Love and Personal Persistence

According to a traditional conception, romantic love is both constant – roughly, if someone loves another, they continue to love them – and exclusive – roughly, if someone loves another, they love only the other. In this paper, we argue that the constancy and exclusivity of love presupposes a naïve conception of personal persistence. In particular, constancy and exclusivity are jointly inconsistent with the possibilities of fission – roughly speaking, of one person becoming two – and fusion – roughly speaking, of two people becoming one. We conclude by discussing some consequences for the question of whether we love for reasons.