Why We Can't Connect with Love — The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Smith examines passions rooted in a peculiar turn of imagination, especially romantic love between two people long fixed on each other. Because our imaginations have not run in the lover's channel, the passion looks disproportionate and ridiculous to everyone except the lover, who often treats his own feeling with raillery. Serious love talk wearies us; Ovid's gaiety pleases where Cowley's gravity does not. A lover may be good company to his mistress and to nobody else.

We cannot adopt the particular attachment, yet we readily enter the hopes, fears, and distress love creates. Tragedy and romance interest us through anticipated obstacles, not secure mutual fondness, which would provoke laughter. Phaedra's guilt and fear engage us through secondary passions; scenes of perfect safety bore us unless danger looms. Reserve imposed on women makes frustrated love especially affecting.

Love is also softened by accompanying social passions such as kindness, friendship, and esteem, with which we strongly sympathize even when the central passion is excessive. The same logic explains why talking too much about our own friends, studies, or professions makes bad company: objects that absorb us cannot be expected to absorb others, and reserve is part of social propriety. A philosopher is company chiefly to philosophers.