To understand love in its entirety is to understand The Greatest Love. I believe neither is possible due to the infinite complexity of both. The infinite complexity of love combined with the ubiquity of the term in our society prevents a single, concise, yet complete definition of the term. Despite this one cannot avoid defining terms before exploring any given topic and this post is no different.
To start I will use the term aberration in this blog to reflect what love is not. An aberration of love is an action that runs contrary to all that love represents. With that out of the way I can discuss what love is. The first definition I will present comes from the Oxford dictionary:
Love is an intense feeling of deep affection (e.g. babies fill parents with feelings of love).
Oxford then provides a second definition as follows:
Love is a great interest and pleasure in something (e.g. his love for football).
The examples cited in these definitions above imply that the first definition is meant to describe a relationship between loving individuals. While the second definition is meant to describe a relationship between an individual and an inanimate thing. The concept common to both is that of a relationship and so I believe the two definitions can be combined into a single, albeit much broader, definition as follows:
Love is a directed relationship between two entities.
One could argue that this definition is too broad. That it can be applied to any feeling at all as well as completely unrelated concepts. It is akin to defining a Boeing 747 as “an object that flies“: it may be a true statement but due to its lack of precision the definition is inadequate for any dictionary. But my goal right now is not to provide an adequate dictionary definition for love. Instead I want to provide a definition that serves as a single, broad foundation on which the more specific terms and concepts associated with love, and which are presented later in this post, can build upon. For now this relationship-based definition can serve that purpose.
On one side of a love relationship is the source of affection: a life capable of expressing love. On the other side of the relationship is the object of affection. The directed nature of the relationship means the object of affection need not reciprocate the love from the source or even be a life capable of expressing love at all. For example a person can love the magnificent oak tree in their front yard, or their car parked in the driveway but neither of these are capable of reciprocating the love. An oak tree or car is incapable of loving their owner in return.
The fact that an inanimate thing can be an object of affection in a love relationship may sound odd. However I will include it in my definition for the time being. In a later post I will provide a narrower definition for love between two individuals capable of expressing it to one another.
A given source of affection has an associated breadth of love. The breadth of love for a given source is the number of loving relationships it has established with objects of affection. For my purposes here it is strictly a count. A number.
This source/object distinction introduces a few special cases. The first special case occurs when an object of affection is a loving life capable of reciprocating the love from the source, but does not. This is often termed unrequited love.
The next special case occurs when the source of affection and object of affection are embodied in the same individual. This is termed self-love, and it is a valid, and important, type of love. The types of love are discussed below.
The third special case occurs when either one, or both sides, of the relationship involves a group of individuals. For example fans can love their local hockey team and such a love can be reciprocated. Sometimes such love of the group can be decomposed. Other times it cannot be. For example we can decompose “fans” and “team” to consider each individual fan and team member specifically. We can say such things as “fan Barbara loves the team” or “fan Charlie loves the team goalie Andrew”. But it does not follow that “team goalie Andrew loves fan Charlie” specifically. This is because love requires a familiarity, an amount of knowledge about the object of affection, that can prevent its decomposition from groups of individuals to the individuals themselves. Fan Charlie is somewhat familiar with goalie Andrew. Charlie sees Andrew’s passion and effort night after night, follows Andrew’s comments on social media and has attended some of the community events Andrew participated in. But Andrew does not know anything about Charlie and so cannot form an opinion about his love for Charlie either way. We say that “team goalie Andrew is indifferent about fan Charlie”. Indifference will be discussed in more detail below.
The more familiar a source is with an object of affection, the more knowledge they have about that object. Terms such as approve of, like, adore, love etc., can be used to describe the source’s current opinion of the object. These words are all terms of affection used to describe the depth of love a source has for an object at a particular instant in time.
A subtle but important grammatical point is that when we say “fan Charlie does not like goalie Andrew” it is often taken to mean “fan Charlie dislikes goalie Andrew”. But the phrases mean different things. To say “not like” is to say that the depth of affection Charlie has for Andrew does not justify a “like” determination. For example Charlie may not like Andrew, he may instead adore Andrew. But to say Charlie dislikes Andrew is to say something different. There is another grouping of terms, terms of disaffection, of which “dislike” is one of the terms. These terms are used to describe the depth of hate a source has for an object.
It is of course possible for fan Charlie to have no opinion of goalie Andrew at all as mentioned above. In such a case we say “fan Charlie is indifferent towards goalie Andrew”. Stated differently “Charlie has neither affection nor disaffection for goalie Andrew“.
Let us explore some of the terms mentioned above a little more closely. First off a given depth of love will never be a measurement we can calculate with our rational minds. There is no questionnaire you can fill out or measurement that can be made that will calculate your depth of love for a particular relation. It is not some mathematical equation to solve for and does not involve itemizing lists and assigning scores. It is instead a determination made by the heart and can involve the assessment of complex and conflicting emotions. Something that The Greatest Love, in Their infinite wisdom, allowed our hearts to perform.
The Greatest Love also provided the ability for our hearts to compare our depths of love between two relations. Sometimes this is a trivial task. A conclusion that “I love Deborah more than Edward” is easily made when Deborah is my partner and Edward a distant cousin. But comparing two loves in general exposes another layer of complexity.
That additional layer of complexity comes from the recognition that there are different types of love that confuses the assessment. These types of love have been explored for millennia. The ancient Greeks, for example, had many different words for love as it manifests between individuals, each describing different types and traits. Some of those terms were as follows:
- Eros (romantic love): Named after the Greek god of love, desire, passion and fertility from which the term erotic is derived. The counterpart to Eros in Roman mythology is Cupid. Characterized by romance, passion, and intensity that is not necessarily long-lasting.
- Philia (deep friendship): Often described as “brotherly love” this is the love between close friends who are equals, connected with the mind, and/or have shared hard times. Characterized by mutual respect, shared values, and close bonds. The idea comes from Plato, thus the term “platonic friendships”.
- Storge (familial love): A natural or instinctual affection such as that found between parents and children or even more distant familial relations. Characterized by a sense of belonging and/or the feeling that others depend upon us. It extends beyond familial relations however and can be used to describe our love for our pets, roommates, sports team, community, nation, or even inanimate objects
- Ludus (playful love): Flirtatious. spontaneous, non-committal and playful love. It can mean the affection found in the earliest stages of a relationship but also that found between friends and between children.
- Pragma (dutiful love): The most practical type of love, this type of love is associated with being together for a long time. A love which has endured and matured. Characterized by compassion, commitment, reason and responsibility. Often involves compromises on behalf of both partners as well as patience and tolerance. Can also be found in politics or arranged marriages, as well as mature relationships amongst couples.
- Philautia (self-love): A regard for one’s own happiness or advantage. The Greeks further divided this love into positive and negative: one, the unhealthy version, is the self-obsessed love, and the other is the concept of self-compassion
- Mania (obsessive love): As a type of love, mania is not good and the Greeks understood this. Characterized by intense and often irrational feelings of attachment, possessiveness, and jealousy toward a romantic partner.
- Agape (unconditional love): Characterized by profound selflessness, unconditionality, and sacrifice that transcends and persists regardless of circumstance. In Christian theology agape refers to the covenant love of God for humans, as well as the human reciprocal love for God. I will reuse the term agape love, to describe the love that flows from us to The Greatest Love. However I will use the term Divine Love to describe the love that flows in the opposite direction: from The Greatest Love to us. As we will see in a later post the nature of Divine love including its depth and breadth fundamentally differs from agape love. They are thus, I believe, better served by using different terms in this blog.
Before we conclude that two relationships might be more easily compared if they are of the same type realize that a given relationship may involve components from a variety of types while the boundaries can often times be blurred. A long-term friendship may borrow from Pragma as well as Philia, Whereas if that friend is our partner it may also include elements from Eros and Agape. But not only are the traits different. The histories of the relationship, the thoughts and feelings associated with each are also different. We begin to see that every one of our relationships is unique and defies such neat one-type only classifications. There is enormous complexity in love and making comparisons between two relations can sometimes be fraught with difficulty.
Which brings me to the fifth message. It came in the early stages of the exploration documented in this post. They said:
Your love is sacred
Of all the messages and visions I have received this fifth message has been the most difficult for me. I have struggled with its meaning for several years and where it even fits within the concepts and definitions discussed above. But thankfully it is in the pursuit of such answers that many of my beliefs were formed. I will explore it’s meaning in detail in the next post.
A Love Story 