So, looking back now 67 years I see compassion, friendship and kindness and compassion being useful, but romantic love often harms as much as it might help. So, what does one do with that?
We have all seen people so incredibly in love that they eventually kill themselves, (directly or indirectly because of it). I even was one of these. (Even though later I realized I was in love likely with at least 2 women and was also despondent at being asked to leave my church at the time.
But, all that took me years to figure it all out. Because emotionally at least love is as mysterious a thing as any of us can imagine. We might want to just define it as chemical processes in our brains, I suppose. But, somehow I don't find that very satisfying. Likely, if I was forced to see life only in that way I would find a way to self destruct fairly soon myself.
So, even though I'm saying (romantic love) isn't practical or often times survivable, still it happens to all of us. And anyone reading this is one of the survivors of romantic love. Otherwise, your pain would have killed you. So, then we have to thank all the people in our lives that talked us into staying alive through our very broken hearts (usually sometime between 12 and 30) that we many times almost didn't survive.
I often wonder how many people get to actually live with the people they are "in love with" only to watch them tarnish in all ways because no one is perfect. Or even if they are perfect they certainly aren't going to stay that way by any stretch of the imagination. So, in the end no matter how much you love someone and no matter how successful it is if you stay together long enough and live long enough likely you are going to have to watch this person die whether you are still with them or not.
Also, once again I'm speaking from a very long lifetime of 67 years so far. And I must say that I still love everyone I ever loved even the ones that might want me dead now because that is a part of the human condition too.
And, there are many kinds of love. Some of the kinds of love starting with (platonic friendship) which is completely non-romantic or (Agape) is listed below.
So, then the other extreme would be Eros which would be completely sexual love which is at the far end of the same spectrum.
Note: I tend to define Eros as a love born of Sexual attraction. However, C.S. Lewis defines it somewhat differently than that.
And I think one of the problems is too many young people mistake Eros for real love which is it not. (Even though being sexually compatible is one hallmark of a long term successful relationship) it is not everything and not enough to sustain a live in relationship while raising children. There has to be more than that for relationships to prosper long term.
I have been in relationships that were only sexually perfect but I knew at the time that this wasn't going to work long term. Because in the end life is about practicality in the end. If your life isn't practical in all ways you are really going to suffer the consequences. This is a given for everyone.
I tried to avoid looking at life in this supremely practical way as long as I could but eventually suffering brought me back to extreme practicality. I have been much much happier ever since I gave up on idealism and went with practicality and kindness instead.
I'm sure you might agree with me.
However, then we must define love because in the end there are many kinds of love. First there is:
Agape: Friendship and platonic love which might also be compared to compassion which is almost always a good thing. (unless it is idiot compassion which gets people killed often).
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agape Cached
Agape, which means "love: esp. brotherly love, charity; the love of God for man and of man for God." The noun form first occurs in the Septuagint, but the verb form ...and then of course you have C.S.Lewis who says:The Four Loves
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Four Loves is a book by C. S. Lewis which explores the nature of love from a Christian and philosophical perspective through thought experiments.[1]The Four Loves
First editionAuthor C. S. Lewis Cover artist Michael Harvey Country Northern Ireland Language English Genre Philosophy Publisher Geoffrey Bles Publication date1960 Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback) Pages 160 OCLC 30879763
The book was based on a set of radio talks from 1958, criticised in the US at the time for their frankness about sex.[2]
Contents
Need/gift love
Taking his start from St. John's words "God is Love", Lewis initially thought to contrast "Need-love" (such as the love of a child for its mother) and "Gift-love" (epitomized by God's love for humanity), to the disparagement of the former.[3] However he swiftly happened on the insight that the natures of even these basic categorizations of love are more complicated than they at first seemed: a child's need for parental comfort is a necessity, not a selfish indulgence, while conversely parental Gift-love in excessive form can be a perversion of its own.[4]
Pleasures
Lewis continued his examination by exploring the nature of pleasure, distinguishing Need-pleasures (such as water for the thirsty) from Pleasures of Appreciation, such as the love of nature.[5] From the latter, he developed what he called “a third element in love...Appreciative love”,[6] to go along with Need-love and Gift-love.
Throughout the rest of the book, Lewis would go on to counterpart that three-fold, qualitative distinction against the four broad types of loves indicated in his title.[7]
In his remaining four chapters, Lewis treats of love under four categories ("the highest does not stand without the lowest"), based in part on the four Greek words for love: affection, friendship, eros, and charity. Lewis states that just as Lucifer—a former archangel—perverted himself by pride and fell into depravity, so too can love—commonly held to be the arch-emotion—become corrupt by presuming itself to be what it is not.
A fictional treatment of these loves is the main theme of Lewis's novel Till We Have Faces.
Storge – affection
Storge (storgē, Greek: στοργή) is fondness through familiarity (a brotherly love), especially between family members or people who have otherwise found themselves together by chance. It is described as the most natural, emotive, and widely diffused of loves: natural in that it is present without coercion; emotive because it is the result of fondness due to familiarity; and most widely diffused because it pays the least attention to those characteristics deemed "valuable" or worthy of love and, as a result, is able to transcend most discriminating factors.
Affection, for Lewis, included both Need-love and Gift-love; he considered it responsible for 9/10th of all solid and lasting human happiness.[8]
Ironically, however, affection's strength is also what makes it vulnerable. Affection has the appearance of being "built-in" or "ready made", says Lewis, and as a result people come to expect it irrespective of their behavior and its natural consequences.[9] Both in its Need and its Gift form, affection then is liable to 'go bad', and to be corrupted by such forces as jealousy, ambivalence and smothering.[10]
Philia – friendship
Philia (philía, Greek: φιλία) is the love between friends. Friendship is the strong bond existing between people who share common interest or activity.[11] Lewis immediately differentiates Friendship Love from the other Loves. He describes friendship as, "the least biological, organic, instinctive, gregarious and necessary...the least natural of loves"[12] - our species does not need friendship in order to reproduce - but to the classical and medieval worlds the more profound precisely because it is freely chosen.
Lewis explains that true friendships, like the friendship between David and Jonathan in the Bible, are almost a lost art. He expresses a strong distaste for the way modern society ignores friendship. He notes that he cannot remember any poem that celebrated true friendship like that between David and Jonathan, Orestes and Pylades, Roland and Oliver, Amis and Amiles. Lewis goes on to say, "to the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it".
Growing out of Companionship, friendship for Lewis was a deeply Appreciative love, though one which he felt few people in modern society could value at its worth, because so few actually experienced true friendship.[13]
Nevertheless Lewis was not blind to the dangers of friendships, such as its potential for cliqueyness, anti-authoritarianism, and pride.[14]
Eros – romance
Eros (erōs, Greek: ἔρως) for Lewis was love in the sense of 'being in love' or 'loving' someone, as opposed to the raw sexuality of what he called Venus: the illustration Lewis uses was the distinction between 'wanting a woman' and wanting one particular woman - something that matched his (classical) view of man as a rational animal, a composite both of reasoning angel and instinctual alley-cat.[15]
Eros turns the need-pleasure of Venus into the most appreciative of all pleasures;[16] but nevertheless Lewis warned against the modern tendency for Eros to become a god to people who fully submit themselves to it, a justification for selfishness, even a phallic religion.[17]
After exploring sexual activity and its spiritual significance in both a pagan and a Christian sense, he notes how Eros (or being in love) is in itself an indifferent, neutral force: how "Eros in all his splendour...may urge to evil as well as good".[18] While accepting that Eros can be an extremely profound experience, he does not overlook the dark way in which it could lead even to the point of suicide pacts or murder, as well as to furious refusals to part, "mercilessly chaining together two mutual tormentors, each raw all over with the poison of hate-in-love".[19]
Agape – unconditional love
Charity (agápē, Greek: ἀγάπη) is the love that brings forth caring regardless of the circumstance. Lewis recognizes this as the greatest of loves, and sees it as a specifically Christian virtue. The chapter on the subject focuses on the need of subordinating the natural loves - as Lewis puts it, "The natural loves are not self-sufficient"[20] - to the love of God, who is full of charitable love, to prevent what he termed their 'demonic' self-aggrandisement.[21] Lewis did not actually use the word agape although later commentators did. [22][23][24]
See also
References
- Carl Rogers, Becoming Partners (1984) p. 238
