Solicitous love
Watchful, protective love for someone in your care.
Solicitous love is watchful, protective love for someone in your care. The chest is open with watchful care and attention sustains. Deep care combines with active vigilance about their welfare. You carry responsibility for their wellbeing.
Watchful love is also a way of being present
Solicitous love is the love that looks out for someone. Did they eat? Did they sleep? Are they warm enough? Modern culture sometimes mistakes this for being controlling or codependent. It can become that. In healthy form, it is one of the deepest expressions of care. The trick is in the asking, not the assuming. Ask. Offer. Then let them choose. The love is in the noticing that they are a person whose body and soul require attention, including yours. People who have someone solicitous in their life usually outlive people who do not. Be that person for someone. Let someone be that person for you.
"When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment."
— Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Solicitous love has a distinctive body signature of sustained watchful loving engagement. The chest is open with sustained watchful care. The breath becomes alert when the person of care is in question. The face shows particular watchful loving quality. The voice carries particular warm watchful quality when speaking about or to the person. The body holds itself in a way that suggests being oriented toward their welfare: posture often turns toward, attention sustained on their situation, gestures often communicate the protective care. The state can be sustained over years or decades when relationships of care continue, often becoming part of how the relationship operates.
Solicitous love has been engaged with in research on caregiving, parenting, particular caring relationships, and various aspects of love that includes protective dimension. Research has examined both the constructive potential of solicitous love and the potential for it to cross into overprotection that may not serve the cared-for person. The capacity for solicitous love appears widely shared across various relationships though substantial variation exists in how it operates.
Solicitous love arises through specific conditions involving love combined with caregiving responsibility. Common patterns include:
Solicitous love benefits from being engaged with thoughtfully rather than just expressed. The following help.
Attune to actual needs rather than to anxiety
Genuine solicitous love attunes to what the person actually needs rather than primarily managing carer anxiety. Building practice of attending to actual needs including the person's autonomy and capacity supports more effective solicitous love than care driven primarily by anxiety. The attunement is part of mature solicitous love.
Distinguish from overprotection
Examining whether your solicitous love respects the person's autonomy and capacity, or has crossed into overprotection that substitutes your judgement for theirs, supports better practice. Appropriate solicitous love attunes to actual welfare which may include autonomy; overprotection often does not respect actual capacity.
Address anxious patterns when present
When solicitous love includes substantial anxiety that may produce overprotection or other difficulty, addressing the underlying anxiety supports better solicitous love. Various approaches to managing anxiety can support more effective caregiving alongside addressing anxiety in its own right.
Sustain own welfare alongside caring
Sustained solicitous love requires sustained carer welfare. Building practices that support your own welfare alongside the care you provide supports sustainable solicitous love. Caregiver burnout often produces difficulty for both carer and cared-for; sustaining own welfare is part of sustainable caregiving.
If solicitous love has become overwhelming or difficult
Sustained solicitous love that has become overwhelming, has crossed into difficulty, or involves sustained caregiver burden often warrants attention to underlying patterns and support. Caregiver support resources, professional support for caregivers, and various other resources can help. The sustainability of solicitous love depends substantially on appropriate support for the carer.
"Research on caregiving and parenting has examined both the constructive potential of solicitous love and the potential for it to cross into overprotection that may not serve the cared-for person."
— A summary of research on caregiving
What is solicitous love?
Solicitous love is watchful, protective love for someone in your care. The body has been organised around sustained protective watchfulness combined with love, with quality that combines deep care with active vigilance about the person's welfare. The chest is open with sustained watchful care. Attention sustains. There is a quality of being deeply invested in someone's wellbeing, of operating from love that includes protective watchfulness, of carrying responsibility for the welfare of someone in your care. Solicitous love specifically refers to watchful protective love for someone in your care.
Where do people feel solicitous love in the body?
Solicitous love has a distinctive signature of sustained watchful loving engagement. The chest is open with sustained watchful care. The breath becomes alert when the person of care is in question. The face shows particular watchful loving quality. The voice carries particular warm watchful quality when speaking about or to the person. The body holds itself in a way that suggests being oriented toward their welfare: posture often turns toward, attention sustained on their situation, gestures often communicate the protective care. The state can be sustained over years or decades when relationships of care continue, often becoming part of how the relationship operates.
How is solicitous love different from regular love?
Love is the broader category that includes various forms. Solicitous love is the specific form combining love with active watchful protection. A person can love without specific solicitousness (broader love without specific watchful protective dimension). Solicitous love involves the additional watchful protective dimensions that broader love does not require. Ordinary love can be present between adults in various relationships including romantic and friendship contexts without involving caregiving responsibility; solicitous love specifically involves love combined with caregiving responsibility and active watchfulness about welfare. The distinction matters because the contexts each is appropriate to differ: ordinary love between capable adults typically does not warrant active watchfulness about welfare; solicitous love is appropriate when caregiving responsibility makes watchful protection a fitting feature of the relationship. Recognising when love appropriately includes solicitousness and when it does not supports better engagement; solicitous love directed at capable adults who do not need watchful protection often produces difficulty including the recipient feeling infantilised or controlled.
Why do people feel solicitous love?
Several conditions can produce solicitous love. Parenting typically involves substantial solicitous love particularly during periods when children require sustained care; the combination of love with appropriate watchfulness about welfare is feature of parenting throughout development. Caring for ill or vulnerable family members typically involves solicitous love; the combination of love with appropriate watchfulness about the person's welfare often sustains over substantial periods. Various professional caring roles develop solicitous love through sustained relationships with people in your care; healthcare providers, certain therapeutic relationships, or certain teaching relationships may develop solicitous love as feature of sustained care. Romantic relationships involving care for vulnerable partner whether through illness, particular life circumstances, or various other vulnerabilities often involve substantial solicitous love. Research on caregiving has examined both the constructive potential of solicitous love and the potential for it to cross into overprotection.
Can solicitous love become problematic?
Yes, when it crosses into overprotection or anxious caregiving that does not serve the cared-for person. Several patterns can produce difficulty. Overprotection that substitutes the carer's judgement for the cared-for person's, that does not respect actual capacity, or that prevents appropriate autonomy often produces difficulty including for the cared-for person's development and for the relationship. Anxious caregiving driven primarily by carer anxiety rather than by appropriate love and attunement often produces difficulty for both carer and cared-for. Sustained solicitous love directed at capable adults who do not need watchful protection often produces difficulty including the recipient feeling infantilised or controlled. Several practices help: attuning to actual needs rather than to anxiety supports more effective solicitous love; distinguishing from overprotection supports better practice; addressing anxious patterns when present supports better solicitous love; sustaining own welfare alongside caring supports sustainable solicitous love; and when solicitous love has become overwhelming or difficult, professional support and caregiver resources can help.
No source-level citations are stored for this entry yet. The dictionary draws on the broader literature in affective neuroscience, psychology and cross-cultural emotion research. See the About page for the project's wider references.
Solicitous love sits in the love family as one of its more sustained caring forms. It overlaps with love as the broader category, with protectiveness when protective dimension is involved, with solicitude when broader attentive care is central, with what caregiving research has examined as significant in various caring relationships, and with what attachment research has identified as feature of various secure caring relationships.
See where solicitous love sits among the other 402 emotions.
Open Solicitous love on the wheel