This is part of what my hus­band told me on 10/6.

I prob­a­bly didn’t real­ize it, but he’s been spend­ing a lot of time read­ing about mar­riage. That and pray­ing is what he real­ly spends all his time in his office doing. The books he read talked about the dif­fer­ent kinds of love.

Phi­los – Friend/brother love (about a minute)

Storges – Fam­i­ly love (about a minute)

Agape – God’s love (glossed over it, spent all of 10 sec­onds touch­ing on it.)

Eros – Phys­i­cal attraction/love

As he was read­ing all these books, he real­ized they talk about rekin­dling the fire… but we nev­er had any fire to begin with. How could we rekin­dle some­thing that nev­er exist­ed? Yes, it’s true, after a year of friend­ship (sum­mer 2001), he brushed off any­thing poten­tial­ly hap­pen­ing in the future. And although we both said nei­ther of us want­ed a rela­tion­ship at the time but maybe in the future, he lat­er said his rea­son was because he knew he was not good enough. But appar­ent­ly both of those were lies. In real­i­ty, it was because he had nev­er found me attrac­tive and couldn’t think of a nice way to say it. Yet three years lat­er, he was so over­come by how per­fect I was in every oth­er regard, how he did­n’t ever imag­ine some­one like me could exist, and how my being his wife would fix all his prob­lems, he just had to pro­pose. He thought attrac­tion would come over time, as with some arranged mar­riages he knew of. Any roman­tic over­tures he made while we were engaged were sim­ply because “that’s what engaged guys do,” and mere phys­i­cal respons­es of any male (blue balls includ­ed appar­ent­ly), not because he was actu­al­ly attract­ed to me.

And so because he was nev­er attract­ed to me, and who you’re attract­ed to does not change, there is no hope for us hav­ing a future. None of the oth­er loves mat­ter, if eros is miss­ing. We are des­tined to divorce, whether right now as he wants, or after the kids are grown. But why waste any more of our good years togeth­er, and cause the kids to endure watch­ing the ten­sion grow between us? Ten­sion that inevitably will come because I will sus­pect him of con­tin­ued cheat­ing, which he like­ly will be doing?

Poor man. To have fall­en for the devil’s lies, and about love, of all things? It would be like the dev­il to make him give agape the least atten­tion and eros the most. But I guess it’s not sur­pris­ing, see­ing as how that’s how the major­i­ty of the world views it as well.

It’s actu­al­ly amaz­ing to see how dif­fer­ent Greek words for love are used in the Bible. Love is more nuanced than the Eng­lish lan­guage can account for. All of human­i­ty desires to know and be known, to love and be loved. It’s because we were cre­at­ed in God’s image, and God is love. He cre­at­ed rela­tion­ships for us to expe­ri­ence the full spec­trum of love, but it’s only our rela­tion­ship with Him that will give us the ulti­mate ful­fill­ment we’re all search­ing for – because only He encom­pass­es all love and all rela­tion­ships. Every rela­tion­ship here on earth is meant to teach us of yet anoth­er aspect of Who He is to us – Father, Broth­er, Friend, Hus­band, Lover. Yet we tend to reject Him, and look to some­one else, any­body else some­times… or some oth­er thing, to give us a sense of pur­pose, sig­nif­i­cance, ful­fill­ment… or even just plea­sure… or escape.

Embark­ing on a study of love would eas­i­ly be a person’s life work. But these expla­na­tions of the four Greek words and their use in Scrip­ture is a good start. 

https://www.mcleanbible.org/sites/default/files/Multiply-Resources/Chap3/GreekWordsforLoveWS_Chapter3.pdf

https://www.crosswalk.com/faith/spiritual-life/what-is-love.html

Four Kinds of Love

Love, Love, Love, Love

Lewis on Love