What Does "Love" Really Mean?
The Four Loves of C.S. Lewis
We use the word “love” to describe our feelings about a lot of things. I might say I love my mother, pizza, baseball, and my dog, but of course, each of these loves is expressed very differently. Add in the different ways I love my siblings, cousins, best friend, and God, and the breadth of the word is obvious.
But while we use love in a lot of ways, it has always primarily been used to describe human relationships. In fact, many languages other than English use multiple words to describe the many relationships that fall under our one word of “love.” Teasing out the different relationships can help us better understand both those relationships and the people in them.
Fortunately, C.S. Lewis wrote a short book for exactly this purpose. It is titled The Four Loves, and its insights will not just help you understand love better — it will help you love other people better, too…
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“Need-Love” Vs “Gift-Love”
Lewis first distinguishes between two ways to love, both of which are found in all four of the four loves. The first kind, “need-love,” is frequently found in children: they love their parents dearly, in no small part because they depend on their parents to survive.
The second kind, “gift-love,” is found in the lover who says “I would die for you.” This is not a request or a demand, so much as an offer. This expression of love expresses the desire to make a gift of oneself to the beloved rather than asking something of the beloved.
Now it is tempting, as Lewis acknowledges, to think of “need-love” as the “bad/immature kind,” and of “gift-love” as the “good/mature kind.” But Lewis thinks this is a mistake. For one thing, love of God is more frequently, and often more fittingly, the “need-love” rather than the “gift-love.” We need God far more than he needs us, and while it is possible to offer ourselves back to him, such an act is only proper if it is animated by a conscious remembering that it is us who needs him.
Moreover, each of Lewis’s four loves frequently have a combination of the two, and both are needed for a healthy love…
1. Affection
Affection, which Lewis attributes to the Greeks under the word Storge, is the love found between children and parents. Lewis calls it the “humblest love,” because the love we have for our family is not the kind that we brag about.
This is not true for all loves: friendship and romantic love might be bragged about, even without any real vanity. Many people love talking about how in love they are with their spouse, or how their friendship to Joseph is second to none — but few people will do the same for their love for their family. To be sure, they may brag about the people in their family, but rarely about how much they actually love their mother or son.
Affection is also capable of loving even those who are, in all other ways, unlovable. It is far less discerning than other loves. Just think of the common phrase that a face is one that “only a mother could love,” or the joke about “my MOM says I’m good at…” This isn’t a defect of Affection; what is special about it is that it sees the good in every person, even for all their faults, and is not easily destroyed, even by great faults. It is affection that prompts parents to tell their children “no matter what evil you commit, what mistakes you make, I will still love you.”
Need-love and gift-love both feature prominently here, and both are healthy — within reason. It is fitting and right that a child would love their parent in a needy way. And, in a way, parents “need” their children too. But both parents and children also give of themselves to one another; it is what makes family life so powerful.
Of course, affection can be corrupted, too. People take advantage of their parents’ love all the time. But Lewis is also concerned about the way parents can corrupt the gift-love side of affection to be so overbearing that nobody in the family is capable of living their own lives. What begins as a desire to give yourself to others becomes a domination of each member of the family. Neither are good.
Ultimately, however, affection is still vital for everyone. It is the first love that we experience as persons, and one of the ways we most fully love God. To have a healthy relationship of affection, one in which we both need our family and offer ourselves to our family, is part of what it is to be fully alive.
But it is not the only love that we experience; in some ways it might be called the lowest form of love. There are still three more, and missing any of them will ruin both your understanding of love and, so to speak, your love life…