Would you still love me if I was a worm?

An investigation

Heidi Klum, dressed as a worm for a 2022 Halloween party

[This is a mildly revised version of a post that was sent out to paid subscribers only.]

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I hadn’t paid attention to the whole “Would you still love me if I was a worm?” discussion until my wife showed me the video below.¹ It’s about a woman who asks her husband (they’re both in their late 20s, married for six months) if he would still love her if she were a plant. He says yes, adding that he would water her every day. She feels he’s not taking her seriously and says she wants a divorce.

The worm meme started in 2019 with this viral tweet.

Variants of the meme gained popularity on TikTok, featuring videos in which a woman asks her boyfriend if he would love her if she were a tank and a man asks his girlfriend if she would love him if he were a cockroach. These videos garnered millions of views and likes.

I know this will come up, so before going on, yes, I’m well aware that this is a joke—a comically needy question that puts the relationship partner in an awkward position.

And yet. Sparked by the plant story, it occurs to me that

1. Some people take it seriously and genuinely wonder if their partner would love them if they were a worm, a plant, a tank, or a cockroach.

2. For many, it’s a silly, dramatic, and annoying question, but still a coherent one—something a very insecure person might ask.

If so, then it reveals two interesting facts about how people think. The first is about personal identity; the second is about what we want from those we love.

Personal identity

Our commonsense notion of personal identity allows for certain changes. One not-silly parallel to the worm question is whether love will persist through the changes that occur with age. The Beatles ask:

When I get older
Losing my hair
Many years from now
Will you still be sending me a valentine, birthday greetings, bottle of wine?
…. Will you still need me,
Will you still feed me,
When I'm sixty-four?

Lana Del Rey asks:

Will you still love me when I'm no longer young and beautiful?
Will you still love me when I got nothing but my aching soul?

One can ask about other changes. Would you still love me if my body were different—if I were fatter, skinnier, taller, shorter? Would you still love me if my mind were different—if I changed my taste in music, became religious, lost interest in politics, got mean? Such changes really occur.

Critically, though, certain questions make no sense. Sometimes it’s incoherent to ask, “Would you still love me if I were an X?” because there’s no way that I could be who I am and also be an X. Suppose I asked:

Would you still love me if I were Brad Pitt?²

It would be reasonable to wonder if you would love me if I looked like Brad Pitt, shared his name, or had some of his personality traits. But I can’t be Brad Pitt. There’s already a Brad Pitt, and he’s not me.³ You can imagine a perfect duplicate of Pitt, but, again, there’s no sense in which this person would be me. The only way to make sense of this question is as something quite different from the intended meaning, as:

Do you love Brad Pitt?

Or suppose I asked:

Would you still love me if I were an isosceles triangle?

I can’t be an isosceles triangle. Whatever makes me me—presumably some cluster of memories, goals, personality traits, and the like—requires a brain or something like a brain, and so cannot exist as a triangle with two equal sides. If a witch said she was going to put a curse on me and turn me into an isosceles triangle, I’d tell her that this is impossible. She could kill me and then create an isosceles triangle in my stead, but I can’t be an isosceles triangle.

What about:

Would you still love me if I were a pig?

This is more of a toughie. It’s conceivable in a way that the triangle case isn’t. I know it’s conceivable because Homer conceived it. In the Odyssey, Circe puts a spell on Odysseus and his men. Here’s Robert Fagles’ translation:

She gave them cheese to eat, and barley-meal,
and honey sweet with Pramnian wine, but mixed
into the food a drug, to make them lose
all memory of home.
Once they had drunk it down, she struck them with her wand,
and penned them in the pigsties.
Grunting like pigs, they had the bodies of swine,
but their minds remained intact.

As a materialist, I can imagine a realistic version of this. Instead of a spell, Circe could have dragged the men into her basement lab, removed their brains from their skulls, and transplanted them into the heads of pigs, carefully connecting the human brains to the pigs’ motor and sensory neurons.⁴ Or perhaps, with even more advanced technology, she could have scanned the men’s brains, recorded all their neural connections, and then somehow recreated these connections in the brains of pigs.⁵

Would the men then be pigs? In the Fagles translation above, the implication is that they are men trapped in the bodies of pigs, not actual pigs. Emily Wilson’s translation has it as “There they were turned into pigs in body and in voice,” and the qualification here suggests that she, too, doesn’t view it as a complete transformation. Perhaps, then, Odysseus might think of Penelope and plaintively grunt,

Would she still love me if I were trapped in the body of a pig?

This seems to me like a perfectly good question.

But the worm question and the plant and cockroach questions are, for me, at least, more like triangle cases. There is no way you can stuff a distinct human mind into such things, and so the question of whether love will persist through transformation literally makes no sense.

Many people have a different intuition. I think this is because we are drawn to common-sense dualism. In my book, Descartes’ Baby, I argued that we naturally think of ourselves as immaterial souls, not material things. As George MacDonald put it,

You do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.

This belief in an immaterial has interesting consequences. An immaterial soul can leave the body through astral projection. It can hop from one body to another, Freaky Friday-style. It can forcibly possess another body, as in demonic possession. And, most significantly of all, it can survive the destruction of the body, perhaps ascending to heaven, residing in a spiritual realm, or occupying another body, human or animal.

It can even end up in a worm.

Love

Would you still love me if I were 64?

This is a reasonable question. One day, I’ll be 64, and I might wonder if my partner will stick around for that.

Would you still love me if I weren’t such a hottie?
Would you still love me if I weren’t rich?

Also, good questions, for a subtly different reason. Many people are troubled by the idea that they are loved solely for their looks or their wealth. So, even if their beauty and wealth never faded, they might still want reassurance that in an alternative universe where they lacked these traits, they would still be loved.

But why would anyone ever ask the worm question? (Besides the fun of putting their partner in an awkward spot.)

A promising answer can be found in Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works as part of his analysis of the origin of romantic love.

How can you be sure that a prospective partner won't leave the minute it is rational to do so—say, when a 10-out-of-10 moves in next door?

One answer is, don't accept a partner who wanted you for rational reasons to begin with; look for a partner who is committed to staying with you because you are you. Committed by what? Committed by an emotion. An emotion that the person did not decide to have, and so cannot decide not to have. An emotion that was not triggered by your objective mate-value and so will not be alienated by someone with greater mate-value. … An emotion like romantic love. "People who are sensible about love are incapable of it," wrote Douglas Yates.

Murmuring that your lover's looks, earning power, and IQ meet your minimal standards would probably kill the romantic mood, even though the statement is statistically true. The way to a person's heart is to declare the opposite—that you're in love because you can't help it.

Pinker’s focus is on how the involuntary nature of love serves as a commitment device, and I think that’s right. But for our purposes, what’s more relevant here is that the emotion locks you onto a specific individual, not the traits that they have.

The problem with being loved for your traits is that such love is contingent. It’ll go away once someone with better traits comes along, and it’ll fade if you ever lose these traits.

We worry most about this problem for traits that we see as superficial, such as looks and wealth. But this contingency arises for any trait. If you love me because I’m genuinely a good person, our relationship is at risk, because you’ll send me packing the moment you have a shot at someone who is genuinely a better person.

The only sort of love I can count on is love that is locked onto me. Others might be hotter, richer, kinder, wiser, and so on, but the one thing that I excel at is being me.

The question we want answered, then, is:

Do you love me—not my traits, but me?

Or, to put it differently:

Would you still love me if I was a worm?

1. Grammarly wants me to change this to “If I were a worm,” but the meme is what it is, and I’ll stick to quoting the original form.

2. I chose Brad Pitt because we were born 6 days apart.

3. For this reason, I’ve always found claims about reincarnation to be not just empirically dubious but conceptually incoherent. What can someone mean when they say, “I was once Napoleon Bonaparte”?

4. A human brain is about 8 times larger than a pig’s brain, so we’d have to expand the pigs’ skulls quite a bit. When I asked ChatGPT about the details of the procedure, it noted that there were serious ethical concerns. Please keep this in mind before trying this at home.

5. I have my doubts here—my view is that these would be, at best, duplicates of the men—but many believe that such a procedure preserves identity, which is why so many people are excited about uploading their consciousness into a computer.