Remember in the movie "The Princess Bride" how Wallace Shawn's character kept saying, "Inconceivable!!!" After several rounds of the man in the black mask surviving these challenges where it is "inconceivable" that any man would survive, one of his henchmen (played by Mandy Pantinkin) turns to him and says, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."If there's a word in our culture where we are universally confused, it has to be LOVE!
The Spanish language has 100,000 words. German has a vocabulary of 185,000 words. That may seem like a lot of words until you realize that the English language has somewhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000 words. The English language is one of the most robust languages that has ever existed.
The word "chatty" has 40 synonyms!
blabby, chatty, conversational, gabby, garrulous, loquacious, motormouthed, mouthy, talky, communicative, expansive; demonstrative, effusive, gushing; free-spoken, outspoken, unreserved, vocal; articulate, fluent, glib, voluble, well-spoken; gossipy, talebearing, tale-telling; long-winded, prolix, rambling, verbose, windy, wordy; extroverted, gregarious, outgoing, sociable[1]
But, for some reason, when it comes to possibly the most important concept in the English language, we use a single word as a junk drawer for a series of complex emotions: LOVE
Just look at this quick sampling of ways we use the word LOVE
Love Shoes – To
really really like an object
Love
Dogs - To have fondness for a creature
Love
Friends – To find
companionship in other people
Love
Family – To have a deep, unconditional concern for relatives
Love
Boyfriend – To have romantic feelings without commitment
Love
Mankind – Universal concern
for your species
Love
Wife – To have romantic feelings and commitment
Make
Love – Euphemism for Sex
To be in Love – Romantic Feelings
Love
is a Verb – A choice to care for someone which is accompanied by
actions
God
Loves Us – An unconditional, selfless concern for mankind
I Love God – A selfless affection for
who God is and what He has done
I wonder how many relationships and marriages have run into problems simply because of a vocabulary problem. When one word covers so much ground, it's guaranteed to lead to confusion and trouble.
Whether you're trying to understand your relationship with another person or you're trying to understand the tension in a relationship, you need to understand what you mean when you say, "Love."
One of the things which has most helped me understand what I mean by LOVE and how to better evaluate how I'm doing at loving my wife and family is to look at the different words for, "Love," in Greek.
The Greek language has four different words for LOVE:
The Greek language has four different words for LOVE:
- Storge
- Philia
- Eros
- Agape
Different relationships require different types of love. A life-long romantic relationship called marriage requires all four types of love. These four words we call LOVE can give you a grid by which to understand why certain relationships in your life succeed and others fail.
So, what do each of these words mean?
STORGE - Fondness for the Familiar / Nurturing
Storge, "στοργή" or "Affection" is fondness through
familiarity, especially between family members. It has an implied sense of carrying a nurturing nature.
- Nurturing
- Mother to a child
This love refers to a desire to see to the well-being for a person or an object. Storge is so essential to the love a parent has for their kids that any hint that a parent lacks this love will draw extreme criticism. When we learn of a parent abusing their child, we're appalled, because abuse is so antithetical to the storge love we assume parents have for their kids.
RELATIONSHIPS WITHOUT STORGE
Consider the many people in your life that you may say you "love." What does that "love" mean without storge?
- FRIENDSHIP - You may enjoy each other's company, but if there is no "storge," these aren't lifelong friends who truly care for you.
- PARENTS - A parent without storge love for their children is more of a sperm or egg donor than a parent. They're the biological parents, but they haven't earned the title.
- HERE'S THE TRICKY PART FOR PARENTS - Often times, we will feel a storge love for our children, but we don't know how to communicate. Our children may not FEEL our storge love because our actions communicate something different to them.
- MARRIAGE - A marriage without storge is a marriage with two people who have stopped caring about one another. Even if you still have the other loves, without storge, your marriage is in serious danger. Much like with children, your actions communicate much louder than your words. If you don't communicate storge with your actions, your spouse won't feel loved.
PHILIA - Friendship
This Greek word eventually translated into Latin, and it made it's way into a number of familiar words.
- Philadelphia - The City of Brotherly Love
- Philosophy - Love of Wisdom
- Pedophile - Lover of Children
Philia love is a
bond existing between people who share interests or activities. Phileo is a love between family and friends. When you say you love your friends, that is PHILIA love.
RELATIONSHIPS WITHOUT PHILIA
- FRIENDS - Friendships without PHILIA aren't lifelong friendships. These are your buddies and acquaintances. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but you need to know which friends are true friends, and which friends are buddies.
- PARENTS - Philia love is not the most important love for a parent to have for their child. As much as society loves to romanticize the idea of moms and dads as their kids' best friends, in reality, parents need to be parents first, and friends second, or third. With that said, your relationship with your children will be much stronger, and more fun, if you have a healthy dose of PHILIA.
- MARRIAGE - When you remove FRIENDSHIP from your relationship with your spouse, your marriage stops being a marriage, and becomes more like a job where you're required to do married people things.
EROS - Passion / Romance
Eros (ἔρως) is love in the sense of 'being in love." Eros longs to emotionally connect with another person, and it is directed towards a specific person. This is probably the form of love which is easiest to understand.
- I love him!
- We're falling in love!
While EROS is probably the most familiar and commonly agreed upon definition of love, it's also the most dangerous. EROS is the closest love to being purely emotion. When someone says they've fallen out of love, they're referring to EROS. Likewise, feelings of EROS keep people in relationships which should have ended long ago. In particular, sex (as a physical act of EROS) is intended to glue two people together in the context of marriage. In dating relationships, sex can prolong bad relationships by pouring fuel on the EROS without any substance behind it.
Often times, PHILIA love is a precursor to EROS. When two people of opposite sexes have a strong PHILIA love, it's extremely common for one or both people to develop EROS. This is why I almost always encourage people who are married to set extremely conservative boundaries in regards to the opposite sex. It's so easy for PHILIA to morph into EROS if you're not being careful.
RELATIONSHIPS WITHOUT EROS
- MARRIAGE - Marriage without EROS is a passionless marriage. While this may seem the most fickle of the loves, in practice, you can fuel the EROS by offering STORGE and PHILIA. If you're distant, avoiding having fun, and not acting nurturing, why would you be surprised that the EROS is fading?
AGAPE - Unconditional Love
Agape love is the love which commits for life. Agape love transcends circumstances and time. Agape love is a bond which holds friendships, families, and marriages together.
While we love to receive AGAPE love, it is the most difficult love to offer others. AGAPE love requires that I offer forgiveness and grace. AGAPE love exists even when love isn't reciprocated.
AGAPE love is the ingredient missing from far too many marriages. Ironically, virtually every marriage ceremony has a reading of the passage in the Bible which most accurately describes AGAPE love:
1
Corinthians 13
4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast,
it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is
not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
8 Love
never fails.
AGAPE love is the reason there is a huge disconnect between teenagers and adults regarding love. Most adults scoff off the words of teenagers when they proclaim they're in love. The teenagers are annoyed because their feelings of PHILIA and EROS are being discounted by adults. The adults are insulted that the teenager is using the same word to describe a two month relationship as they use to describe their 20 year marriage based in AGAPE love.
AGAPE IN RELATIONSIHPS
- FRIENDS - A friendship with AGAPE love is a life long friendship. These are the friends that you would do anything for. These are the friends that you will continue to fight for, even if they turned far away.
- CHILDREN - AGAPE love is what keeps a parent fighting for their child during the teenage years. AGAPE love means that parents love their children in times of rebellion, and times of celebration.
- MARRIAGE - AGAPE love is the glue which holds marriages together, regardless of circumstances and changes. AGAPE love is what everyone wants to receive out of marriage, and what almost everyone pledges to give during their marriage.
A marriage without AGAPE love is in serious danger of ending in divorce.
LOVE PATTERNS
When you understand these four forms of love, you start to better understand the nature of the most important relationships in your life.
PHILIA + AGAPE =
Life-Long Friends
STORGE + AGAPE =
Family Relationships
PHILIA + EROS =
Romantic Dating Relationships
EROS + STORGE =
Co-Dependent Relationships
FINAL THOUGHTS
As you look at the most important relationships in your life, you can usually evaluate their health based off of whether they have appropriate levels of the different types of love.- Is your marriage lacking one of the four types of love?
- Do you have a friendship that isn't a deep as it pretends to be because it's lacking AGAPE or STORGE?
- Is your relationship with a child strained over a perceived lack of STORGE or AGAPE?
How are you doing at loving with all four loves?
Where do you see that people are most confused when it comes to love?
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