A person's sense of life is of crucial importance in the formation of his basic values, since all value-choices rest on
an implicit view of the being who values and of the world in which he must act. A person's sense of life underlies
all his other feelings, all his emotional responses—like the leitmotif of his soul, the basic theme of his personality.
This is particularly evident in the sphere of his romantic-sexual responses.
Just as one's own sense of life can be very difficult to isolate and identify conceptually, so it is very difficult to
isolate and identify the sense of life of another human being, because it colors the entire personality. However, in
romantic relationships, the affirmative response of each party to the sense of life of the other is crucial to the
experience of love and to the projection of mutual visibility. In romantic love, one feels implicitly: "He (or she)
sees life as I do. He (or she) faces existence as I face it. He (or she) experiences the fact of being alive as I
experience it."
There are many ways in which a sense-of-life affinity is communicated; perhaps the rarest is by explicit, conceptual
statement. Two people discover their affinity by learning of each other's values and disvalues—and by such means
as observing each other's manner of talking, of smiling, of standing, of moving, of expressing emotions, of reacting
to events, etc. They discover it by the way they react to each other, by the things that are said and by the things that
are not said, by the explanations it is not necessary to give, by sudden, unexpected signs of mutual understanding.
One of the most eloquent signs of a sense-of-life affinity is common likes and dislikes in the field of art; art is a
sense-of-life realm, more explicitly than any other human activity; and an individual's sense of life is crucial in
determining his artistic responses.
Two individuals' discussion of their respective ideas is not unimportant; it can be very important, indeed; but mere
abstract, intellectual agreement on particular subjects is not sufficient by itself to establish an authentic sense -of-life
affinity.
Without a significant sense-of-life affinity, no fundamental and intimate experience of visibility is possible. One
may be admired for some particular quality of qualities, by a person with an alien sense of life, but one's feeling of
gratification, if any would be