M. Scott Peck

M. Scott Peck is cited as a psychiatrist whose three-part argument distinguishes the involuntary, absorbing experience of falling in love from the deliberate work of enduring love. In the book’s account, the distinction matters because romantic euphoria can feel complete while leaving both partners’ growth outside its focus.

Identity and Argument

Peck appears in a discussion of whether the experience of falling in love should properly be called love. The text reports that some researchers, including Peck, reject that label. Psychologist Dorothy Tennov gives the experience a separate name, “limerance,” while Peck explains his position through three reasons: falling in love is not chosen, requires little conscious effort, and does not foster personal growth.

An Involuntary Experience

Peck’s first distinction is between falling in love and an act of will. People cannot make the experience happen simply by wanting it, and it may overtake them when they are not seeking it. The book emphasizes its unpredictable timing and attachments, including occasions when people fall in love at inconvenient times or with unlikely partners. Its force is therefore presented as something that happens to a person, rather than a commitment deliberately undertaken.

Effort, Instinct, and Behavior

The second distinction concerns effort. In Peck’s account, actions performed in the in-love state require little discipline or conscious exertion. Long and expensive phone calls, travel to see one another, gifts, and work projects can all seem effortless to the people doing them. The book compares this impulse to a bird’s instinctive nest-building: the experience can propel people toward extravagant or unnatural actions without making those actions evidence of sustained, chosen love.

Growth and the Limits of Euphoria

Peck’s third reason is that being in love does not center on fostering either person’s development. He characterizes its purpose as ending one’s loneliness, perhaps by securing that result through marriage. The experience can instead create a feeling of arrival: life seems to have reached its happiest point, further growth appears unnecessary, and the beloved seems perfect as she is. This idealization leaves little room for recognizing development as part of a continuing relationship.

Peck offers a biological interpretation as well, describing falling in love as an instinctual component of mating behavior. In the passage, the temporary collapse of ego boundaries is understood as a response to internal sexual drives and external stimuli that increases the likelihood of sexual pairing and bonding, thereby serving the survival of the species. The book presents this as Peck’s conclusion without requiring agreement with it.

Place in the Book’s Argument

The discussion sets the intense but temporary experience of falling in love against rational, volitional love, which the book identifies as a form of love long commended by the sages. It also links emotional security to a person’s capacity to pursue their potential: a full emotional love tank is associated with a bright outlook and movement toward that potential, while an empty one is associated with feeling used rather than loved and with a diminished likelihood of reaching it. Peck’s distinctions thus help frame the book’s broader contrast between romantic euphoria and love sustained through conscious action.

A note identifies the source of the quoted argument as M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled, published in New York by Simon & Schuster in 1978, with the cited discussion on pages 89–90.