Love, It Varieties, and its Facsimilies

When I was in high school our Honors English Professor assigned us to write what he called our "Magnum Opus". Magnum Opus, I guess, is Latin for "major work". What it meant to us is that we had to write a 20 page research paper while we were still in high school. I wrote mine on the writings of C.S. Lewis, and since I did not really have a thesis, I would be utterly ashamed to have anyone read it today.

One of the C.S. Lewis books that I read was "The Four Loves", which was a non-fiction work about labeling different kinds of love. Since I have not read it in nearly 20 years, I will have to share this from memory. But the four loves he listed are brotherly love (phileo), erotic love (eros), sacrificial love (agape), and something similar to love as affection. Lewis believed that understanding these different biblical uses of the word love was essential in understanding our relationship with Jesus and following him.

Lewis' understanding has influenced me throughout my life. In particular, I think about how by mislabeling "love" and not understanding the different kinds of love, people stumble in their relationships. In particular, I think it is easy to conflate all sorts of love as aiming toward erotic love. Thus, in our society, we place a high emphasis on erotic love as the ultimate love to hope for and experience. I believe this idolotry of erotic love is both a lie and destructive.

An example of this comes with John Boswell's research on homosexuality among medieval priests. Through his research, he uncovered covenants between male clergy. These covenants include oaths of lifelong fidelity. I think it is clear that these oaths are not oaths of erotic love, but rather oaths of friendship. I think that Boswell both comes to his research with an agenda to prove, and a cultural bias that nearly diefies romantic love as the most important of romantic relationships. The truth is, I think, for most of human history, people put a much higher value on friendship than they did on romantic relationships.

I think another example of this happens with people's lack of boundaries in sexual relationships. I think that especially among people with emotional and mental disabilities, it is easy to see how this happens. There are a number of people that are sex offenders that are also mentally and emotionally disabled. This is true, in part, because their disabilities prohibit them from developing boundaries between "affection" love, "friend" love, and "eros" loves. So, when they feel drawn to someone, they feel affection for them, and then this often leads to crossing sexual boundaries, because they have no boundaries. As a matter of fact, I think that abusers that are not disabled, also have problems in understanding the difference between affection and eros loves.

To a lesser extent, I think this blending of boundaries happens in mainstream, heterosexual culture. People have their friendship needs met by someone, and they think that because they have experienced a connection as friends, that it should necessarily lead "somewhere else".

I learned this as a young youth minister. There were times when I felt strong connections with students of the opposite gender. And I had to use my understandings of the four kinds of love to choose how I was going to label these connections. I think it could have been easy to stumble if I had not clearly been able to "define the relationship" with those students in my head, and set appropriate boundaries and systems of accountablity. One way of stumbling would have been defining that attachment as erotic. Another way of stumbling would have developed relationships with students that was overly friendship based, and thus been a peer instead of a meaningful adult presence in their lives. Or, I could have been so hypervigilant about my feelings that I just closed myself off to everyone. Instead, I learned early in my ministry to label the affection and attachment I had to students into a "big brotherly" kind of role with them. This seemed appropriate, until late in my youth ministry career, when I was more of a "non-resident" parent/adopted uncle.

Sometimes relationships need reframing. In certain situations, this may take time away from a relationship with someone. When I was single, I often momentary crushes on people. After a while, I grew to reframe feelings that I first identified as romantic love into an affection for someone that could grow into a friendship kind of love for someone.

At times, we try to use eros love to meet reational needs that eros was never meant to meet. We feel lonely for friends, we don't know how to be intimate with someone, and instead of looking to understand that lack of love in our lives, we tend to go with the quick fix of sex to meet our emotional needs. The problem is, when we try and make sex be able to fulfill us in ways that it was not designed to, we end up both hurt and perpetually dissatisfied. I often hear about and deal with people who try to use sex to build all sorts of relational and emotional capital in their lives that will always disappoint them.

And, in the relationship of marriage, we have all of these loves at different points in our relationships. However, I think that primarily marriage is about a choice to live a life of self-sacrificial love with another, bonded and cemented by eros love.

A couple of conversations I have had with friends in recent days have gotten me to thinking about these things anew. And, although I have wanted to think outloud about this for a while, I feel in a happier and better place talking about this thought process now that I am in the middle of a very happy marriage.

Does this make sense to you?
How have you had to reframe relationships with people?
How have you seen confusion between different types of love?