the season to celebrate love. Every year when Valentine's Day comes around, most of us focus on romantic love. But when you stop to think about it, there are many levels and types of love: I love my husband. I love my sister. I love my dog. I love my career. I love warm nights.
Although I'm using one word to describe my feeling toward all these objects, most people understand what I'm saying: I love my husband as my life and romantic partner; I love my sister, well, "as a sister," (I trust her and share some of my deepest thoughts with her); my dog opens my heart; I enjoy my work, and warm nights make me feel relaxed and happy.
The Greeks had the good sense to break love into four levels: "storge" was kinship, "philia" was friendship, "eros," sexual and romantic love, and finally divine love was known as "agape."
They might interpret the sentence, "I love you but I'm not 'in love' with you" to mean, "I feel philia toward you but not eros."
But while the Greeks gave love four spots in the dictionary, this emotion was feared. Both Plato and Socrates saw this emotion as, “Love is a serious mental disease,” and “Love is a madness.” And it was the Greeks who coined the phrase, "lovesick."
Love makes people do stupid things, dangerous things as well as magnanimus and bold things.
But what is love really? Because people define love differently, a common trap is for couples is to assume they are speaking about the same thing. And because people define love differently, they show it differently and have different expectations of what it should look and feel like. many, if not most, of the problems couples experience is a result of a miscommunicated love or a dashed expectation around love and connection.
Many of us show love in the ways we hope to receive love (the golden rule of doing unto others as you would have others do unto you) but this assumes your partner defines love the same way you. In fact, the couples who come in to see me for therapy have been missing the mark for years. By the time they come to therapy, they have had years of pain and hurtbecause they have made too many assumptions about love:
One wanted physical connection, the other wanted to go on a walk together; one wanted to buy gifts to show affection but the other would rather have had him or her do the dishes, pick up the dry cleaning or even put money into the savings account rather than spend it, because that's their definition of love.