Beyond Friendship and Eros, livre ebook

Explores deep intimate personal relationships between men and women.

Explores deep intimate personal relationships between men and women.

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.

Preface
1. Why Another Interpretation of Love?
2. Abundant Being and Societal Tensions
Dialogical Love and Abundant Being
Societal Restraint and Misdirection
Struggling with Cultural Misdirection
Must Sex Inhibit Friendship?

3. Dialogical Love: Friends or Lovers
Lewis on the Transformation of Sex by Eros
May on How Sex Is Transformed by Eros
Lewis on Friendship and Eros
May on Friendship and Eros

4. Friendship between Men and Women
Simon on Intergender Friendship
Solomon on the Complementary Relationship of Friendship and Love
Plato and Aristotle on Friendship

5. Reaching for Dialogical Love
Lewis Surprised by Joy
Emerson's Rejection of Fuller's Invitation to Dialogical Love
Mill and Taylor's Reaching for Dialogical Love and Finding Feminism

6. I-Thou, Personal, and We-Relationships
The Personal and Categorical: Buber
The Social and the Personal: Macmurray
We-Relationships: Schutz

7. Why Dialogical Love?
References
Index