Best Books on the Philosophy of Love and Romantic Relationships

Philosophy has been arguing about love since Plato gathered a group of Athenians to give speeches about it at a dinner party. The question seems simple enough: what is love? But every serious attempt to answer it runs into the same difficulty. Love is both an emotion and a commitment. It is something you fall into and something you choose. It changes the person who experiences it while also depending on the person who experiences it to make sense.

Philosophers have divided the problem in different ways. Some focus on eros, desire and longing. Some focus on philia, friendship and care. Some focus on agape, unconditional regard that does not depend on what the beloved is like. The modern psychological literature adds attachment theory, evolutionary accounts, and the neuroscience of pair bonding, none of which quite settle the questions philosophers have been asking since Athens.

The books below are for readers who want more than self-help. They engage with what love actually is, not just how to have more of it.

The Classical Foundation: Plato and What Came After

1. The Symposium by Plato (translated by Robin Waterfield)

Plato's Symposium is the starting point for Western philosophy of love, and it is still one of the most readable philosophical texts ever written. Each guest at a dinner party gives a speech about Eros. Aristophanes contributes the myth of humans originally being double creatures, split in two by Zeus, who spend their lives searching for their other half. Socrates, in the most important speech, reports what Diotima told him: that love is not possession of beauty but a longing for immortality, a desire to create something that lasts. The Waterfield translation is modern and accessible.

Best for: Readers who want the original philosophical source and the full range of ancient views on love in one short book.

2. Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature by Martha Nussbaum

Nussbaum argues that literature, not just philosophy, is a form of moral knowledge. Her essays read novels by Henry James and Proust as philosophical texts, asking what they know about love, vulnerability, and the ethics of how we treat the people we are attached to. Her central claim is that love requires a kind of receptive attention that pure rational analysis cannot achieve. This is challenging material, but Nussbaum writes with unusual clarity.

Best for: Readers who want a serious philosophical treatment of love that also engages with great literature.

Modern Philosophy of Love: What Philosophers Say Now

Contemporary philosophers of love generally work in one of two directions. Some analyze what kind of mental state love is: whether it is primarily a belief, a desire, an emotion, or something else. Others focus on the ethics of love: what obligations love creates, how love relates to justice, and whether love is compatible with treating the beloved as a full moral agent rather than as an extension of yourself.

3. Love: A History by Simon May

May traces how the concept of love has changed from ancient Greece and the Hebrew Bible through Romanticism to the present. His argument is that Western culture places excessive demands on romantic love, expecting it to provide the kind of grounding and belonging that used to come from religion and community. Whether or not you agree with his thesis, the historical survey is thorough and the writing is clear. May is good at explaining why people in different eras thought about love so differently.

4. The Examined Life by Robert Nozick

Nozick's 1989 book includes one of the best short philosophical essays on love in modern philosophy. He describes love as the formation of a "we," a new entity that the two people form together that is irreducible to either of them individually. The essay is short, reads as a series of linked observations, and covers more ground than most full books on the subject. The rest of The Examined Life covers death, faith, and the good life, and is worth reading alongside the love section.

Best for: Readers who want rigorous philosophical analysis without academic jargon.

Psychology and the Science of Love

The psychological literature on love does not replace the philosophical literature but it does add precision to it. Attachment theory, developed by John Bowlby and extended by many others, describes how early relationships shape the patterns we bring to adult love. The neuroscience of love identifies the biological systems involved. Neither account answers the philosophical questions about what love means, but both change how you think about the experience.

5. Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller

Levine and Heller's 2010 book made attachment theory accessible for general readers and had a significant impact on how people think about their own relationship patterns. The book identifies three main attachment styles (secure, anxious, avoidant) and argues that understanding your own style explains a great deal about why your relationships have gone the way they have. It sits closer to self-help than philosophy, but it is grounded in real research.

Three Philosophy of Love Books Worth Reading

• The Symposium by Plato, translated by Robin Waterfield, the original philosophical text on love that still generates arguments after two thousand years.
• Love: A History by Simon May, a thorough historical account of how the concept of love has changed across Western culture.
• Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller, the clearest account of how attachment theory explains adult relationship patterns.

Further Reading

For more on philosophy and ethics, see the philosophy books category. If you want to continue into the psychology of relationships, the attachment theory literature is covered in depth in our guide to the best books on attachment theory.