reach toward an elsewhere and a future to be explored together, without being able to know exactly how things will turn out, for each of us, for us together. Desire fails, I want to argue, in two opposite and complementary ways. Sometimes the gap closes entirely, margins for “negativity” are strangled: The not-yet, the unknown disappear, we get into the grip of recurring mechanical habits and routines; nothing is left to find out. Sometimes, conversely, the gap becomes infinite: Desire spins restlessly; it never rests in any stable joy; we can build no sustaining habits, and we are never at home together, anywhere. Søren Kierkegaard has a word for this double failure: despair. Despair is also a good name for unlove.
The third hypothesis moves outward to the social, political, and economic forces that pull lovers apart. As many have argued, the ideal of romantic or passionate love as a frictionless domestic oasis, particularly when oriented toward monogamous marriage and family, and sealed off from the antagonisms of public life, fulfills a crucial economic function, replenishing workers so they can perform in the office, in the factory, or in the gig economy. Meanwhile, entire categories of people (queer, trans, and nonbinary people, women who defy gendered expectations, people who are racialized and displaced) are routinely denied recognition as legitimate subjects of love, which, as Shon Faye writes, can produce a profound sense of exile from the realm of love, hence from the broader world as well. However, according to sociologist Eva Illouz, one of the few committed theorists of unlove, under neoliberal capitalism, even such romantic fantasy of refuge is jeopardized. Love relationships tend to be broken off quickly and without much pondering, she believes, because of the economic logic that has also colonized the intimate sphere: A companion is “worthy” of my attention and loyalty as long as they adequately satisfy my needs and interests. But if they fall short, and when their needs and interests begin to stand between me and my personal fulfillment and self-realization…bye-bye, baby. (This argument does not have to be read conservatively: Sometimes, the end of a relationship, especially if it involves abuses and violence, is to be favorably saluted). After all, my new companion, whether for a night, a month, or a year, may be just a few swipes away on Tindr, Bumble, or Hinge. Alternatively, a partner can simply be conjured to my exact specifications by the latest AI program.
None of this is fate. Those who have wronged a loved one can acknowledge it, apologize, and do the work of repair. Those caught in dead habituation can find the courage to reopen the negativity that (collective, erotic) freedom requires; those spinning in restless, unsatisfied desire can build flexible habits capable of holding both joy and pain. Where unlove has social and structural roots, individual choice is often not enough. Not giving up on love becomes a political matter, bound up with broader struggles against oppression and injustice. Disamore does not just happen to us. Of course, the fantasy of full sovereignty over one’s love life is a ridiculous one. This does not mean, though, that we should delegate or avoid responsibility for it. In the end, unlove may help us better understand who we are and want to be, both as individuals and as collectives.
Federica Gregoratto
Federica Gregoratto is visiting associate professor of practical philosophy at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. Her research moves between Hegelian critical theory, feminist philosophy, and the philosophy of emotions. Recent work includes Love Troubles. A Philosophy of Eros (2025) and Le Ragioni del Disamore (2026). Her current project is on the social philosophy of depression.
