I have a wife and two kids. According to hard determinism, I was determined since time began moving forward to marry my wife and have my children. Every moment we share together was also predetermined, and my affection for them is a chemical reaction in my brain that is likewise bound by the laws of physics.
How can a person truly love another if hard determinsim is true?
Hard determinism does not entail that your love is a chemical reaction in your brain.
Hard determinism is roughly the view that :
For every event, E2, there is another event, E1, that precedes E2 and is causally sufficient for E2.
If dualism were true, hard determinism could still be true even though E1 and E2 were purely mental, with no physical components whatever. (But I am not a dualist.) Hard determinism does not imply mind/ brain identity; it is merely consistent with it. The two positions are logically independent. Hard determinism could be true without your love being identical with a chemical reaction.
Whether your love is a purely non-physical mental state or a chemical reaction in your brain, either way its nature is not altered by its causation. If love is a feeling of intense attachment, with associated behavioural dispositions, this is what it is whether it has been 'hard-determined' or is a voluntary state.
If hard determinism is correct then there is no other option so "true" love would be defined as you having the moments you've had and experiencing the corresponding chemical response that you have.
The usual question is whether free will is possible under hard determinism. However, love, particularly romantic love as conceived in the western culture, certainly is not construed as an act of free will. In the popular imagination, it is an involuntary response to someone's qualities. So in fact, quite the opposite, the concept of a predestined love that was "meant to be" specifically demands some form of determinism.
Determinism in the context of love can be interpreted as the sequence of events that someone has certain virtues, that you were predestined to meet that someone, and that you respond to those qualities in the only possible way.
Love is a word we have created for an experience or a set of emotions related to something or someone. It is just a word to describe the experience of this cocktail of emotions.
The word in itself does not in any way disqualify if this experience is in any sense voluntary or predetermined from birth or learned from society or upbringing or maybe even induced by a magical potion (as in fairytales, no?).
I'll challenge the frame of the question.
"Truly love" as in hollywood is a fictitious license / artifact for entertainment purposes.
Real love is a different thing for each relationship. Some are paternal, come protective, some dependent, some mutual admiration, some are a kind of deeper friendship, some companionship, some complicated shared pasts, some sexual/physical, some a form of idealization... And of course, mixes of all those. As you can see, many of these may be considered "shallow". But you can deepen any of those a lot and would be considered real. The one feeling them will at least consider them very real. But some of those, in the deep form, are considered harmful or toxic from the outside. Both are real, the shallow versions and the ones felt strongest. They are real because they exist, and they define behaviors.
Like stones are real, without having anything other than determinism defining their characteristics and behavior.
You may have seen some form of love different from the one you experience, and being a form of love that you have not experienced, may be thinking that the other one has some quality that yours does not have and that makes it more "pure" or "real", but oh boy. The real versions of hollywood "love" (too sexual, too based on idealization of relationships and too hormone based ) end pretty fast, badly, with someone pretty broken, and many times a kid(s) eating what's left.
You experience real love. That it lacks some quality that you have seen from the outside on other loves does not make those more real or yours less. Mind that the outside is usually the best that the participants allow to publicly surface; all relationships have complicated pieces dancing under the surface, and many of those pieces are the closest to determinism and instinct that you can get.
Make sure to understand the difference between "hard determinism" and "ontological monoistic reductionism".
Hard determinism is the view that free will can not exist, because of determinism.
(Matter-centric) Ontological monoistic reductionism is the view that all things can be reduced to matter.
You will find a lot of religious people who believe in hard determinism, but not in reductionism, so they fully appreciate the metaphysical (in theory they could be dualist reductionists, but oh well 😅 ). Ontological monostic "matter" reductionism is the thing that equates "love" to nothing more than a chemical reaction, whilst hard determinism doesn't do that in any way.
