The Autonomy of the Heart

photo by anthropic claude

Western culture has been running a masterclass in romantic passivity for roughly five centuries. The idiom ‘falling in love’ is charming, ancient, and almost certainly making you worse at it. It traces its passive roots to at least the sixteenth century, though the underlying logic is considerably older. Medieval Europeans were helplessly fatalistic about most things—plagues, harvests, the general capriciousness of God, and love was no exception. Fortune's Wheel, that great spinning metaphor borrowed cheerfully from the Roman goddess Fortuna, captured the essential worldview: You do not steer; you are turned. You do not choose your position on the wheel; you simply hold on and hope the spin is kind. Love, in this cosmology, was something that happened to you in the same category as the weather, taxation, your next meal, or even the Black Death.

Go back further, and it gets worse. Eros—the Greek god of love, later repackaged by the Romans as the rather more cherubic Cupid—operated by firing affection-tipped arrows at unsuspecting mortals who had absolutely no say in the matter. This was considered divine. The arrow struck, the amorous feelings ignited, and the hapless mortal was off to the races, compelled by forces entirely beyond their control or consent. It is, if you look at it with modern eyes, an origin story for love that is indistinguishable from an assault. The entire classical tradition essentially codified romantic attraction as something done to you by a sneaky Roman toddler hiding in the shrubbery with a weapon and absolutely zero accountability.

What is remarkable—and this is the part that should give us genuine pause—is that the neuroscience, the psychology, and the philosophy have all moved on. We have Bandura. We have Seligman. We have the prefrontal cortex. We have, in short, overwhelming evidence that human beings are capable of intention, self-regulation, and deliberate choice in virtually every domain of life. And yet our language for love remains stubbornly, almost proudly, medieval. We still fall. We are still struck. We are swept away, carried off our feet, knocked sideways—the entire vocabulary of romantic love is a catalogue of things happening to us. We are, grammatically speaking, always the object. Never the subject. Progress, it turns out, is selective. We got the prefrontal cortex. Love got Cupid. And nobody sits you down and explains any of this. It arrives by osmosis—seeping in through fairy tales and film scores and the careful architecture of most pop songs ever written, each one ending, tellingly, at the moment the falling stops, and the choosing would have to begin.

Gravity, which is behind every fall as it turns out, accelerates all objects at precisely 9.8 meters per second squared, regardless of their intentions, their values, or how many therapy sessions they have completed. A person who trips on a cobblestone and a person who falls in love are, mechanically speaking, having the same experience. The landing is just less predictable in one case—which should perhaps invite some scrutiny before we adopt it as the primary metaphor for the most consequential relationships of our lives. After an adulthood of watching leaders, parents, and friends navigate the complexities of connection, I have come to see this passive vocabulary as something worse than poetic license. It is a dangerous abdication of power. To fall in love is to be a passenger in your own heart—as likely to trip over a loose rug as to find genuine flourishing. And in a world of engineered drift, algorithmically curated feeds, and platforms designed to keep us reactive and compliant, the conditions for that passivity have never been more seductive. We do not need more falling. We need more authorship. A love that is not struck by chance, but built by choice.

The falling fallacy does not merely rob us of responsibility; it robs us of the story. When the initial chemical surge dims, as it usually does, the passive passenger has nothing to work with. The feeling was the whole plan. But real flourishing demands we stop drifting on momentum and start acting like the deliberate driver of our own intent. Love is not a stumble in the dark; it is a high-stakes, intentional project. The decision to maintain the structure of connection long after the spark has dimmed. When sentiment drops, most people conclude the love is gone. What has actually gone is the passenger. The driver was never there to begin with.

Love as the Integrative Infrastructure

In positive psychology, we organize well-being into the five pillars of PERMA: Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment (Seligman, 2011). But love is not just one of the pillars; I see it as the foundation and the plumbing that keeps the whole structure from leaning. It animates Positive Emotion as the engine that broadens our horizons and builds our resilience. It elevates Engagement into relational flow. It transforms Relationships from weary social contracts into chosen, autonomous covenants. Without it, Meaning is a compass pointing nowhere. And it turns the solitary pursuit of Accomplishment into something far grander—a contribution. It ensures our deeds are not just for show but are the enduring foundation of a life actively authored.

We must also distinguish between two expressions of love. Barbara Fredrickson's (2013) Love 2.0 describes those vital, reactive micro-moments of positivity resonance—the spark. But a spark is not a fire. What I call agentic love is what you build from the spark: a chosen, committed, purposeful, self-endorsed expression of the self. Resonance is the beginning. Agency is everything that comes after. 

This is not a new conversation. Rollo May saw the fracture coming more than fifty years ago. In Love and Will, he argued that modern culture had made a catastrophic error: severing love from will, reducing our deepest connections to pure sentiment while draining them of intention and purpose (May, 1969). For May, genuine love was never a passive state to be inhabited; it was an act of the whole person, requiring the full and deliberate engagement of the will. Positive psychology has since given us the neuroscience and frameworks to explain why he was right. But the essential insight—that love without will is just the weather—was his.

The Mechanics of Agency: Bandura, Seligman, and the Brain

To move from falling to steering, we have to look at the machinery upstairs—specifically, the handoff from the limbic system (the ancient, reactive part of the brain that responds to shiny things) to the prefrontal cortex, the brain's adult in the room.

Albert Bandura's work on human agency is the first pillar. Agency, for Bandura, is the concrete architecture of intentionality, forethought, self-reactiveness, and self-reflectiveness—the capacity to influence your own functioning rather than simply reacting to your environment (Bandura, 2001). Applied to love, this means we are not condemned to the chemistry. We can imagine a version of ourselves—and a version of our connection—that does not yet exist, and build toward it.

Martin Seligman's concept of prospection is the second pillar. Where Bandura gives us the mechanics, Seligman gives us the pull. Prospection is the imaginative efficacy and optimism to believe we can shape a better future—the neurobiological substrate of hope, not as wishful thinking, but as an active simulation of a possible future self that motivates present action (Seligman et al., 2016). Together, Bandura's intentionality and Seligman's prospection form a cognitive architecture that allows us to see a possible us and begin building the bridge.

The third pillar comes from the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett, neuroscientist at Northeastern University and one of the most cited researchers in her field. Barrett's (2017) theory of constructed emotion proposes that the brain is not a passive reactor but a relentless prediction machine—constantly updating its model of the world based on what you repeatedly attend to and experience. The implication for love is striking: Every deliberate act of noticing your partner, every conscious choice to attend to what they bring rather than what they lack, literally updates your brain's predictive architecture. You are not just being kind. You are neurologically building a more generous version of the relationship, one intentional perception at a time.

Autonomy vs. Compliance: The Self-Endorsed Yes

This brings us to the cornerstone of self-determination theory: the self-endorsed yes (Ryan & Deci, 2000). We often settle for compliance—we do the chores, say the lines, show up because the alternative feels too expensive. But love by compliance is relational debt. Every obligatory gesture, every performative fine, every action taken to avoid discomfort rather than express devotion is a payment on a loan you never chose to take out. The interest compounds quietly. The balance never clears. And unlike financial debt, compliance-based love doesn't build credit—it builds resentment.

Agentic love works on the opposite principle entirely. It is equity. Every deliberate choice to show up, to notice, to invest yourself in another person is a contribution to something you actually own—a connection built from the inside out, aligned with your values rather than your obligations. When we move from “I have to” to “I choose to,” we stop servicing debt and start building equity. You stop being a tenant paying rent in the expectations of others and become the sole proprietor of your own flourishing.

The difference is not merely semantic. Compliance is sustained by momentum: You stay because leaving is hard. Agentic love is sustained by meaning: You stay because you looked clearly at this person, and chose today—again. That again is the whole ballgame.

Taking Back the Wheel

Somewhere along the way, agency became a spectator sport—something you demonstrate on a stage, a podium, or a pitch deck, in front of people who can applaud it. It isn't. It is the quiet, daily, unglamorous decision to choose the people you love—not because you fell and cannot get up, but because you looked, decided, and keep deciding. Begin with noticing. Notice your partner today, not as a habit or backdrop, but as a deliberate act of attention. Notice what they carry. Notice what they bring. Notice what they need. Do it again tomorrow. The neuroscience tells us this kind of directed, repeated attention is not just good relationship advice; it is how the brain builds new structure through neuroplasticity, how the prefrontal cortex gradually asserts itself over the reactive limbic pull (Barrett, 2017), how we become, over time, the authors of our affection rather than its victims.

In a world engineered for passive consumption, where algorithms anticipate your next scroll and platforms profit from your drift, agentic love is a genuinely radical act. It is the analog anchor in a hyperconnected world. To choose, deliberately and repeatedly, to attend to another human being with your full and unoptimized self is to opt out of the entire attention economy in one quiet, daily gesture.

The falling fallacy will persist, as will our mythical, generously unrestrained Latinate boy archer. They are far too romantic, too convenient, too easily sung. But for those who have decided to live with intention, the invitation is clear: Stop searching for the feeling. Start building the fire. Because the most important love story you will ever write is not the one that happened to you. It is the one you chose.

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

May, R. Love and Will. W. W. Norton, 1969. The existentialist forefather of agentic love.
May's argument that modernity had catastrophically severed love from will remains the most urgent diagnosis of the falling fallacy ever written. Decades ahead of its time.

Baumeister, R. F., & Tierney, J. Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. Penguin Press, 2011.
Baumeister's landmark work on self-regulation as a trainable capacity—essential context for understanding why choosing love daily is a discipline that builds genuine strength over time.

Bandura, A. (2001). Social cognitive theory: An agentic perspective. Annual Review of Psychology, 52(1), 1–26.
The foundational account of human agency—intentionality, forethought, and self-regulation — as the engine of purposeful action.

Barrett, L. F. How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.
Barrett's landmark theory of constructed emotion—that the brain actively predicts and constructs experience rather than passively reacting to it—offers the most compelling neurological argument for why what we choose to notice in love shapes what we ultimately feel.

Fredrickson, B. L. (2013). Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection. Hudson Street Press.
Fredrickson's reframe of love as micro-moments of positivity resonance—the spark from which agentic love must grow.

Seligman, M. E. P. (2018). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being. Free Press, 2011.
The book that gave positive psychology its architecture. Seligman's PERMA framework: Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment—provides the structural foundation upon which agentic love operates, not as one pillar among five, but as the integrating force that gives all five their fullest expression.

Seligman, M. E. P., Railton, P., Baumeister, R. F., & Sripada, C. Homo Prospectus. Oxford University Press, 2016. The definitive case for prospection — the imaginative pull of a possible future—as the true driver of human motivation and the neurobiological foundation of hope.

Seligman, M. E. P. (2018). The Hope Circuit: A Psychologist's Journey from Helplessness to Optimism. PublicAffairs.
Seligman's personal and scientific account of how the brain's hope architecture works.

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78.
The foundational SDT paper—essential reading on autonomy, intrinsic motivation, and why the self-endorsed yes is the only sustainable yes.

About the author | Jason Reed Wagner (C’25) is a MAPP.20 graduate and a self-proclaimed positive psychology enthusiast still buzzing from his 2025 Penn journey. With over 30 years of global corporate miles behind him, he now serves as a leadership and talent advisor from his home base in Thailand.

Jason is the architect of "Agentic Love," a concept he’s eager to share (and live out). At home, he’s happily outranked in the kitchen by his wife, Onchan, and consistently outpaced by his spirited 3.5-year-old son, Wolfgang. He’s just a lifelong learner trying to put a little more "zest" into the world every day.