Frequently Asked Questions

No. There are many types of love such as romantic love, platonic love, parental love, friendship love, and non-interpersonal love. These various types of love have a lot in common, but they also differ from each other because in each case love is modified to fit the situation.

Usually the best word for the love of things is just “love.” But sometimes we need a word that specifically means the love of things. When I started this work over 20 years ago, I quickly realized that there was no English word for precisely the kind of love I was studying. Homosexuality has been called “the love that dare not speak its name”[1]. I was studying a kind of love that had no name at all.

I considered just using the greek word “philia,” which means non-sexual love (“eros” is the word for sexual love). There are hundreds of English words ending in philia that refer to the non-sexual love of just about anything, oenophilia is love of wine, and kainophilia is love of innovation, there is even hypegiaphilia meaning the love of responsibility. Philia was, almost, perfect. But, unfortunately, there are a few words such as pedophilia that misuse the term philia to mean sexual attraction. I have searched, without real success, to find out why sexual attraction to children is called “pedophilia” (literally, the non-sexual love for children) and not pedoerotica (sexual attraction to children). One theory I’ve come across is that the term “pedophile” was coined by pederasts themselves in an attempt to whitewash their image, but I’ve unable to locate any substantiation for this claim. In any event, I found that every time I used the word philia to refer to the things we love, I also needed to give an explanation of the term pedophilia, and that was a problem.

At that time I briefly considered using “non-interpersonal love” but decided against it. My reasoning was that I wanted to define this love based on what it was, not based on what it wasn’t (i.e. not interpersonal love).

So in 1991, with the help of a family friend and classics professor, Dr. Gerta Seligman, I invented the term “philopragia,” which combines philo (i.e. ‘non-sexual love of’) and the less familiar Greek term ‘pragma’ which means “everyday things”. Philopragia has a very academic tone—a plus in academia, but not necessarily in the rest of the world. The term didn’t catch on. (Perhaps I overestimated the number of people who spoke ancient Greek?)

So, I’ve reconsidered the term non-interpersonal love and decided that it is the best alternative. Moreover, when I first started studying this topic I didn’t like the way the term “non-interpersonal” made this love seem derivative of interpersonal love. But through my research I have learned that non-interpersonal love is derived from interpersonal love, so the derivative nature of the term is well justified.

While we’re on the subject of of vocabulary, I’d like to clarify three more phrases:

1. The love of things is not limited to physical objects. That is because the word “things” in the phrase “the love of things” includes all sorts of things such as activities, ideas, places, objects, and anything else that isn’t a person.
2. The phrase love object comes from object-relations psychology, and refers to anything a person loves, including both people and things. In fact, the term “love object” usually refers to a person. So when you see the term “love object”, think object as in grammar, not necessarily an inanimate physical object.
3. The phrase is brand love is just marketing jargon for non-interpersonal love in situations where a person loves a product, service, brand, or anything else that someone is trying to market. A lot of the research on non-interpersonal love has been done under the heading of brand love.

[1] From a line in the 1894 poem Two Loves by Lord Alfred Douglas.

There are four main reasons why it is worth our while to understand non-interpersonal love. First, the contemporary world is an overflowing cornucopia of things. Wal-Mart stores stock over 140,000 products, so that on a typical shopping trip we may walk past more products in an hour than most of our ancestors would have encountered in several lifetimes.  And that’s small beer compared to Amazon, which sells over 200,000,000 different things. But wait, there’s more; because non-interpersonal love also potentially includes an endless stream of activities available to us and a world full of places to see. But from this staggering menu of options there are only a very few things that we love, and these are the things that bring us joy and make possible the best parts of our lives.

Second, we are all embarked on a great life project of figuring out who we want to be and striving to become that aspired to person. Anything that helps us in this quest is of great importance. The things we love are our constant partners in this project. They help us discern what is authentically “us.” And they literally become part of who we are, helping us move a little closer to becoming the person we wish to be.

Third, when I began this research I worried, along with many other social critics, that the more we loved things the less we would love people. Yet to my pleasant surprise, one of the more paradoxical and interesting things I have learned is that non-interpersonal love is all about people. For the time being at least, the things we love are inseparably woven into interpersonal relationships. Understanding non-interpersonal love will not only help us know ourselves better, but it can help us gain new insights and how we relate to those around us.

Finally, this topic is timely because we are on the verge of a potentially momentous change in the way people lead their everyday lives. In the previous paragraph I wrote “For the time being at least, the things we love inseparably woven into interpersonal relationships.” The qualifying phrase “for the time being,” is a crucial part of that claim. As technology advances, there exists a real danger that this may change. Even with today’s technology, toy robot dogs can be as effective at relieving loneliness as are real dogs; and people find that speaking to simple computerized-psychologist program is surprisingly engaging and rewarding.  Consider then what might happen when these robot-dogs or psychologist-software actually gets good? As machines become more anthropomorphically sophisticated, they may, for the first time, truly compete with humans as relationship partners. True, anthropomorphic machines may never be able to create the intensely meaningful experiences that actual humans provide; but neither will they ask you to listen to their tedious stories, or watch the movie they want to see, or make many of the other demands on you that are inherent to interpersonal relationships. As a result, not only may your boss replace you with a machine at work, but conceivably, you friend might replace you with a machine after work. To understand if this is a real threat, or just another doomsday prediction that says a lot more about our currant anxieties than it does about any future reality, we need to have a basic understanding of how non-interpersonal love works.

As I began this research, I started with some of the most basic question one could ask: is non-interpersonal love real love?  Many people agree that the answer to this question is obvious. It’s just that some of them think the answer is obviously no, while others think the answer is obviously yes. In everyday speech, it’s quite possible that the word love is used as often in connection with loved activities (“l love skiing”), places (“I love nature”), products (“I love your new dress”), and abstractions (“I love my freedom too much to settle down”) as it is with loved people. But people use words loosely all the time. They say they are “starving” when they are hungry, they say they are “dead” when they are tired. Was all this talk of love just colorful exaggeration, or do people really love things?

As you’ve no doubt surmised, the answer turns out to be yes, people really do love all sorts of things.  This is not to say that every time someone says “I love your new haircut” that they actually love your new haircut.  People also use the word love to mean, “it’s great”; e.g. I think your new haircut is great. Yet some of the times when people say they love something, they really do love it in the strongest and most literal sense of the word.

As you can see from the pictures of people with things they love, people love a wide variety of things. Yet some things are more widely loved than others. The research has not been done that would allow me to say precisely what the most loved things are the world over, but making an educated guess, I find that six categories of objects, activities and places are so commonly loved that I’ve come to call them “the ubiquitous six”.

• Nature is number one on this list, in part because it is something that all humans have in common. Nature’s widespread appeal is consistent with research showing that exposure to the natural world improves people’s happiness, even if this exposure to nature is nothing more than having a potted plant in your office.

The other five are somewhat less widely loved than nature, because they are more commonly loved in some groups than in others. They are, in no particular order:

• God/religious items,
• Pets,
• Sports,
• The arts, and
• Home (including one’s country, region, city, and/or dwelling).

There is a romantic notion that for every person on earth, there is someone out there who is right for them as a loving partner. When it comes to non-interpersonal love it wouldn’t go that far, but it never ceases to amaze me how for all sorts of things that don’t seem that loveable, there are nonetheless people who love them. I once interviewed a man who loved steel and a woman who loved a pad of paper with the image of the Mona Lisa printed on the side. In a study by Rossiter (2012), 17% of the respondents reported loving their favorite brand of laundry detergent. Although his methodology may have led to some inflation in the number of laundry detergent lovers, the idea that a solid chunk of the population loves a laundry detergent brand took me a bit by surprise.

And then there’s Norwegian wood, not the song, the stuff they put in Norwegian fireplaces. In 2013, Norwegian television ran a 12-hour program called “National Firewood Night.” As Ryan Grenoble (2013) reported, the first four hours “featured firewood aficionados discussing chopping and stacking techniques, in addition to more (ahem) burning questions related to the fire itself. The following eight hours were filled by a live shot of a burning fire.” In terms of non-interpersonal love, what really makes this interesting is the fact that the show was a hit, watched by nearly 20% of all Norwegians. I don’t have data directly on what percentage of Norwegians love firewood, but in every other case where I’ve seen that level of positive interest and involvement, a sizable minority of the people love thing in question.

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