Love can be a confusing word. I think this is because we use the same word to mean a preference for something (I love chocolate, I love the feeling of pages turning in a book) and also to describe a relationship with various types of people (I love my parents, I love my friends). To make things even more complicated, we use the same word to describe how we feel about one person, for example a parent, but will see the same word to describe how we might feel a significant other. Even though feelings for one person might be deeper than feelings for another, we still use the same word to describe both feelings. How can we make sense of this?
While we use the same word “love” to mean all sorts of things in English, the ancient Greeks were actually much clearer expressing which type of love they were talking about because they used four different words, depending on which type of love they were talking about.
Storge (pronounced like store – gay)
Storge is the earliest form of love we typically encounter. It’s the love between parents and children, as well as the family bond between siblings. Usually this type of love is not something we choose, but rather something we are given. In a sense, the home is like the training ground for which we learn to love other people. Sometimes family life can get messy, but this type of love is there to remind us that hopefully there will always be someone that has our back when the world is against us.
Philia – (pronounced like feel-ee-ah)
Philia is love shown between friends. This is a deeper kind of kinship that most family love, and it is the first type of love we actively choose to participate in. For me, the love I have for my friends can sometimes feel like familial love, but there’s one major difference. There are things that I tell my friends that I will never tell my family in 1 million years. It’s not because I hate my family for some reason, I just feel more comfortable sharing some things with my friends than I do my family.
Eros – (pronounced like the word “arrows”)
Usually when we talk about love between two people, this is the type of love we are talking about. This kind of love is romantic and sometimes sexual in nature, going much deeper than both the previous two types of love. However, this should not be confused with lust. Lust uses someone (whether emotionally or sexually) just for their own benefit, without any regard to the desires of the other person involved. This romantic type of love I’m speaking about here involves an open giving of oneself to another, little by little, but in time hopefully completely.
Agape (pronounced a gah pay)
Agape is an interesting form of love, because it wasn’t invented by the ancient Greeks. Agape is an unconditional form of love usually reserved to signify the relationship between God and human beings. The writings of St. Paul are filled with references to agape. Agape is the kind of love that Christians are supposed to aspire to, because it transcends the other three. It’s a love without limits, a love that goes beyond any human relationship.
So I think it’s time we try and differentiate what we mean by love. Maybe it’ll take some new definitions, but then our language would be clearer.
Thank you for reading, and God bless you!
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