The Four Loves and Why They Matter to Singles

I love love.

This may come as a surprise to some because I am divorced.

However, I am zero percent jaded about love, despite how romantic love panned out for me. You can blame it on my personality type or my heritage or my birth order. Regardless, I love love. I have a deep need to love others and to be loved. I get excited about loving others—my kids, my friends, strangers. Have you ever hugged a perfect stranger?  I have.

To love and to be loved is essential; it is what we were made for and from. God is love and we were made from a creative act of the love of God. The first paragraph of the Catechism says, “God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life. For this reason, at every time and in every place, God draws close to man. He calls man to seek him, to know him, to love him with all his strength.” (CCC n.1)

Of course, biblically speaking, there isn’t just one kind of love.

We just have one word in English, but the Bible uses multiple: Eros, Agape, Storge, and Phileo. Understanding these adds richness and nuance to our everyday lives. In order to really love well, we should understand the subtleties of love. C.S. Lewis helps us with this in his book “The Four Loves.” Let’s break it down:

Eros. 

Lewis called this Romantic Love. This is intimate love that has the underpinnings of procreative urges. It sees beauty in another and leads to an appreciation of beauty itself (if you believe Plato). But this isn’t to be confused with lust or simple sexual urges. Eros is not sex. It may result in intimacy, but it is not interchangeable with it. It wills the good of the other (to borrow from Thomas Aquinas) to such an extent that the lover will actually lay down his life for the beloved. 

Storge. 

Lewis translates this Affection. This affection is tenderness, and often familial love. It’s what makes us go “aaawwwwwww…” when something is so cute. It’s what parents feel when looking at their adorable offspring. Lewis writes, “Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our natural lives.” 

Phileo.

Lewis calls this Friendship. “To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves,” says Lewis, “the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it.” Why is this? Could it be that Friendship is “unnecessary”?

Lewis thought so. He writes, “I have no duty to be anyone’s Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”  It’s this amazingly affectionate regard, usually between equals. This is also the “brotherly love” that wills the good of our fellowman and society.

Agape.

Also called Charity. This is the love of God for mankind and the love of an individual for a good God. It’s unconditional, self-sacrificing, and mature. It is the love of 1 Corinthians 13 that you have no doubt heard at countless weddings. Patient, kind, hoping all things, believing all things, does not fail. God shows us exactly what this looks like in the passion and death of Jesus. 

In some sense Storge, Phileo, and Eros are a training ground, the baby-steps if you will, that hopefully lead us to Agape. That is not to say, however, that we abandon them when we find Agape. Rather, they are enriched and deepened and we see them for what they truly are.

This time of year, Valentine’s Day, everyone is looking for Eros.

The candlelight dinners, chocolates, wine, and flowers. Everyone hopes they will be snuggled up to someone who makes their heart beat faster.

However, I propose that this holiday is far more Phileo and Storge in its ethos than Eros. Now, just hear me out. As the story goes, in the year 269 a priest named Valentine was sentenced to death for defying the emperor and performing Christian weddings in secret, despite an edict outlawing the Sacrament. While in prison the judge asked Fr. Valentine to pray for his daughter who was blind. When she was healed the judge converted to Christianity. Valentine, who had been sentenced to beating, stoning, and decapitation, allegedly wrote a note to the judge’s (formerly) blind daughter, signing it, “From Your Valentine.”

This should lead us to consider not Romantic love this Valentine’s Day, but affectionate love between friends and family. Is that not what we are really missing in our everyday lives? Is it not this affection and tenderness that makes the mundane bearable and the unbearable redeemable?

Yet, it’s a challenge to find, nurture, and grow Phileo in an Eros-soaked world.

Our culture wants to romanticize and sexualize everything—from advertising for fast food and cars to our relationship with our brothers and sisters in the pews. We often struggle to see one another as an occasion of grace because so often we have misused our relationships and sexuality as occasions of sin. But, I believe we can do better, with the help of the Holy Spirit.

The most loving thing we can do, whatever state of life we find ourselves—single and searching, celibate, or married—is to ask for the Holy Spirit’s help in mastering our passions and bringing them under His control. (2 Timothy 2:11-13, Galatians 5:22-26) We can ask for God’s help in growing in our Phileo and Storge. 

Of course, there are those in the Church and in the world (thank you, Harry and Sally) who say that true friendship without sex doesn’t exist—especially between single men and women. To this, C.S. Lewis ahead of his time wrote:

“Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest. Above all, Eros (while it lasts) is necessarily between two only. But two, far from being the necessary number for Friendship, is not even the best.

"And the reason for this is important.… In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets… Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, ‘Here comes one who will augment our loves.’ For in this love ‘to divide is not to take away.” 

Let's reclaim Valentine's Day for friendship.

When we can’t be with family at Thanksgiving we happily have a “Friendsgiving” and give thanks for our friendships. Maybe it is time that Valentine’s Day finds a similar tradition. Maybe in keeping with the true origins and ethos of the holiday, we can gather friends and cultivate the deep affection of Phileo. Because if earthly loves are a stepping stone to Agape, let’s not skip a step and lose our way.