Beyond Friendship and Eros: Unrecognized Relationships between Men and Women

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SUNY Press, Jul 26, 2001 - Social Science - 128 pages
Culminating a twenty-year personal and scholarly quest, the authors explore the phenomenon of loving relationships (minus the sexual attraction) between men and women. They articulate these relationships as dialogical love in which partners respond to each other s presence personally rather than categorically as friend or lover. In a society where relationships of dialogical love are neither articulated and named nor recognized as acceptable ways of being, they are usually mistaken as affairs or regarded as just friend relationships. Since these relationships are spontaneous, free, and open, their meaning is disclosed through examples rather than by traditional definition. Throughout the book, the authors share their own personal relationship, similar relationships of those they interviewed, and relationships from literature and popular movies. Further illuminating interpretations of friendship and love are excerpts from C. S. Lewis, Rollo May, Caroline Simon, and Robert Solomon. Personal relationships are explicated by the work of Martin Buber, John Macmurray, and Alfred Schutz.
 

Contents

WHY ANOTHER INTERPRETATION OF LOVE?
1
ABUNDANT BEING AND SOCIETAL TENSIONS
9
Dialogical Love and Abundant Being
10
Societal Restraint and Misdirection
18
Struggling with Cultural Misdirection
24
Must Sex Inhibit Friendship?
31
DIALOGICAL LOVE FRIENDS OR LOVERS
35
Lewis on the Transformation of Sex by Eros
37
Solomon on the Complementary Relationship of Friendship and Love
56
Plato and Aristotle on Friendship
60
REACHING FOR DIALOGICAL LOVE
69
Emersons Rejection of Fullers Invitation to Dialogical Love
77
Mill and Taylors Reaching for Dialogical Love and Finding Feminism
83
ITHOU PERSONAL AND WERELATIONSHIPS
91
Buber
94
Macmurray
99

May on How Sex Is Transformed by Eros
41
Lewis on Friendship and Eros
44
May on Friendship and Eros
46
FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN
49
Simon on Intergender Friendship
50
Schutz
105
WHY DIALOGICAL LOVE?
111
REFERENCES
123
INDEX
127
Copyright

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About the author (2001)

At Lynchburg College John R. Scudder Jr. is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus and Anne H. Bishop is Professor of Nursing Emerita. Together they have coauthored a number of books on nursing, including The Practical, Moral, and Personal Sense of Nursing: A Phenomenological Philosophy of Practice, also published by SUNY Press.

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