L is for Love - Blogging from A to Z April Challenge

They say love makes the world go round. It would be so nice if it actually did. With a little more love around we might not have so many of the problems we see everywhere.

However, I'm not about to talk about world issues, I'm going to talk about love and what it means to me.

Love is actually a very imprecise word. In ancient Greek there are four different words for love, where we only have the one. Sometimes only having the one can be most problematic. Hence I'm going to use three of the Ancient Greek terms to divide up my post.

Agape - A deep abiding love

Now this is a hard one to define because it's been grabbed by Christianity to represent to love of God for humankind. It is a deep abiding love that cannot be undone and is the love Christ showed when he sacrificed himself for humans. Plato and his contemporaries used it as the deep love between family members and for a spouse, so that's what I'm going to talk about.

My father has always said, you don't always have to like your relatives, you just have to love them. This is the love he was talking about. I'm very lucky, I do like as well as love most of my family. I think this is the kind of love that comes with time. It grows with familiarity and gives great comfort and stability and I feel very fortunate to have this with my immediate family and my husband.

Eros - passionate love

This is the love usually associated with sexual love, although apparently it does not have to be sexual in nature and can simply mean more than Philia (which is coming next). Thank you wikipedia for that gem of information. Eros involves passion, sensual desire and longing, all of which can easily be equated to sex.

I'm not going to go too deeply into this one, but let's just say, my husband and I are very happily in eros ;).

Philia - affectionate regard

This is the love of friends and is about loyalty. The feelings of community, of deep friendship and standing behind your family are what Philia is about. This is a more generic form of love, not so deep, but still abiding and true. Philia as a dispassionate, virtuous love was developed by Aristotle (thank you again wikipedia).

I would like to think we all have this, but have been unfortunate in my life to meet some people who appear to have no good will towards their fellow humans at all. I believe if we had more of this kind of love, this is what could make the world a happier place. A kind word here, a helping hand there, it's not hard and it builds love between people, which can only be a good thing.

Wow, this post turned out way more serious than I expected :). Thank you very much for reading.

If you would like to see what all of my posts will be about in advance, click here to see my theme post.
My twin and I are also doing the A to Z Challenge over at our fantasy erotica blog: http://fantasyboysxxx.blogspot.co.uk/