![]() ![]() Two Reasons Why People End up Parenting Badly Why We Sometimes Feel Like Curling Up Into a Ball Why Abused Children End Up Hating Themselves How We Are Easily, Too Easily, 'Triggered' On Needing to Find Something to Worry About - Why We Always Worry for No Reason The Disaster of Anthropocentrism - and the Promise of the Transcendent What Is Wrong with Modern Times - and How to Regain Wisdom How To Stop Worrying Whether or Not They Like You How to Spill A Drink Down One’s Front - and Survive Spirituality for People who Hate Spirituality For Those Who (Privately) Aspire to Become More Reclusive Under their tutelage, we can see that we probably have far more love in our lives than our current vocabulary knows how to recognise. The Ancient Greeks were wise in dividing the blinding monolith of love into its constituent parts. Having these three words to hand – eros, philia and agape – powerfully extends our sense of what love really is. 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. It’s the kind of love that we experience in relation to someone’s weakness rather than their strength. 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 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. This can be best translated as a charitable love. The Greeks had a third word for love: agape ( ἀγάπη). 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 word adds an important nuance to our understanding of a viable union. Aristotle recommended that we outgrow eros in youth, and then base our relationships – especially our marriages – on a philosophy of philia. 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’. 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. The Greeks anointed the powerful physical feelings we often experience at the start of a relationship with the word ‘eros’ (ἔρως). 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. This is where the Ancient Greeks can help. We’ve created a cult of love radically out of line with most of our real experiences of relationships. 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. ![]() This is beautiful in theory and hugely punitive in practice. In other words, we should follow the script of Romantic ecstasy throughout our lives. 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. Society is subtly highly prescriptive in this regard. Chiefly, we worry whether we are entirely normal because it frequently feels as if we are not experiencing love the way we should be. 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.
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