Trying to say what the experience of love is immediately runs into a daunting problem, semantic and phenomenological. The word love says Joseph Fletcher in his Situation Ethics (1966), is a "swampy one, a semantic confusion," and one is tempted, he says, to delete it from Christian ethical discourse. Gene Outka, in Agape: An Ethical Analysis (1972), claims that the only thing certain authors have in common when they write on love is the employment of the same word.
Michael V. Millor (1987) concludes his review of Irving Singer's third volume of The Nature of Love with this discouraging suggestion: "Maybe the search for [the nature of] love is as close as we can get to [the nature of] love." Psychologists as well as philosophers and theologians join the chorus. C.G. Jung remarks that when discussing love we find ourselves talking about "a concept of absolutely unlimited extent and indefiniteness" (Hazo, 1967). Theodor Reik says of the word love that "its diversity of meaning, its adaptability and its capability to quick change are astonishing" (Reik 1949).
It is not surprising then, that some consider the question, what is love?, to be unanswerable; they deny the very possibility of finding any common factor in all acts and feelings given that name and, therefore, the possibility of any concept of love which can include them all. Love is said to be an "open concept." Others, without explicitly denying the possibility of a general notion of love, ignore the need for it and write as though there were no such notion, or, if there is, as though it were of no importance for their purposes. They note and distinguish several kinds of love, but do not trouble themselves to ask what is common to all of them by reason of which every one of them is said to be love.
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