Love is our highest value, what we all crave and what we believe makes us fundamentally
human, but it is also the source of considerable anxiety. Chiefly, we worry whether we are
entirely normal because it frequently feels as if we are not experiencing love the way
we should be. Society is subtly highly prescriptive in this regard. It suggests that to be a decent
person, we should all be within sexual relationships and furthermore, that within these, we should
‘love’ in a very particular way: we should be constantly thrilled by our partner’s
presence, we should long to see them after every absence, we should crave to hold them
in our arms, to kiss and be kissed by them and – most of all – want to have sex with
them every day or so. In other words, we should follow the script of Romantic ecstasy throughout
our lives. This is beautiful in theory and hugely punitive in practice. If we’re going
to define love like this and peg the idea of normality accordingly, then most of us
will have to admit to ourselves (with considerable embarrassment) that we don’t know much about
love – and therefore don’t qualify as decent, sane, or normal people. We’ve created
a cult of love radically out of line with most of our real experiences of relationships.
This is where the Ancient Greeks can help. They realised early on that there are many
kinds of love, each with their respective virtues and seasons – and that a good society
requires us to append a correct vocabulary to these different states of the heart, lending
each one legitimacy in the process. The Greeks anointed the powerful physical feelings we
often experience at the start of a relationship with the word ‘eros’ (ἔρως) . But
they knew that love is not necessarily over when this sexual intensity wanes, as it almost
always does after a year or so in a relationship. Our feelings can then evolve into another
sort of love they captured with the word ‘philia’ (φιλία) normally translated as ‘friendship’
though the Greek word is far warmer, more loyal and more touching than its English counterpart;
one might be willing to die for ‘philia’. Aristotle recommended that we outgrow eros
in youth, and then base our relationships – especially our marriages – on a philosophy
of philia. The word adds an important nuance to our understanding of a viable union. It
allows us to see that we may still love even when we are in a phase that our own, more
one-sided vocabulary fails to value. The Greeks had a third word for love: agape (ἀγάπη).
This can be best translated as a charitable love. It’s what we might feel towards someone
who has behaved rather badly or come to grief through flaws of character – but for whom
we still feel compassion. It’s what a God might feel for his or her people, or what
an audience might feel for a tragic character in a play. It’s the kind of love that we
experience in relation to someone’s weakness rather than their strength. It reminds us
that love isn’t just about admiration for virtues, it’s also about sympathy and generosity
towards what is fragile and imperfect in us. Having these three words to hand – eros,
philia and agape – powerfully extends our sense of what love really is. The Ancient
Greeks were wise in dividing the blinding monolith of love into its constituent parts.
Under their tutelage, we can see that we probably have far more love in our lives than our current
vocabulary knows how to recognise.
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