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In this paper I appraise John Wilson's ideal of (erotic) love between equals. Although I allow that the ideal is intriguing, one that leads to good conversation (in bed and out of it), in the end it is one I cannot endorse.

One commentator has called John Wilson's Love between Equals (1995) "a philosophical tour de force" (Burwood, 1999). It is. Wilson, in his analysis of love and in his advocacy for an ideal of love between equals, unflinchingly lays out in comprehensive detail what is involved in seeing love as a form of desire. He brings to bear much psychological insight into the selves who fall in love; and he describes with subtlety and sensitivity some features of vulnerability associated with loving. His discussion is full of examples which, although sketchy, are familiar enough for most (heterosexual) readers to say, "This book is talking about what I struggle with in my love life"-a rare accomplishment among philosophy books.

This does not mean that I think Wilson gets it right [1]. In fact, I think in some ways his analysis is quite wrong; but then Wilson himself says he attempts to write with a kind of clarity he hopes will make it "more obvious what I say is wrong" (Wilson, 1995, p. ix). So it is a genuine compliment to say, he does; and yet another virtue of the book to be noted.

Wilson's promotion of an ideal erotic love between equals is a rare phenomenon. It is an admirable, lusty attempt both to capture what is generally thought to be exciting, captivating, delicious and even illicit about love, its unruly nature, let us call it, the element of passionate desire, and also to show that when we are serious about love between equals there is an inescapable moral dimension to it.

Love, Wilson claims, is a child of want; and to so love something is "just to have a fairly permanent kind of intensity of desire for it and attachment to it" (p. 14). He quickly notes that complexities enter "when we start to consider the kind of object we love and the other relationships we have or ought to have with that object besides that of desiring it" (p. 14). Regardless of the object of our love, Wilson claims, we need to respect and do justice to its nature; we must love it for what it is and not some purpose we put it to. If it is a person we love, we need to consider how we can do justice to them while still retaining our desire for them and the pleasure we get out of them (p. 21).

Wilson aligns romantic love between equals with Aristotle's notion of intrinsic friendship and separates it from agape. Although intrinsic friendship is distinguished from erotic love by the absence of a sexual relationship, still at the heart of both there is "the desire to share the self for its own sake" and to form an association which allows this (p. 48). With erotic love, the desire is to share the self, the whole self, and, as Wilson notes, "not just the nice bits".

Noting that some writers see love as incompatible with the desire for power over the other, Wilson is unequivocal in rejecting this view. He says, I cannot love X without wanting some measure of power over X, wanting to possess X in some sense, wanting X to depend on me: not at least where X is a person and perhaps not for any X. The basic reason for this is simple: if I love X, then by definition I desire X, delight in some association with X, want to get as much out of X as possible. So to achieve this I must also want X to be available for me, and to be so controlled or possessed by me that I can get what I want out of X (p. 62).

Wilson finds it unalarming to declare power is a constituent of love because this simply acknowledges that love relationships "invariably and rightly" make use of the feelings we had as young children which included "the feeling that I desired the complete and utter love and possession of my mother/father, that I had the power to elicit and rely on this; and also the feeling that I was totally dependent on him/her, that I was in his/her possession and power" (p. 64).

In a satisfactory love relationship between equals Wilson believes it is not how much or what kind of power that should concern us but rather the recognition that everything "turns on whether what A and B do is the result of bilateral negotiation and mutual understanding or the result of unilateral judgement and guess work. The former is governed ultimately by communication, sharing and negotiation, the latter by some idea of how best to 'manage' each other" (p. 48). In relationships between equals, Wilson claims justice and fairness just is "the maintenance of whatever arrangements A and B work out and contract for between them" (p. 106).

For Wilson, the test of love is the ability and willingness to welcome the desire for power over the other, even as it is directed to oneself (p. 69). He also believes this achievement, when it occurs with repressed desires and fantasies, is the chief social value of love between equals because it is what makes justice possible: indeed, he claims it is essential for justice (p. 169).

What do I think is to be said for Wilson's ideal? It is intriguing. Undoubtedly there is much to admire in Wilson's clarification and defence of it. However, it is not one that, upon serious consideration, I can sincerely prescribe for myself. It is not one I would recommend to others, nor do I think it is one that others should endorse. In short, I find it a love not worth wanting. Whether my own feelings, reasons and arguments can justify this claim, we will see soon enough.

Here, perhaps, is the place to enter two basic features of my discussion of Wilson's ideal. First, my perspective can be called feminist, if we use the term "feminist" very broadly to describe someone who has close to the centre of her attention a concern for women's autonomy, freedom, welfare and happiness, or at least the acknowledgement of women's oppression, a desire to resist and eliminate it, and a desire to bring women's experience more into the domain of what is publicly valued.

A second feature of my discussion is that I treat Wilson's love between equals as an ideal of heterosexual erotic love only, although he himself offers it as an equal opportunity ideal in the sense that it is intended as an ideal for lesbians and gay men as well as for heterosexuals. However, not all loves are equal, and there are many reasons why I think Wilson's analysis cannot easily apply to "the love that dare not speak its name". For one, the latter love is one that is vilified, castigated, forbidden, an outlaw love, while heterosexual love is valorised and coercively promoted within most cultures. The desire of gay and lesbian lovers is enormously costly, at least in the United States and in many other places as well; it can cost people their children, jobs, housing, health benefits, indeed their lives.

Additionally, there is sufficient evidence in writings by gays and lesbians that (some of) their views on erotic love may differ significantly from Wilson's on two particular features he takes to be integral to it, a desire for possessiveness and control, and the requirement of sexual fidelity (Lorde, 1984; Browning, 1994; Bersani, 1995). Of course, not all lesbians and gay men agree on matters related to the erotic and there are certainly gay and lesbian writings which could be seen as an endorsement of Wilson's analysis. There is, however, another complicating factor. In several passages Wilson appeals to what he takes to be "natural differences" ("givens") between women and men which he thinks can or should account for their attraction to one another (p. 71). Whether or not any claims of differences are true, all these points raise relevant questions about the applicability of Wilson's analysis for gay and lesbian erotic love relationships, matters too complicated either to ignore or to address in this paper. Thus, to avoid these complications, throughout the rest of this essay the reader should assume that when I am speaking of Wilson's analysis I have in mind heterosexual erotic love relationships.

Equality: who counts as equals?

One cannot begin an appraisal of Wilson's philosophical study of love without first dealing with the oddity of his having argued the possibility and desirability of a particular form of erotic love between equals without addressing the obvious question: Who counts as equals?

It seems clear that Wilson is referring to most of us, adult women and men, and while he straightforwardly acknowledges women's inequality vis-d-vis men, for the most part he philosophises about erotic love without weighing its full significance, i.e. without seeing the full import of the fact that most heterosexual love is between unequals. The phrase "love between equals" is abstract; it diverts our attention from the question, "What are the preconditions of equality that need to be met before we can assume a love between equals?"

Wilson knows that in trying to understand love we need to explain not only the motive for it but also the freedom to love, i.e. the agency required. In elaborating the conditions for the latter he speaks primarily of internal fears, which for both sexes are real enough when it comes to sharing the self. But are these the only barriers? What about the external situation, the public contexts we inhabit and those which inhabit us? Do these make a difference?

There is no doubt Wilson thinks love is aided by social political equality (p. 78): and he confirms the large-scale institutionalised oppression which affects conditions of equality and feelings of trust essential for love. He says:

in common with other people, I myself believe that the ideas marked by "male domination", "patriarchal oppression" and "male chauvinism" and others do indeed stand for something real, not imaginary; and that feminists are quite right to direct our attention to this. It is a real danger, it does real damage, it has to be combatted (p. 100).

However, he just as clearly insists that we are not to be "so dominated by these ideas as to allow no space for personal relationships at all; or to fill that space with political ideology, or even to be unable to give any attention to such space" (p. 100). In the teeth of social inequality we must still wrest what space we can for love and personal relationships, otherwise "we surrender our freedom by seeing ourselves solely in a political role dictated to us by society" (p. 100). Besides, he insists, we are not to forget that there are other factors relevant to any discussion of sex differences, and also the fact that individuals "play an important part in defining themselves" (p. 102). In short, Wilson thinks that social differences should not matter that much; in love between equals, the moral requirements of equality are satisfied simply by having the persons bilaterally negotiate the terms of their relationship.

The problem is that even as he admits its existence Wilson wants to bracket the inequality that threatens the possibility of his ideal. He treats heterosexuality as though it were neutral, not related to the social inequality he recognises. Even if we grant that in some sense (hetero)sex is natural, it is not neutral. There are many who think that heterosexuality is a primary site of women's subordination and that as sexual beings women move in a coercive context of pervasive power imbalance (Rich, 1980; Frye, 1984, 1992).

If we approach the question "Who counts as equal?" from the life experience of a woman, we cannot help but be struck by the enormous power imbalances that obtain in most heterosexual relationships. As Marilyn Frye notes:

As long as the culture is male-dominated, misogynist and characterized by compulsory heterosexuality for women, most females will have most of their sexual experience in relationships in which, on balance, they have considerably less social, economic and physical power than their partners, and in a context of myth and dogma that would impose male affirming and female degrading meanings upon their sex acts (1984, p. 451).

To put it bluntly, female heterosexuality is not (or not simply) a biological drive, it is also a set of social institutions and practices imposed by patriarchal kinship systems, civil and religious laws and by strenuously enforced deeply entrenched values and taboos. What this means is that women do not freely enter a "love between equals" when it is heterosexual love. No amount of good will or moral intention to treat her as an equal can alter this fact nor eradicate all the coercive powers that function to bring her into, and keep her in, such a love relationship.

I find Wilson's proposed solution to these complexities worrisome. If I understand him correctly, his answer is to acknowledge that there may be differences to be negotiated and other non-negotiable "givens", which need simply to be faced up to; and we should distinguish these by "looking without prejudice", i.e. unimpeded "by any kind of political or other theory or ideology" (p. 104).

I doubt whether such looking is possible. Whatever appeal it may have comes from a false dichotomy Wilson assumes between either being totally preoccupied with seeing the other solely as an oppressor (or victim), or else having an exclusive space marked "personal" set aside where we can conduct our erotic relationships free from any social or political influences. But no such personal space exists wholly free of the effects of large-scale systematic oppression. Oppression is not something out there having only to do with gender stereotypes, economic opportunity and legal rights. A counterpart inhabits the private personal sphere. Sexual acts, desire, dread and taboos are profoundly political; and equality, for women, is just as much about "the disposition of bodies, the manipulation of desire and arousal and the bonds of intimacy and loyalty" (Frye, 1992, p. 123). In short, "the political is personal, very very personal" (ibid.). We cannot pretend that what it is to be a man and what it is to be a woman are not socially constructed in heterosexual erotic relations. They are. Too often what it is to be a man means to be in control of a woman's sexuality.

Like Wilson, I do not want historical determinism to suffocate erotic love, but with Frye I think that "the free space of creation exists only when it is actively, creatively, aggressively, courageously, persistently occupied" (1992, p. 133).

My idea of how we attend to these matters to ensure more of the freedom to love which both Wilson and I want is first to recognise that heterosexuality itself, in this and most cultures we know, is patriarchal, not neutral. The way to wrest our freedom is to pay attention to its precise details in our lives, how it shapes our own desires, sexual responses and erotic attractions to the "opposite sex" (Bartky, 1990). We need to pay at least as much attention to these feelings as Wilson wants us to pay to our childhood feelings of wanting to possess and control those with whom we are most intimate. Who knows, we may find some connections here.

Another step is to avoid treating significant power differences as all of equivalent significance in personal relationships, as Wilson does. There is a significant difference between a woman being a good cook and a man having more status, access to material resources (education, money, jobs, pension, security, health care), and being more physically secure in the world. These structural differences can make a woman more dependent upon a man, especially if she has children, cares for them, and takes responsibility for them. Not all differences are equal; differences that affect women's ability to change the conditions of their relationship and their ability to negotiate matter more.

The point at issue here is the one made by Bernard Williams (1984) some time ago. If one wants to treat someone who is a member of a dominated or exploited group as an equal, then one cannot do it simply by taking account of what they want, for:

there are ways of exploiting [persons] or degrading them which cannot be excluded merely by considering how the exploited or degraded see the situation. For it is precisely a mark of extreme exploitation or degradation that those who suffer it do not see themselves differently from the way they are seen by the exploiters; either they do not see themselves as anything at all, or they acquiesce passively in the role for which they have been cast (pp. 85-86).

Consequently, taking account of their point of view entails attending to the conditions that make it possible for them to have their own point of view, their own wants. Attending to the matters I have mentioned is one way to respect these conditions and to know when they are jeopardised.

Thus we see that the notion of justice that is inherent in Wilson's ideal erotic relationship may be too weak to realise justice in the actual relationship. It assumes the partners are equal, but only in an abstract sense in which we are all claimed to be equal (yet in fact are not).

Who's Taking Responsibility for Whose Sexuality?

In Wilson's analysis much weight is attached not simply to the idea that love is a form of desire but that it entails particular desires. It is a virtue of Wilson's analysis that he meets these desires head-on and insists on their legitimacy. Where I think his writings fail is in his answer to a question he never asks explicitly: who is responsible for such desires? In particular, who is responsible for the unruly desires for domination, possessiveness and control which manifest themselves in morally suspicious sexual demands?

If I read him right Wilson thinks one's partner bears a large burden of the responsibility. He notes this "puts enormous weight (and rightly so) on the existing erotic relationship" (p. 137); but the existing erotic relationship that supposedly bears the weight here is an abstraction. It is, really, the other person in the relationship who bears the weight of responsibility for accepting these desires and their transformation or transmutation.

Consider Wilson's discussion of sadism, in which he claims that "it is entirely normal (indeed essential) for either partner in a relationship to wish to be assured of his/her power over the other; and this may be demonstrated, and welcomed in a variety of forms of interaction that do not cause pain" (p. 138). Wilson claims it is the mutuality and desire to gratify that are crucial. If they are in place and if each partner makes a serious attempt to understand what lies behind sexual fantasies, how "each represents some aspect of desire which is itself intelligible and acceptable", then:

Once this is understood the point of the details and props of the scenario become acceptable to both parties, so that the role of being an Arab Sheik, or a prisoner of the Gestapo, or the favourite girl in the harem, or a cruel mistress of slaves or whatever, can be enacted with mutual pleasure (p. 141).

It may (or may not) be surprising to be told that the test of one's love relationship with an equal is the ability to act out in bed the desires and fantasies that are repressed (consciously or unconsciously) for reasons of social morality, or out of some kind of fear. Yet one of the "tasks" of love, according to Wilson, is to avoid or heal the psychological splitting into "good" and "bad" parts of the self. This is accomplished if the lovers welcome both as "essential parts of each other which merit gratification" (p. 138). We increase our freedom and our ability to feel and express love, first, by understanding the aspects of desire present in ourselves and our partners, and then by the practice of acting them out with pleasure (p. 140). Success, as he recognises, very much depends upon "distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable desires". However, Wilson's discussion of this distinction seems to me to land us in a muddle, for within it an ambiguity persists about which desires we are expected to "acknowledge, welcome and practise". On one hand, it sounds as though there are some desires which are unacceptable candidates for consideration. He says, "All infants, as they grow, have to leave behind them fantasies which can and should never be satisfied: fantasies of revenge, murder, hatred, rape, the desires to hurt and so forth. These are rightly consigned to deep unconscious repression ..." (p. 140). On the other hand, in the discussion of sadism which follows this passage, it sounds as though no desire need be excluded, rather it is a matter of finding within that desire or fantasy the perfectly normal and acceptable feelings that can legitimately claim gratification.

However, even if we were able to distinguish the acceptable unconscious material from the unacceptable, we still have a dilemma. Are the feelings we are to "transmute" the same feelings that lead to murder and rape (for example) or not? If they are not the same, i.e. if Wilson sticks to his claim that there are some which ought rightly to be repressed, then it seems we would lose the major social benefit claimed for erotic love. If they are not the same feelings then how are the socially dangerous ones to be transformed? If the ones he proposes we deal with are related to them, then we need to know exactly how they are related to know whether or not it is safe to deal with them in an erotic relationship, whether it is fair to the other person to ask them to engage them.

If, on the other hand, they are part of the material of the erotic relationship that is to be transmuted, then we need to know what has happened to the argument that they should be (rightly) repressed. In describing their potential for wreaking havoc Wilson indicates they are so unruly as to be unaffected by the demands of social morality. If they are that unruly it seems rather dangerous to act them out in an erotic love relationship, to expect one's partner to be able to accomplish alone what other civilising forces have failed to accomplish. If I love you, according to Wilson, then I must bear the responsibility of not only understanding the "perverse", seeing the normal in the "unacceptable", but also somehow gratifying your demands without at the same time encouraging or endorsing the "bad". This is too heavy a burden to expect any one, or even any two people, to manage, and here is the crucial point, in a context where we already have an eroticisation of power and dominant/ subordinate relations which systematically disadvantage women.

Wilson seems to think we can detach cultural meanings associated with the "practising" of certain desires and fantasies, that we can "lovingly institutionalise" the desire to "possess, control and dominate a woman" and thereby transmute the feelings and the meanings associated with such acts in a culture in which women have been and still are regarded and treated as property, in a culture where currents of cultural meaning have a "semantics" in which dominance, conquest, power and violence are "marked" masculine (Frye, 1984, p. 448). The theory of meaning he presupposes here, in which two individuals can change the cultural meaning of acts, would seem to run counter to the theory of meaning he relies upon when he insists that erotic love means wanting to possess the one we love.

I see a dilemma here for Wilson stemming from what I take to be his implicit theory of meaning. If we grant what he needs here, that persons in morally suspicious erotic love "scenarios" can exercise significant power over what they mean on these occasions by their willingness and ability to interpret, then we can ask why should that not also be true for what they mean by love? In which case, if a woman simply does not want to gratify her partner's (repressed) sexual desires to dominate or be dominated, she cannot rightly be accused of not loving him. Or, if she is, she can simply answer, "But I was not party to that definition. That's not what I mean by love."

Alternatively, if Wilson chooses to stay with what I assume is his more conventional theory of meaning which underwrites his conceptual analysis of love, then he cannot, without inconsistency, be adamant that the social meanings of treating someone like a slave can be both employed for the erotic pleasure they give and simultaneously be easily transformed.

It does not occur to Wilson to wonder whether the eroticisation of power could be a primary cause and/or means of social injustice. It does not occur to Wilson to wonder whether the reason he can be so confident in defining heterosexual erotic love in terms of power might be precisely because we have so eroticised power relations between the sexes that such feelings now do seem to us to be part of the human condition.

The feelings, impulses, desires and fantasies that Wilson proposes a successful erotic relationship work out, or transmute so that they should not become socially dangerous, he proposes we work out in a social context which magnifies, sanctions and encourages them. What we get, I propose, is an entrenchment of the status quo, not something that will promote social justice.

A corollary difficulty is that although Wilson is keen to recognise the conceptualisation of desires, his conceptualisation is narrowly restricted by the theories he calls upon to make sense of them. He relies on Freudian theory to account for the pervasiveness and normalcy of desires to possess, control and dominate the one we love; and ignores the social political forces which play a role in shaping these desires in the first instance, and in their subsequent manifestations.

While I do not have great deal of quarrel with Freudian or Kleinian psychoanalytic insights, I do think they are less categorical than Wilson suggests and significantly more influenced by the social political context than he acknowledges. For example, other theorists argue that the feelings Wilson thinks "part of our humanity, of what it is to be a person" (for example, a desire for possession and control over the other) are not so common in cultures with a less intense motherchild bond where, unlike in most western cultures, from the beginning many adults are intimately involved with the care of the child (Flax, 1990). Chodorow and other object-relations theorists have argued, persuasively I think, that it is the social political context of sexism in which women, and hence the mother, are devalued, and especially devalued as an object of identification for the boy, that accounts for the trauma associated with our cultural insistence on the timing and nature of his (premature) separation from her. This could account for the intensity of the need for separation and thus one might easily speculate for the fear of it, and hence, again (speculatively) the (defensive) desire to merge, which, since it is defensive, is full of unresolvable tensions that actually act to prevent merging. Hence the insistence Wilson attributes to these desires.

I would not want to argue that there are no such feelings as Wilson describes. What I would argue is that the nature, pervasiveness and roots of such feelings probably vary much more than he suggests (Chodorow, 1994). Furthermore, they could be relevantly different when we are discussing whether they can be gratified, whether they should be gratified, and in cases where they can and should be, how this might best be accomplished. Perhaps attempts at gratification simply intensify the desire. We are not well served by his advice to simply "look without prejudice".

Is repression and psychological "splitting" the only alternative to Wilson's suggestion that we acknowledge, welcome and act out the desires? Again, he seems to pose a false dichotomy: either we welcome desires (of the "bad" part), act them out, and transmute them, thereby ensuring our contribution to social justice, or else we repress them and pay for it with ensuing trouble (pp. 169-170).

If indeed this were the dichotomy we faced, I might be more favourably disposed to the acting-out alternative, provided it was recognised that to be successful at it people needed to really learn how to be actors. But let us not get caught in Wilson's false dichotomy. It ignores a distinct third possibility. Another, better alternative I would suggest is to acknowledge our feelings and desires certainly, but then inquire into them before making demands or undertaking enactments. Looking deeply, what might we see? It may well be that the kinds of desires Wilson wants welcomed and practised are not the sorts of desires that can be easily "gratified". Indeed, I suspect they might show us the truth in Nietzsche's remark: "One loves ultimately one's own desires, not the thing desired" (1991, p. 150). Given Wilson's constant characterisation of them as insistent "demands", there is every chance they are the sort of desires that, when "practised", intensify and are never easily, if at all, gratified. Certainly many other writers on love think so (Rapaport, 1991; Solomon, 1991).

Reflections on a Tyrannical Philosophical Lover

In this section I further explore some of the moral perils Wilson's model of intimacy poses for women. In particular, I argue that the limitations Wilson puts on the negotiation jeopardise self-respect, and thus constitute a deeper danger for women.

We have seen that Wilson insists that (perhaps) everything, certainly everything that is "consistent with the requirements of love" within the relationship, is to be negotiated bilaterally. I want now to explore the limitations Wilson puts on negotiations, limits that derive, he claims, from the concept of love, and from his concept of humanity. The limitations take on a special importance given that "the overall desire characteristic of erotic love is the desire to share oneself, one's whole self, not just the nice bits".

In sharing ourselves, and not "just the nice bits" we inevitably come to difficult matters when we want the other not just to do something, but to be and feel a certain way, or, as Wilson says, to act convincingly as though they do. Thus a likely "scenario" according to Wilson might be the following. A woman might desire that a man with whom she is in a love relationship express his feelings more, dress up perhaps like "a hero in a women's magazine". A man, the same man, may want a woman, the same woman, to dress like a hooker in bed, treat him with cruelty and dominance, and/or be tied up and threatened like a slave (pp. 82-83, 140).

In discussing these "demands" Wilson places limitations not only on the sort of desires that are acceptable, but also on the sorts of reasons one can offer for refusing to meet the other person's demands. In particular, he is suspicious of appeals to dignity, self-respect and integrity. According to Wilson:

B may rightly say, "Of course I love you; but I have naturally other love-objects and interests, and indeed I am actually contracted in various ways elsewhere-I am bound to look after my children, to do my job, not to renege on my religion. But these do not vitiate the love between us." What B cannot rightly say is "I love you, but it goes very much against the grain for me to take any orders from you, to dress up as you wish me to (in bed and out of it) ..." If B said that, he/she would in effect be saying, "I do not want to share myself with you, I prefer to keep significant parts of myself private, away from you: I will not release them on demand, because my privacy/dignity/self-respect/integrity is at stake." That means that B does not love A: what B loves is his/her inner self (privacy, integrity, or whatever), which B refuses to offer A (p. 68).

Although Wilson repeatedly notes that negotiation does not mean agreement and having a demand does not mean that it is satisfied, nevertheless there are places where I suspect he is unaware of a sort of philosophical bullying.

Wilson is right to have us scrutinise the ways in which we can appeal to integrity as no more than a self-protective function. As Chesire Calhoun puts it: "If it is just for me, for the sake of my ground-project, to preserve the purity of my agency that I stick to my best judgement, then I do not stand for something beyond myself (Calhoun, 1995, p. 253). It is indeed difficult to see why this sort of integrity should be admired or upheld. Contrary to Wilson, however, I think we do value integrity (even sometimes when persons stake their integrity on the wrong things). I see the notion of integrity differently, more the way Calhoun characterises it when she says that integrity is "acting on one's own best judgement of what is worth doing": It is an act of standing for something, of publicly representing one's own best judgement, among co-legislators who may dispute or endorse one's stand. As such it is an enabling condition for being a co-legislator of value, where co-legislation is understood in a non-Kantian fashion, simply as participation in the democratic representation of deliberative conclusions about what is worth doing (ibid., p. 257).

In Calhoun's view, integrity is central to our humanity. Certainly as a capacity it has as much claim as the childhood, culturally specific desires Wilson claims to be a mark of our humanity. As a moral achievement to which we aspire I would say integrity has a better claim to be a mark of "what it is to be a person".

I can imagine good reasons, perhaps even sound arguments why a woman would think dressing like a hooker, enacting the part of a slave in their lovemaking, or even treating her lover with cruelty and dominance in bed, even though such would delight her lover, would compromise her integrity, i.e. her best judgement about whether such sexual expressions deserved not simply acknowledgement or understanding, but enactment. Should she think it best to deny them both this form of sexual expression, in the face of a persistent negotiator who is ardent and skilled in pressing his case with charges that she is selfishly concerned only with her own ego-ideal, or fails to love him (enough), or that a refusal might mean they were not doing their bit for social justice, in the face of all this, she is right to fear for her own integrity.

Furthermore, although Wilson portrays his own favoured boundaries or limitations on what can be demanded in an erotic love relationship as deriving from the concept of love itself, it is important to see that Wilson himself will still need to have recourse to the notion of integrity I favour. Let us grant it is true, as A (assume it is a man) in Wilson's example declares, that work and family and friends are important to humans. Why must he insist on this particular job of being a philosopher, at this particular college? What is wrong with a job doing something similar, or in a different place, that requires fewer hours so that he might spend more time with his lover, his partner? Of course he needs to spend time with his children from a former marriage, but so much time, with such an investment of money, and in a manner that makes B feel second to them? The particular judgements in dispute here between A and B do not matter so much for our purposes as the fact that in responding to these sorts of queries it can hardly be an answer to say, "Yes, the degree and manner in which I do these things, meet these contracts, is required by the notion of what it is to be a human."

More responsive answers to such queries require one to make moral judgements and assessments, they call for moral deliberation; and at times one is called upon to stand up, as one deliberator among others, for one's own best judgement. Wilson's invocation of the concept of humanity here masks what, in the end, should entail a justifiable appeal of the sort B makes. We need not think that integrity cannot occur in small matters as well as large. If I am right in this, then to use these concepts as grounds for precluding B's appeals is a form of philosophical bullying, intentional or not.

It is surprising that what seems to have fallen away rather quickly is Aristotle's advice, and Wilson's endorsement of it, that the kind of sharing we hope for in erotic love is derived from the feelings of regard we have for ourselves. Wilson states, "We have to have a valued and loved self to share in the first place", for "if we do not value ourselves and our wants there is ultimately no reason why we should value those of others, nor can we properly understand them" (p. 43). We should expect no quarrel from Wilson if our negotiator values her own best judgement, if she thinks her integrity requires her to refuse her lover's "demands". Her partner may not like the answer at which she arrives, he may reject it for himself. What he cannot do is complain that she is selfishly considering only her own ego-ideal, or that she does not really love him, or that a refusal to engage these particular desires is likely to lead to trouble in the relationship or even in the larger world. At least he cannot do so without in some fashion bullying her.

Conclusion

Wilson claims that a love in which unruly desires "are not accepted and acted out" is a love not worth wanting. Is it true that other alternatives will be "thin, bloodless and superficial"? Perhaps, but I doubt it.

What intrigues me about Wilson's analysis is the hope it offers of showing that attending to the passionate nature of erotic love need not rob it of its moral quality, and vice versa. However, I have doubts that that hope is realised. This promise seems threatened when Wilson indicates that benevolence is to come in on the side, that it cannot be a central feature of erotic love because it will not allow for the passionate engagement and idiosyncratic nature of personal love. What takes up the moral slack in his view is a respect for the other as an equal; but in his account this does not seem to me to capture the sense of loving someone as a person for who they really are, for their true self.

As an idiosyncratic woman-person, it is hardly my place to say what women in general want or expect in love. I can hardly say what I myself want, but we might start there. In an erotic love relationship I want not only mutual passionate desire, I also want, dare I say it, my love to respect me as a person. These are not supposed to be incompatible.

Wilson has been insistent from the first that when we are analysing love we need to clarify what it is to love and what it is to love a person. I think the latter gets short shrift in his account because so much of his analysis is taken up defending a rather narrow set of desires. Despite his clear recognition that love of anything involves respect for its nature, what feels missing is a respect for persons as something more than a bundle of particular desires they are likely to want gratified.

Suppose we were to keep more fully in front of us the Kantian notion of a person as an end in themselves. What might love be like if it were closer to Kant's notion of respect for people? David Velleman has explored this possibility in depth. Here I can only hint that he thinks it would lead us to see that "love is an arresting awareness of value inhering in [a person]" and what gets arrested is our emotional self-protection from the person (1999, p. 360).

Imagine that the initial impetus for love lay not in desires but in an apprehension of the value in a person which arrested my tendencies to emotional self-protection from them. It may not seem as high-temperature as Wilson wants, but it does not rule out fascination and attraction and probably all the other desires he values. It is simply that they are now independent responses which are unleashed by love, as benevolence, sympathy, empathy usually are. The difference is that love now means "having a heart opened to us by a recognition of our own true selves" (Velleman, 1999, p. 363). This, I think, explains more effectively why and how I want to be loved, even erotically. It seems to more obviously place respect for the person qua person at the centre of love, just where, Wilson and I both agree, it is supposed to be.

In conclusion, partly because of my serious disagreements with Wilson's Love between Equals, I feel the need to say why I admire his work so much, although I am not so sure Wilson will like my reasons. William Gass tells us writing about love is a risky undertaking because:

It can't help but be revelatory. The point at which you begin, the assumptions you make, the elements you omit or ignore, emphasize or distort, the sorts of expository steps you take, the conclusions you draw: each choice will add a line to your portrait, as will the lyricism you display, your cynicism, scorn, or derision, whether you approach your subject as a psychologist, philosopher, or poet, and whether you adopt a scholar's scrupulosity, a theorist's evaluation, the artist's ardency, or a politician's pose (1992, p. 452).

If Gass is right, then writing about love takes more than the philosophical virtues of humility, courage, patience and honesty Wilson suggests at the outset. It will, in fact, require rather a different sort of courage than I expect Wilson had in mind. It requires courage in the sense attributed to that word in the thirteenth century: "to speak one's mind by telling all one's heart" (Rodgers, 1993, p. 265). I admire Wilson's articulation and defence of his ideal of erotic love for showing this form of courage; I also admire its manifest integrity. Although Wilson himself speaks deprecatingly about integrity, understanding integrity in the sense I have outlined earlier, it is obvious that Wilson here stands up for his "own best judgement of what is worth doing".

However useful and relevant his skills in conceptual analysis, Wilson can only have acquired his ideal of erotic love between equals out of his own heart. It is not the fashion of analytical philosophers to tell all that lies within their hearts, no matter how thoroughly it might be worked over by the mind, so the undertaking is one that does require standing up for.

If Wilson were not willing to speak from his heart, we would not have an ideal worth examining; if he were not so clear and honest in his articulation of it, we would not know whether or how it goes wrong; if he were not so fierce in his defence of this ideal, we would be unable to really wrestle with it. In evaluating philosophically his ideal of love, it has been a challenge for me to match both the courage and the integrity John Wilson displays.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Barbara Brockelman, Scott Fletcher, Liza Finkel and members of PHAEDRA for candid and useful discussions. Thanks also to Maryann Ayim who loaned me her study, and to Michaele Canfield for emergency typing. I am especially indebted to Ann Diller for forbearance and helpful editing.