Does the person who says he loves you really love you?

Let's consider one of the most popular social concepts for the word love. Love understood as a causal relationship. Let's also disregard, to simplify the debate a little more, the familiar brotherly love (this is more complex than what I call causal love...).


I call causal love the love that is born, maintained and prolonged on the basis of a cause and effect relationship. Example: a woman's beauty attracts a man's attention. He gets to know her better and then begins to notice that there are characteristics in her that he loves. He admires her moral values, he admires her courage, etc. In short, this man ends up falling in love with this woman based on this set that is the cause of this love. And love is the "inevitable effect" of this set of qualities that this woman has. The problem is that this set, on the part of the one who loves us, may be incomplete with regard to the general conception that this person has of us. A woman can truly love a man based on many characteristics that she loves about him. But what if that man suddenly doesn't have some of the characteristics she believes he has? What if that man suddenly has characteristics that she is unaware of? What if that man has characteristics that this woman deeply despises? Maybe, by knowing that much of what she loves doesn't exist in this man and at the same time that much of what she despises exists in this same man, this woman will also discover that she doesn't love him.


Note that, in the context described, it is possible that many friendships and love relationships are formed on false beliefs and lack of knowledge. Love, in many cases, being pure illusion based on "false facts" and ignorance of facts.


Many men here have children. Let's suppose that a man has a 20-year-old daughter and deeply desires her. At the same time this man loves his wife. The wife claims to love this man and justifies this love based on several facts... But she does not know about this desire of her husband for his daughter. And let's suppose that this woman has deep contempt for all kinds of incest, especially father-daughter incest. She views this desire with horror and sees in such a man a monster, a filth... But the man she claims to love is exactly like that without her knowing it. Given the context, the question comes: is it really correct to say that this woman loves her husband, or is it correct to say that she loves the man she believes her husband to be? In this sense, she loves an illusion. And being deeper from a philosophical point of view: would it be correct to say that this woman actually hates her husband? Perhaps the answer is yes (it depends on the context...), because this man has some characteristics that, conjuncturally conceived, represent men that this woman deeply despises.