INTRODUCTION Suppose there is someone with whom you wish to share an important part of your life. You go to bed and wake up with this person in mind. You desire that the other person feels the same way about you and (unless you know that he or she simply doesn’t care about you) you are happy when you see him or her and sad when you do not. One could continue this phenomeno- logical exercise, but I venture to surmise that a certain degree of familiarity with the phenomenon of romantic love can be taken for granted here. However, it seems that, when it comes to describing what romantic love is, one element frequently goes unnoticed: if one loves someone, it matters to one whether the beloved, in turn, “knows” that he or she is loved (in a sense which has yet to be clariied, cf. section 3). To be more speciic, it could be argued that, if one feels this kind of emotion, then one usually also intends to let the beloved understand how one feels. It is tempting to see the romantic lover’s intention to disclose his or her feelings of love to the beloved as being closely linked to his or her desire that the beloved, in turn, reciprocates such love (cf. Nozick 1989). Although it is questionable whether these considerations apply to love in general (for love, it has been argued, does not necessarily imply desire; cf. Velleman 1999), they remain tempting in the case of romantic love because, if the lover wishes for his or her feeling to be reciprocated, then the fulillment of such a desire appears to require that the beloved understands that he or she is the target of the lover’s emotion. Only in this case can the beloved, in turn, emotionally respond to, and hence genuinely reciprocate, the love of which he or she is the target. Of course, unrequited love exists, so reciprocation does not need to occur, but luckily, it can occur—contingently upon the fact that the addressee knows about the lover’s emotion. If these observations are so far on the right track, one could say that certain emotions (e.g., romantic love) demand that their uptake be secured by their addressees. Such a condition, insofar as it can be taken to speak for the sociality of certain emotions, distinguishes these “social” emotions from those that allegedly do not share the same condition (the emotion of envy, e.g., can be expressed to the envied person, but obviously does not need to be). 14 Love and Other Social Stances in Early Phenomenology Alessandro Salice