Why Do You Love Me? The Question That Reveals Everything the Answer Cannot

The wrong question on a park bench

A couple sits on a bench as the sky moves from blue to red. The partner turns and asks, "Why do you love me?" The honest answer — "I love you, not your qualities; other people could have those qualities" — lands, Ira Bedzow tells us in his recent Psychology Today essay, like a stone dropped into a quiet evening. The partner feels dismissed. The philosopher feels vindicated. Neither is quite right.

Bedzow's insight is genuine: the why-question frames love as a consumer decision, matching a buyer's preferences to a product's specifications. Replace the specifications, the logic runs, and you'd love someone else instead. His proposed remedy — shift from "why do you love me" to "how did you come to love me" — is wiser than it first appears. The narrative account of shared memory and mutual investment avoids the category error of reducing a person to a portfolio of attributes.

But the essay stops just at the threshold of the deeper room. It tells us that love grows through shared experience without asking what kind of thing a person must be for that to be true. That question belongs to Catholic anthropology, and the answer changes everything about how we hear the park-bench exchange.

A person is not a bundle of traits

When Aquinas distinguishes love as unio et nexus — a union and bond of feeling and will between the lover and the loved — he is making a claim about ontology, not psychology.[^4] The beloved is not apprehended as a collection of properties but as a subsistent individual, a unique act of existence that cannot be duplicated or replaced. Traits can be replicated. Persons cannot.

DMU faculty argue that the human person, understood within a Catholic Christian framework, is constitutively relational — not relational as one feature among others, but relational at the root of what it means to be a person at all.[^2] The Trinitarian image the tradition relies on is not decorative theology; it is an account of why persons are irreducibly oriented toward union with others and, through others, toward God.[^6] Bedzow's narrative account of love — lives becoming woven together over time — maps, perhaps unintentionally, onto precisely this anthropology. The story of how love grew is not just a more accurate description of love's phenomenology. It discloses what persons are: beings whose identity is partly constituted by their relationships.

Here the essay's secular framework quietly strains. If persons are ultimately the products of contingent shared experience and nothing more, then the "how" question merely defers the why-problem rather than solving it. Why does this shared history generate love rather than mere familiarity? Bedzow has no resources for that answer. The Catholic tradition does: because each person participates, however dimly, in a goodness that is inexhaustible and that the lover perceives, partially and fitfully, in the particular face before them.[^1]

The crisis the essay faces

The strongest version of Bedzow's case deserves a direct answer: perhaps the Catholic appeal to the person's Trinitarian depth is just a more elaborate confabulation — a richer story, but a story nonetheless.

The honest Catholic reply is that this is not a causal explanation at all. It is an account of the kind of thing love is. When Aquinas says that love is a union of will toward the good of the other, he is not offering a mechanism; he is identifying love's proper object. The beloved is good — not merely useful, not merely pleasurable, but good in themselves — and love is the will's movement toward that goodness. The "how" story Bedzow rightly prefers is the phenomenological trace of that movement through time. The Catholic tradition simply refuses to let the trace be the whole account.

This matters pastorally as much as philosophically. Couples in marital therapy who can only answer "how we came to love each other" with a story of shared pleasures are — as DMU faculty drawing on Gottman's research observe — more fragile than they know.[^5] When the shared pleasures shift, as they always do, the story loses its power to sustain. What holds love through its hardest seasons is not the accumulation of good memories alone. It is the conviction that the person before you is someone whose existence is, in itself, a gift worth receiving.

Something to sit with

Back on the bench, the sky still turning. Here is the answer Bedzow's essay works toward and the tradition can complete: "How did I come to love you? There was the evening you laughed at nothing, and I saw something in you that I had not made and could not take away. There was the morning you were afraid, and you let me be afraid with you. There was every ordinary hour that taught me you are not replaceable — not by someone funnier or kinder or more patient — because you are not a list of things. You are you, and that turned out to be more than enough."

That answer is a story. But it points past itself — toward the irreducible weight of a particular human existence, which the Catholic tradition has always insisted is not finally explicable by anything less than the love that called it into being.

<p style="font-style:italic;">Disclaimer: The views and content of this post are the author's own. AI was used to help edit grammar and improve clarity.</p>

References

[^1]: Unknown author, Catholic theological and psychological understanding of human love, grounded in Trinitarian theology. [^2]: Unknown author, panel discussion on integrating Catholic Christian anthropology into clinical psychology practice; self-gift to others rather than self-actualization. [^4]: William Nordling, in Vitz, P.C., Nordling, W.J., & Titus, C.S. (2020), A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person, Divine Mercy University Press, pp. 306-330; love as 'union and bond' (unio et nexus) of feeling and will between the lover and the loved. [^5]: Unknown author, Chapter 5: Basic Psychological Support for the Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person; distressed couples fall into negative and distorted perceptions, behave in maladaptive ways. [^6]: William Nordling, in Vitz, P.C., Nordling, W.J., & Titus, C.S. (2020), A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person, Divine Mercy University Press, pp. 115-144; we seek to flourish through transcending ourselves in seeking to be united in friendship and love with others and with God.