Do You Know Love?

7 Ways To Describe Love

I love a lot of things.

I love the smell of my coffee in the morning.

I love to read.

I love my friends.

I love spending time by myself.

All these forms of love are driven by affection and attachment, yet they are all distinct.

According to the dictionary, love is defined as a feeling of strong or constant affection for a person, object or idea.

But why do we use one word to describe what we feel for everything, from people to phones to intangible ideas?

To understand what love is, we have to look back in time to the ancient Greeks. The Greeks didn’t have one all-encompassing word instead they used seven different words to explain love in its many different forms.

1. Eros: Romantic passionate love

Eros which means passionate love is the most common type of love we see in the world today. Most romantic relationships start like this.

It’s love fueled by the desire for pleasure and attraction. It’s love at first sight. It’s love that is intense.

It can even be crazy and can’t get enough of each other obsessive.

But love like this can be confusing, it’s the question of love versus lust. Both love and lust come with intense physical attraction and a strong desire to be close to the person.

2. Philia: Intimate authentic friendship

Sometimes love doesn’t start with lust. It starts with friendship.

This love is knowing someone well enough you develop a soul to soul bond. It’s intimate, authentic and kind. It’s warm and encouraging.

This love is based on the goodwill or wanting what’s best for the other person.

Love is having mutual trust and friendship. It’s calling someone brother or sister even when they are not related to you by blood. The love experienced in this is of loyalty, sacrifice and vulnerability.

Love is a connection akin to that of soul mates; it’s one part of destiny and another part of choice.

3. Ludus: Playful flirtatious love

Love is not always serious. Love is not always permanent. When it’s fleeting, love is not always lust.

It’s a love built on infatuation, flirtation and fun.

Love is having a crush on someone and acting on it. It’s going out for a drink with a friend and being like a romantic couple for the night. It’s going to the club, dancing with strangers or singing in a karaoke room with people you’ve just met.

Love is casual, exciting and fun, with zero obligations or implications to be loved. It doesn’t need physical attraction or friendship to be love.

4. Storge: Unconditional familial love

Sometimes you can love someone even when you don’t like them. You understand this concept if you have siblings.

Love is the kind of kinship that only exists between family members. Family doesn’t mean you’re tied by blood. When you consider someone your family, you often develop a need to protect them, even if they may not be the nicest person to hang around with.

Love is strange. Often when you love someone, you are drawn closer to them. You want to spend all your free time with them and do everything with them. But sometimes love is wanting to go home, even when you might not talk to the people there very much. It’s a sense of security. This love makes you capable of giving a kidney without hesitation.

This type of love is unconditional. It’s not dependent on who the person is or what they can give to you. It’s a one-way ticket. It’s the ability to love someone even if they may not have the ability to love you back.

5. Philautia: Self-love

Love is something you shouldn’t take for granted.

Love is not what you can do for others but it’s also what you can do for yourself.

Go out and treat yourself once in a while. You don’t have to have achieved anything or crossed any milestone to celebrate how fantastic you are.

Love is when you stop comparing yourself to others. When you stop judging and forgive yourself for your past mistakes. Love is when you wake up in the morning, stare at yourself in the mirror and be proud of the person staring back at you. Love is leaving toxic relationships and not feeling obligated to stay no matter who they are or how important they’ve been to you in the past.

Love is being kind to yourself. In your thoughts, in your words and your actions.

Love is choosing yourself.

6. Pragma: committed love

Love lasts for a lifetime. Love is to have and to hold. For better, for worse. For richer, for poorer. In sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do you part.

Love is committed and compassionate. It is accepting each other’s differences and learning to compromise. Love is taking all the broken pieces and putting them together again, instead of throwing them away.

Love is everlasting, rooted in romantic feelings and compassion.

Love is both a feeling and a choice. Falling in love is a feeling, but loving is a decision. It’s telling them you love them even on the worst days. It’s saying to them “I don’t know how we will get through this but we will do it together.”

Love is an amazing feeling in the beginning but for love to last a lifetime, it requires a commitment of never letting this person go for as long as they let you.

7. Agape: Empathetic universal love

It’s a love inclusive of helping strangers, nature and those less fortunate.

Love is empathy towards humanity. It’s fighting for change even if you’re not directly affected by the issues. Love is altruistic. Love is selflessly caring for humans, animals and Earth itself.

Love doesn’t expect anything in return for its action. Love itself is the reward. Love serves as the foundation for societies and communities, without which we cannot thrive. It’s about paying it forward.

The Foundations of Love

Love exists in all cultures of the world. There is something innate and biological about the experience of love. It is fundamental to the human experience. We don’t know why love exists or what ultimate purpose it serves but we do know how important it is.

In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates tells the story of the myth of Aristophanes, about the origins of sexual love. The original humans of Earth were round creatures with four hands, four feet, and their backs and sides forming a circle. These self-sufficient sexless beings were arrogant, threatening and repeatedly attacked the gods. To punish them, Zeus cut them with a thunderbolt and split them apart. One male and one female. Each half-human longing to rejoin with their other half.

Eros, the drive toward passionate, romantic love, can be seen as this ancient desire to be fused with our other half. It seems to be a universal, unconscious human need. It is no wonder the pursuit of romantic love is so powerful.

But if we are looking for lasting satisfaction in a relationship, the foundation of a relationship must be solid. We should examine the underlying basis of a relationship, should we find ourselves in a relationship that is going sour. Sexual attraction or even intense feelings of “falling in love” may play a role in forming an initial bond, but like good epoxy glue, that initial bonding agent needs to be mixed with other ingredients before it can harden into a lasting bond.

To build a strong relationship we should lay the foundations of any relationship on the qualities of affection, compassion and mutual respect. Basing it on these qualities enables us to achieve a deep and meaningful bond not only with our lover, spouse, friends, acquaintances, or strangers but most importantly ourselves.

Quality love for yourself opens up unlimited possibilities and opportunities for connection. Only when you love yourself can you love others the way they deserve to be.

To know love, it all starts and it all ends, with you.