Romantic and Other Forms of Love
Some months ago, we vowed one day a month to post “on an upbeat note” in order to relieve the downbeat aura our writing exudes. Yesterday was the 13th – the date we’d promised a cheerful post each month – so we’re combining it with Valentine’s Day.
During the past several days, we’ve listened to numerous podcasts on The Nature of Love; if you’re interested in this topic (and who isn’t?), you might like to explore offerings such as “This Is Love,” “Love Letters,” “Modern Love,” and/or the 74 episodes of “This American Life” treating of love in its many forms. If you’d prefer to read about the topic, you could try the Washington Post’s “Date Lab” series, although here there’s a caveat lector: “Date Lab” matches its couples electronically, then provides the $$$ for them to go out on a blind date in exchange for an honest assessment by each party (separately provided) about how it went. The episodes we read weren’t very successful – so far, none we’ve seen has concluded with a “Yes” to that all-important question “Would you ask X out again?” Maybe electronic match-ups aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.
A happier note is struck by the New York Times’ “Vows” section. In these stories, featured couples clearly did desire to see each other again, so much so that they decided to spend the rest of their lives together. The most interesting part of these features is the “how we got together / stayed together” despite obstacles along the way to tying the knot (more and more frequently, a ceremony performed by a Universal Life officiant).
Clearly, “Love” is an enormous subject, as multi-faceted as the forms of love itself. One of the most moving podcasts we listened to in preparing for this post was about a girl who swam alongside a baby whale for five-and-a-half hours (she was a world champion distance swimmer, but five hours brought her to the brink of hypothermia) as nearby fishermen encouraged her to stay with the infant until its mother returned. Its mother did eventually return, and the two grey whales swam safely out to sea. But during the five hours they spent together, an almost-otherworldly bond developed between the girl and the infant whale. The moral of this story, which she correctly deduced: We are all connected.
We listened to a story about a young couple from rural Tennessee who’d met when he – a first-year law student at Harvard – called her to assure her that if he could could get into Harvard from the small, strict Christian college her parents wanted her to attend, she could, too. She met him in person a few years later on campus (she did attend the college her parents had picked for her, but was miserable there, just as she’d predicted) and something really, really clicked. She had only two demands: first, that they be married in Paris (which she thought sounded romantic) and second, that they live in NYC. He acquiesced, and she dropped out of the college she’d never liked to move to NYC. He began a career as an 80-hour-a-week underling in Big Law; she enrolled in NYU and worked part-time in a bicycle shop. And their apartment had a (distant, barely visible) view of the Empire State Building, the only landmark she’d heard of in NYC. All this happened within just a few weeks.
Then the calls started, calls from women (a different woman each time) at all hours of the day and night. Dutifully, she noted the callers and numbers and passed them along to her husband, who seemed just as baffled as she was. Turns out, the female callers were asking for someone else – a rock star with the same first name as her husband who’d had their phone number in the past. Mystery solved. Her faith in her husband was vindicated, but she got schooled one day when a waiter asked her how her husband took his coffee and she hadn’t a clue. She realized that 80-hour weeks weren’t conducive to getting to know one’s spouse. The couple packed up and returned to Tennessee, where lawyers’ workloads were lighter and prospects for future intimacy rosier.
And there was the podcast about a man whose wife had died after many years of marriage. They’d been something of a latter-day hippie couple when they first met and married; ashrams, retreats, spirituality and artistic endeavors had been their beat. Their two daughters were born when they were in their forties. The wife, diagnosed shortly after the birth of their second daughter with cancer, died when the girls were still very young.
Following a year of grief support by/in their ashram community, the widower and his two daughters returned to North Carolina, where – in the words of one of his daughters – he sacrificed any hope of financial security to ensure that he could be both father and mother to the girls. He’d raised them as if his wife were still with them, done the things he thought his wife would have done, foregone other relationships (the girls, as they got older, sabotaged a number of incipient involvements), and even today (they’re now grown up), he drops in on them all the time, and they do the same.
True anecdote: when one of his daughter’s fiancé’s got a new job, he went over on the young man’s first day bearing ice cream bars (100 or so) to treat the entire staff. But no one knew where to direct him – it was the young man’s first day on the job and he was in PR or new employee training. But when the man left (not having found his future son-in-law), everyone in the office knew the new employee by name, although they hadn’t yet laid eyes on him. The man’s love, still informed by his wife’s love after 20 years, extended from memory to his daughter to his future son-in-law and thence to the latter’s colleagues.
In short, romantic love, denoted by the Greek word eros (cf. erotic) is but one of the forms this ever-alluring, ever-desired but ultimately, mysterious emotion can assume. Other well-known forms – many podcasts deal with these as well – are storgē (“affection,” “caring”), philia (“friendship”), and the generally-acknowledged higher form of love, agapē.
Storgē is the love we feel towards those for whom we care – our children and our blood relatives. Though we may have little ongoing contact with our siblings/cousins/aunts-uncles, blood ties bind us to caring for them even if we do not feel philia or agapē – witness the family get-togethers during the holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas) caricatured in countless films and all too often enacted in real life (alas, to far less humorous effect) across the country from late November through December.
Philia (cf. Philadelphia, philanthropy) is the love in which we choose freely to engage by virtue of shared tastes, interests, hobbies, etc. Philia is often lauded as preferable to storgē because of its voluntary nature; we don’t choose our relatives, after all, but we do choose our friends (say all our friends and none of our relatives).
It is often the case that two (or more) forms of love are experienced in conjunction with one another, and it is not always possible to disentangle them. In any case, they may overlap and/or succeed one another.
For example, a couple may initially experience eros (in fact, without it there may not be a future to the relationship), philia, storgē, and agapē will come into being as the relationship matures. Each form of love has different foundations and may encompass different phases/stages of a relationship. For example, a couple might initially share common interests, hobbies, and tastes (the basis for philia). These may gradually diverge as each partner continues to develop and cultivate their own knowledge and interests. If they have children and/or care for ill or aging relatives at some point, storgē will be stretched to its caring-for limits. Agapē, characterized as the highest form of love, is harder to define, and many people appear to go through life experiencing the (admittedly) considerable benefits of eros, philia, and storgē without knowing what it is to give or receive agapē.
Agapē denotes both free choice – in this, it resembles philia – and the sort of ongoing caring-for-others parents and adult caretakers associate with storgē. But because it is both voluntary and caring, the combination of the two amounts to more than the sum of its parts. Above all – and uniquely – it is disinterested. Agapē does not ask “what’s in it for me?” but rather “what’s best for the other?” and – somehow – causes us to act accordingly. When our own interests and those of the person(s) for whom we feel agapē diverge, those of the other take precedence. In other words, it requires a conscious decision to look after what’s best for another. Freely chosen, without explicit benefits, it is the “steady intention of the will to another’s highest good. It is an ongoing benevolence—willing (-volence, fr. Latin volo) what’s good or best (bene-) for another.”
In an era which emphasizes self-love, self-fulfillment, and self-determination, corresponding at the individual level to neoliberalism’s emphasis on the private as opposed to the communal sphere (recall Margaret Thatcher’s (in)famous pronouncement “There is no such thing as society”), it is understandable that agapē may not be experienced by all and that it may be confused with eros, storgē, or philia.
A recent Guardian story recounts an ultimate example of agapē. In May 2017, a man named Jeremy Christian attacked two teenage girls (one black, the other wearing a hijab) on a Portland MAX light rail; three unrelated men (strangers to one another, to the attacker, and to the two girls) attempted to intervene. Christian drew a knife and stabbed all three men; two died. Both girls survived.
One of the victims, a 23-year-old named Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche bled to death of his wounds before help arrived. He uttered the following to a fellow-passenger, Rachel Macy, who comforted him in his final moments: “Tell everyone on the train I love them.”
Taliesin’s dying words changed the course of Macy’s life, just as they did that of the article’s author, Maeve Higgins; they had a near-miraculous effect on thousands of others, in Portland and far beyond. Today they still offer faith and hope to his grieving parents; Asha, Taliesin’s mother, recently noted: “Of course, I miss him sometimes, but also I don’t miss him because he often just shows up the minute I think of him – and I feel the love.”
The Guardian piece makes no reference to the irony of the perpetrator’s surname, Christian, and to the parable-like nature of what happened that day, when a young male, a stranger to all on the train, went to save two young girls in danger. They weren’t his girlfriend(s) (eros), they weren’t his sisters (storgē), they weren’t his friends (philia). What Taliesin expressed while dying was a disinterested but overarching form of caring for strangers. He chose to act as he did of his own volition, and in doing so sacrificed that others – strangers – might live. Most of us can sense, even if we cannot fully articulate, the parallel.
In the meantime, our wishes go to those in the throes of romantic love that they may enjoy this day – after all, it’s specifically designated for lovers; that carers feeling overwhelmed by the responsibilities of storgē may feel their burden more lightly, and that those celebrating with friends may take pleasure in common interests, whether in ideas, or books, or film, or Irish music, or electronic games – remember: the pleasure’s in the sharing.
A friend has taken to saying “good morning” each day by sharing Viber messages – jokes or memes or TikTok “Make Your Days” – from her morning feed; she forwards whatever strikes her fancy. Today her message was of three charming stick figures, their frilly skirts formed by red roses (the lovers’ gift par excellence, on sale today in NYC for the bargain-basement price of $59.99). Each rose carried its own command: “Have faith!” “Have hope!” “Love others!” These sounded familiar:
νυνὶ δὲ μένει πίστις, ἐλπίς, ἀγάπη, τὰ τρία ταῦτα· μείζων δὲ τούτων ἡ ἀγάπη
(And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.) (1 Corinthians 13:13, “Hymn to Love”)
Happy Valentine’s Day to one and all, be they lovers, carers, or sharers.