Eros, We-ros, or Are We (just?) Ideal Bros…
Robert Nozick’s union theory of love, particularly his idea of the “we,” and Robert Solomon’s conception of romantic idealization and sexual desire both attempt to construct a unique understanding of eros. I use the term loosely and deliberately. In the tradition of these theorists, eros refers to something like romantic love, a form of attachment distinct from ordinary friendship in its intensity, exclusivity, and the kind of self-transformation it involves. What exactly makes it distinct, though, is precisely what is at stake in this paper. Each theory faces difficulty defending eros as genuinely distinct from friendship, and while incorporating some of Solomon’s arguments can address gaps in Nozick’s framework, their combined force may only be sufficient for certain cases. Not every aspect of either theory is examined here, what matters most is identifying the differences (or lack thereof) between eros and friendship. My conclusion is that eros and friendship are mostly distinct forms of love, while, informed by Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” certain friendships, predominantly between women, cross the traditional boundary between them.
Nozick and the “We”
Nozick’s union theory holds that “romantic love is wanting to form a we with that particular person, feeling, or perhaps wanting, that particular person to be the right one for you to form a we with, and also wanting the other to feel the same way about you” (Love’s Bond, p. 2). It is the desire to form and maintain the “we” that is intrinsic to eros, not the “we” itself. Metaphysically, this new entity comes into existence without the loss of individual identities or their merging into one. It is a creation of a shared identity that adds, rather than reduces, an entity to the world.
The main features of Nozick’s “we” include the pooling of well-being (which ties one’s joys and sorrows to the other’s) and a partial pooling of autonomy (where many decisions are made jointly). Social recognition also matters, lovers wish to be publicly perceived as a “we,” and shared identity becomes a significant part of each partner’s psychological makeup, making it difficult to understand oneself without reference to the other. The connection between partners reaches a point where their identities are constitutive of each person’s self-understanding. When thinking about their own desires, they naturally factor in their partner because the shared identity has become that fundamental.
This union represents a desire for an interconnected bond where both partners feel autonomous yet profoundly linked. They want to share themselves in a way that builds toward a harmonious “we,” without one partner overriding the other’s autonomy. The goal is a balance where the relationship enlarges their identities rather than imposing ownership or control. Eros is about sharing an identity, whereas friendship can be identity-altering without necessarily constituting a shared self. Friendship tends to be more about shared activities, ideas, and interests. The bond in romantic love is generally more encompassing, influencing major life decisions and personal identity more significantly.
Merino’s Challenges
Noël Merino presents three interpretations of Nozick’s “we” and argues that each runs into problems, specifically around whether the pooling of well-being and autonomy can be made coherent without collapsing into something indistinguishable from friendship. These interpretations are (1) a metaphysical third entity, (2) a change to self-identity that incorporates the other, and (3) psychological fusion. The third is most relevant here.
Psychological fusion encapsulates the pooling of well-being and autonomy, where some ends no longer belong to one person but to both within the relationship. If pooling well-being simply means “I am happy for your success,” this can apply to friendships. If one partner’s success genuinely makes the other happier, though, we might be looking at something distinct, a relationship in which welfare and autonomy are genuinely shared.
Merino argues it is incorrect to say we actually share our well-being and ends with a lover. If well-being is pooled, harm to the beloved is harm to the lover, but not the same kind of harm. If your partner loses their job, that might be a significant setback for both of you, yet you are each affected differently. If pooling well-being simply means being unsettled by your lover’s grievances, this is equally true of close friends. Nozick’s response is that a lover need not be happy in the same sense as their beloved; if the beloved’s happiness makes the lover happy too, that may be sufficient. Then eros might not be unique, since the same can be true between friends.
On shared autonomy, Merino points out that wanting your beloved to achieve their goal is not the same as sharing that goal. If your partner wants to start a garden and you want to see your partner successfully grow that garden, you want different things. Your autonomies are not fused. Nozick, however, never claims the fusion is total. Each lover retains much of their original autonomy and can have desires the other knows nothing about. The shared self only requires that some things are jointly desired, leaving room for independent want.
Merino pushes further, arguing that conflict and compromise (which are intuitively part of any romantic relationship) are inconsistent with a shared identity. If a couple disagrees about a “we-choice,” the “we” cannot be a fusion of goals. If they resolve disputes through compromise, their autonomy would not be pooled, each partner is exercising independent judgment. Nozick’s response is that eros is the desire to form a “we.” Fights may be inevitable, but in desiring the “we,” one is not desiring conflict. The theory does not necessarily fail simply because it describes something we can only imperfectly attain.
Still, Merino’s arguments suggest that a rigid interpretation of the “we” runs into real consistency problems. Loosening the concept to something more realistic, though, makes it look less and less different from deep friendship, which is exactly the problem Nozick’s theory needs to solve.
Bringing in Solomon
Nozick’s framework is a decent, if imperfect, starting point for understanding eros through the “we.” Its main weakness is that it struggles to show why the “we” could not apply to non-romantic relationships just as well. Merino may be pushing Nozick’s “we” harder than it was designed to bear, but even granting that, if friendships can sometimes include pooling well-being, autonomy, and shared identity, then borrowing idealization from Solomon and incorporating sexual desire might help establish clearer criteria for what makes eros distinct.
Solomon’s union theory is intertwined with his identity theory. Eros is a process through which we jointly create our ideal selves. His theories are shaped by cultural dimensions like the western world’s love story paradigm, which gives love a narrative structure and provides templates for romantic roles. For Solomon, idealization is central: “to love is to see the other as ideal, oneself as potentially ideal, and to love is to idealize love as well” (About Love, p. 89). Two people in a romantic relationship form a union partly because, for Solomon, the self only exists in relation to others, since the self is socially constructed, no one can truly be an individual alone.
The “looking-glass effect” illustrates this. We see ourselves through the eyes of others. In romantic love, the lover views the beloved as the most wonderful person, which reflects back on the lover, allowing them to see themselves through their beloved’s admiring eyes. That image becomes part of one’s identity. Idealization transforms love into something deeper than mere companionship or desire. This idealization need not be deceptive but rather an imaginative embellishment of reality, since “it is the transcendence of dull factual reality that distinguishes love from just another domestic relationship” (Solomon, p. 161). These fantasies weave two futures together and love becomes a continuous process of mutually creating self-identity.
Sex is also important to Solomon’s theory. He remarks that “sex, solitude, intimacy and privacy play essential roles in love partly because it is when we are naked and alone together that the self comes to especially appreciate its incompleteness and the importance of shared identity” (Solomon, p. 203). Sex matters because it involves sharing an essential part of one’s identity. Intimate moments reveal vulnerabilities and physically unite partners. By fostering sexual intimacy, partners strengthen their connection, since for Solomon, sex is self-expression. Being “good in bed” essentially means being the right one for your lover. “Sexual fit” is an essential factor in love, according to Solomon, not merely physical but rooted in self-expression and role-playing within the relationship, depending on an unspoken agreement on nearly everything sex involves.
For Solomon, the difference between eros and friendship might hinge on the degree and intimacy of idealization, as well as the presence of sex. Friendships can involve idealization (admiration and respect that might extend toward many friends), but this is generally not the same type or intensity as romantic idealization, which tends to involve an exclusive emotional connection and physical attraction coupled with a desire for a shared future. Sexual desire, meanwhile, is not strictly tied to eros. Some friends can and do desire each other sexually, and some act on it. Sexual intimacy is not a general expectation of friendship the way it might be in romance, and a friendship would remain completely intact without it. In romantic relationships, sex often serves as a powerful vehicle for expressing love, and its absence could possibly signal something, a lack of investment or a distance that neither partner has named yet. Sex between friends may also lack the “sexual fit” Solomon finds so essential to love.
Where the Line Blurs
One of the main difficulties with both union theories, and especially Nozick’s, is distinguishing eros from friendship. Solomon’s romantic idealization and sexual desire initially seem to help since they are not requirements for friendship but are generally expected in romance. Yet the line between these two kinds of love can blur in particular, very intimate friendships.
Suppose two ~friends~ desire to form and maintain a “we,” somehow pooling their well-being and autonomy; they seek to spend all of their time together; they are emotionally connected and deeply intimate; neither can conceive of herself without thinking of the other; neither would “trade up” or replace the other; and both idealize and sexually desire each other. Would this not be eros? The most obvious reasons it might not be classified as such are socio-cultural (the pressures that shape how their relationship is perceived, and perhaps a reluctance to change anything out of fear of losing something irreplaceable).
Rich and the Erotic Continuum
Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” provides a foundation for arguing that such friendships between women can encompass eros, or something very like it. Something more socially acceptable, perhaps, but not categorically different. The assumption that women are innately heterosexual neglects the possibility that women might choose relationships with other women if not for societal pressure. Compulsory heterosexuality functions as a political institution, enforced through economic dependency, social norms, and in some cases physical violence. Rich discusses how women’s relationships with other women have been systematically invalidated, and how lesbian existence becomes not rebellion but resistance, a challenge to the institution itself.
Central to Rich’s argument is the concept of the “lesbian continuum,” which she defines as a range of woman-identified experience that extends well beyond the fact of sexual relations between women. It encompasses the sharing of a rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, the giving and receiving of practical and political support. What matters here is that Rich refuses to let the erotic be reduced to the sexual. The erotic, understood more broadly, is a source of knowledge, power, and deep connection between women, and it saturates many relationships that society insists on filing neatly under “friendship.” When two women are each other’s primary emotional world, when they build their lives around each other, when the thought of losing the other is genuinely unbearable, what framework are we actually using when we insist that is not eros?
This is where Rich’s argument does something neither Nozick nor Solomon quite manages. Both of them build their theories around a relatively neutral subject, some generic person who falls in love. Rich locates her analysis specifically in the lives of women and asks what those lives actually look like under patriarchy. The answer is that women have historically turned to each other for the things that are supposed to define romantic love: understanding, tenderness, protection, the sense of being truly known. The intimacy between women has historically been so complete, and so threatening to the institution of heterosexuality, that it had to be either erased or redefined as something lesser, something that does not quite count.
Her work suggests that deep friendships among women may inherently include erotic dimensions beyond what is confined to sexual acts. Vulnerability, mutual support, and shared life experience characterize many close female friendships in ways that quietly redefine what intimacy can look like. There is something particular about the way women tend to love each other, a quality of attention and recognition that does not require the permission of romance to be real and to be felt. The two ~friends~ from the earlier scenario are not an edge case or an exception. They might be closer to the norm than any theory written from outside that experience is equipped to see.
That said, societal indoctrination in male credibility and status can shape women’s internal experiences even as they build strong connections with other women. The influence of patriarchal norms can create internal conflict, confusion or conflicting feelings, even within relationships that are otherwise sustaining and clear. A woman may feel something enormous for another woman and genuinely not have the language for it, not because the feeling is ambiguous but because the available categories were not built with her in mind. Rich argues that the absence of genuine choice in sexual orientation leaves women dependent on the chance of particular relationships, limiting their power to define their own sexuality on their own terms. Recognizing intimate female friendships as potential eros, or some repressed form of it, is not just a philosophical move. It is an acknowledgment that the feelings were always there, and that naming them matters.
Anxiety as a Marker
Something potentially unique to eros might be the presence of a particular kind of anxiety. It is the anxiety that comes from having something important to lose, and maybe what is most at stake is the shared identity itself. The beginning of a new romantic relationship is often accompanied by uncertainty about whether it will last, a low-grade fear that runs beneath the excitement. Friendship does not usually carry that same quality of dread. When you befriend someone new, the thought of that friendship ending does not ordinarily surface without cause. We may not expect all our friendships to last forever, but we rarely actively think about their impermanence the way we might with romantic love.
Returning to the intimate female friendship scenario. If the relationship between two women does not become romantic, one potential reason might be a fear of risking a good friendship for the unpredictability of romance, of losing something solid and irreplaceable by reaching for something uncertain. This too connects to Rich’s arguments. Patriarchal indoctrination may lead women to place an especially high value on female relationships precisely because the bond between women offers a kind of intimacy that cannot always be found elsewhere. If that intimacy cannot be replicated with a man, then losing it (even in exchange for romance) may feel like too great a cost. The fear, in other words, is not just of losing the friendship but of losing the only place where that particular quality of closeness exists.
Conclusion
Nozick and Solomon’s union theories offer frameworks for understanding romantic love through the concepts of the “we,” shared identity, idealization, and sexual desire. These aspects carry much of the weight when trying to distinguish eros from friendship, even if they do not encompass either theory completely. Nozick’s theory emphasizes the pooling of well-being and autonomy. Merino’s critiques highlight the difficulty of maintaining that distinction strictly, especially against intimate friendship. Solomon’s romantic idealization and sexual desire attempt to bridge that gap, suggesting that eros involves a unique, intense form of mutual self-creation that surpasses mere companionship. Even so, these elements can sometimes appear within friendships in forms that remain, most of the time, distinguishable.
Rich complicates the boundary further, particularly for close female friendships. Societal pressures and patriarchal norms often suppress the recognition of erotic dimensions in relationships between women, challenging traditional definitions and acknowledging the real fluidity between certain friendships and romantic love. It seems quite plausible that certain intimate friendships are a repressed or unrecognized form of eros, and that the line between them grows very thin (perhaps, in some cases, nonexistent).
Ultimately, eros and friendship are often distinct in their intensity and in the presence of physical and romantic elements. There is significant overlap, and certain friendships, especially among women, may transcend conventional boundaries and embody something that looks a great deal like romantic love, whether or not it is ever named as such. Eros and friendship are not mutually exclusive, they can overlap, reinforce each other, and transform into one another. Sometimes the distinction is clear, sometimes it is not, and sometimes the truth is that the line was never really there to begin with.
Works Cited
Merino, Noël. “Is the We-Relationship the Right One for Love?” Philosophy and Literature.
Nozick, Robert. “Love’s Bond.” The Examined Life. Simon & Schuster, 1989.
Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs, vol. 5, no. 4, 1980, pp. 631–660.
Solomon, Robert C. About Love: Reinventing Romance for Our Times. Simon & Schuster, 1988.
