Mikayla Leskey | Arts & Entertainment Editor
In today’s society, there’s huge pressure to fall in love and get married, but those two terms aren’t always synonymous. We only have two terms for love: ' romantic’ and ‘platonic,’ yet those lines are constantly being blurred, though almost everyone seems to think they have an idea of what love is.
There are over 100 million love songs and countless romcoms and romance books. Most of all, there’s always someone telling you who and how you should love. Love in itself has slowly turned gendered through the years, about who can and can’t show love, or how to show it. How can we be expected to know what love is when Ancient Greece had eight terms for it?
It ranged from obsessive love to familial love to sexual love. Although we can’t be certain how many of these terms Ancient Greeks used on a day-to-day basis they still had them.
Eros
Named after the Greek God of desire, Eros is the word for romantic, passionate, and sexual love. It’s what best defines our current concept of romantic love. It was considered to be dangerous and powerful, guided by lust and infatuation. It’s the kind of love that makes you let go of your boundaries.
Ludus
Ludus is most often associated with puppy love. It’s meant to be playful and affectionate, the ‘honeymoon phase’ some may say. It’s that fresh excitement of getting to know someone new or dancing with a stranger in the middle of a party. Ludus can also be found between friends and children. It’s the type of love that makes you feel young and free again.
Pragma
Pragma is for longstanding love. The type of love meant for committed relationships. It’s about staying in love just as much as it is falling in love. It involves both sides of the relationship, to put the relationship first. Patience and compromise are the essential elements of this type of love.
Storge
Storge is all about familial love. It’s the kind of love between parents and children, it’s a fondness that’s most often correlated with kinship. It can also be found between siblings or old friends, it’s that feeling of safety and security. It’s not always perfect and often can be asymmetrical as family love usually is. But it is the type of love that’s unconditional.
Philautia
Philautia is about loving yourself. It’s for you to take care of yourself and be aware of your own mental well-being. It’s a reminder to practice self-care. The Greeks believed that loving yourself meant you had a better ability to love everyone else too. But be aware as Philautia always warns against narcissism, too much self-love can lead to selfishness and self-obsession.
Philia
Philia is the love that represents friends. Often recognized as deep friendship, and can be as important as romantic love, or Eros. It’s the kind of love shared between equals who have goodwill towards each other. It’s loyalty and companionship. It goes hand in hand with Eros. Eros is the sexual, wild kind of love, and Philia is the loyal, emotional kind of love.
Agape
Agape is selfless love. It’s the love you have for the entire world. Most often recognized as a spiritual kind of love, it’s supposed to be unconditional. It’s the type of love that teaches us to accept, forgive, and trust others. It’s the one that proves empathy. It gives without any expectations of receiving.
Mania
Mania is what happens when Eros becomes unbalanced. It’s jealousy and obsession, oftentimes leading to codependency. That feeling of “I can fix them.” It’s toxic, the belief you know what’s best for someone else without thought to their emotions or well-being.
With all of these terms of love, there’s still the question of if this is these terms fully define what love is. Love is different for everybody, nobody really experiences it the same way. From when we are kids we’re constantly told the love story between our parents or our guardians, or we search fairytales for this love story, watching it and wondering what our own will be like.
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