The Four Loves (not about standardized tests, Carla!)

Apparently, my 1,200 word, alphabetical breakdown of my take on political issues wasn't "touchy-feely" enough, even though it was a departure from my extended, multi-part, standardized testing rant. So, here's some thoughts about love for your New Year's reading (Very little of this is my original thought, it's a synthesis of really wise stuff I've heard or read (especially The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis) that makes sense to me based on my life experience).

In Greek there are four words for love: storge, philia, eros, and agape. It's interesting to look at the four of them and see how they help us understand what love is all about by seeing the ways that they are different.. but the same, somehow.

Storge could perhaps be translated as "affection." It's a love that is based largely on familiarity: a good example would be the love that young children have for their parents. You may have known a family where you cringe at every poor parenting decision the parents make, yet their kids still smile when they see them and run to them. They still cry for their mother when they need to be comforted, even if their mother isn't particularly comforting. A small child may recoil in fear from the friendliest stranger yet reach up to be held by the grumpy uncle that they see all the time. Think of a dog that is neglected and ill treated by its owner yet still runs to the door with tail wagging when they hear the key turning in the door. This is affection: it's not earned by being particularly loving or lovely, it's earned by merely being familiar.

The second greek word for love is philia. We're used to hearing it translated as "brotherly love" (like in Philadelphia), but love between brothers is probably more like storge. A better translation might be "friendship." It's a love that's built on common interests and common passions: you find someone else who knows all the words to Les Miserables and sings it in the car, you discover that your classmate spends his nights playing the same internet game as you, you catch someone reading your favorite book that nobody else seems to have even heard of. Philia finds people side-by-side in common pursuits rather than face-to-face. Those experiencing philia are not so much interested in each other primarily; it's that they're both interested in the same thing, and this binds them together.

The third is eros, the root word of "erotic," and this is the love that our culture seems to think is the only one that really counts. Eros has sometimes been defined as "lust" but "romantic love" is a better definition. Lust doesn't really want the other person; it wants a physical experience for which the other person is a necessary component. Eros really does want the other person, and not just sexually. It's not that eros takes lovers to the bed and then philia finds them laughing together later in a coffee shop. Eros is at work here, too. Eros is the love that lets you be happy doing anything, as long as the other person is with you. In this way it is very different from philia: where philia finds us side-by-side, eros finds us face-to-face, oblivious to the world around us.

In our culture with only one word for love, it is easy for us to confuse storge, philia, and eros as different stages in the same journey: we start with affection (storge), move to friendship (philia), and finally to the deepest love of romance (eros). A little thought, aided by our wider vocabulary from the Greek, exposes this as ridiculous. The love a young man has for his sweetheart is not the same as his love for his mother, only stronger. At the beginning of the courtship, one would expect that it's actually much weaker than his love for his mother. The fact that his storge for his mother is strong, however, doesn't mean that he in any way desires eros with her. To the contrary, the stronger the storge, the more repugnant the idea probably seems to him. Freud's Oedipal complex falls apart when one realizes that Freud is assuming that the father and the son both love their mother with eros, as if this were the only kind of love there was. Storge allows a son to love his mother without a tinge of jeaulousy toward his father; he'd be much more likely to be jealous of his siblings, which we do see happen all the time. It is, of course, possible for different types of loves to overlap, espiecially with philia. Eros is only stregthened if it's accompanied by philia, and storge and philia combine to make you love all your cousins, but especially the one who's also a die-hard Cubs fan, or to have a special affinity for the sibling who re-enacts commercials with you when you're supposed to be asleep.

So far I've only mentioned three Greek words for love. The fourth is agape, and it's the most difficult word to understand. It's a perfect, unconditional, all-giving love. Storge leads us to make breakfast in bed for our mom on mother's day, but it's agape that's required to sit up in bed with her all night as she wastes away from cancer and retches from chemotherapy. Philia may lead us to take a good friend out to a ball game, but it takes agape to let him have your kidney when he needs a transplant. Eros will inspire us to make fools of ourselves in by singing love songs to our beloved in public. Only agape, however, inspires us to forgive them and take them back when they confess to being unfaithful. Agape is a strange animal. It is, in some way, a deeper, truer love than the others.

Here's an analogy that may be helpful: think of a relationship as a car. You need an engine to drive a car anywhere, and the engine has to be pretty powerful since a car is big and has a lot of inertia. The problem is, an engine that powerful has a lot of inertia itself and isn't the easiest thing to get going. You need a smaller motor, the "starter" to get the engine going. Once the engine is going, the starter is done and you don't need it again until the engine is stopped and needs to be started again. Agape is like the engine of a car. It's strong and can drive a difficult relationship through rough patches, but it needs help getting started. That's what the other loves are for. Storge, philia and eros are like starters for the large engine of agape. They get the engine of agape going, and help start it up again when it's stalled. If you try to drive a car using only the starter engine, you find you can't get above 1 or 2 mph and you burn out the starter pretty quickly. It's not because the starter is bad, it's just not designed to drive the car.

In the same way, relationships that try to drive on pure storge, philia, or eros tend to be pleasant enough for a time but don't last when the road gets tough. Only if agape is engaged will these relationships get through the patches where there aren't the familiar meals and comforts of home that nurture storge; or the shared pleasures of books, music, sports or even gossip that are the breeding ground for philia; or the intimate, candlelit meals or romantic bed-and-breakfasts where eros finds its full strength.

So let the loves do their jobs in your relationships. Let storge, philia, and eros inspire you to love someone, but then don't be surprised when the emotion wanes and the hard work of agape is necessary. Agape requires us to sacrifice, work, and really give of ourselves for the sake of those we love. Storge, philia, and eros may be nouns, but agape is more like a verb: you don't just feel it, you have to decide to do it. Anyone who's ever taken a risk and chosen to give themselves to this kind of love knows that there's no guarantee that you won't be hurt, in fact, it's almost certain that you will be hurt at times. Anyone who's ever taken the risk, though, will tell you that without opening yourself up to pain, you lose the chance at really experiencing any joy, either. We've learned to negotiate our lives so that we avoid the possibility of pain, but we've ended up cutting ourselves off from joy, too. We were created to love and to be loved, and giving that up gives up what makes us human. Embrace your humanity! Love recklessly and generously. Be vulnerable, get hurt, forgive, and repeat. The joy you'll experience won't erase the hurt you experience along the way; rather, love takes that hurt and somehow uses it to create the joy that makes life worth living. Life is dangerous, so love dangerously.

- "Life is a suicide mission." (I cheated, this one's from a book.)