Abstract

Love is a mode of relational existence. To love is not to feel, not to value, not to merge—but to maintain the existence of another within the structure of one’s own consciousness through sustained existential effort. Hate is its structural inverse: the effort to negate what has already been internalized. Between these two poles lies the ontological architecture of human relational life. Three variables govern this architecture. The existential gap G measures the integrative distance between subject and object representations in consciousness. The existential transaction T measures the intensity of the subject’s maintenance effort—the counter-entropic work of keeping another present within oneself. Separation time W measures the entropic pressure that drives representations toward decay. Their relationship is non-linear and phenomenologically motivated: T = k · Gα · Wβ · eγE where each parameter is grounded in the structure of lived experience as dis- closed by Husserl, Hegel, and Spinoza—not inferred from data, but exhibited through structural correspondence between mathematical form and phenomenological architecture. Hate obeys the inverse law H ∝ G−1: the closer the beloved was, the more devastating the negation. The framework accounts for the epistemic status of its constructs through the philosophy of science (Cartwright, Duhem), answers the Levinasian objection through three movements that show alterity to be a mathematical invariant of the model, and defends non-normativity as a principled methodological commitment in the tradition of Spinoza’s geometric method and Strawson’s descriptive metaphysics. Paradigmatic cases—love of God, parent-child, betrayal, narcissism—are analysed phenomenologically, and structural universality is tested across Ubuntu, Confucian rén, and Buddhist metta ̄.