Why are traditional wedding ceremonies so popular? They are the stuff of countless books and movie scenes. Could it be because two people are choosing to celebrate with joy the love they have discovered? In attendance are family members and friends they love. There are also invited well-wishers – friends of friends and family. Everyone genuinely hopes that the couple will continue to write a joyful, loving, life-long story of affection, friendship, sexual fidelity, and grace. Weddings have all the best elements of love and joy on full display and help introduce and organize the complex patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving of married couples.
In his book The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis helps us discover the concepts of affection, friendship, erotic love and charity (grace). He organizes these with the Greek word for each – as in each section below. Affection, friendship and erotic love he describes as “human need-love as our vast crying out in its incompleteness, empty (yet cluttered), dangling loose needing to be tied together” humanness. Gift-love is offered unconditionally with grace for the ups and downs, mistakes and hurt that are suffered with all human relationships. Lewis leads us on a journey down the road of discovering and choosing love that will be the essence of all healthy relationships, but for our purposes here; the tale of joyful, married love.
Affection (Storge)
Affection is the broadest of love for things that include people, pets, places or pleasurable memories of the natural world. This is the simplest of love between people and things they appreciate, and with whom/which they find joy. We have multiple loves for things such as sports, certain foods, our dogs, playing with dolls, hiking in the mountains and other memories and connections with which we feel affection.
“… Affection has its own criteria. Its objects have to be familiar. We can sometimes point to the very day and hour when we fell in love or began a new friendship. I doubt if we ever catch affection beginning." (p.42,43)
“Affection besides being a love itself, can enter into the other loves and color them all through and become the very medium in which from day to day they operate." (p. 45).
It is the basis of what some would call a kindred spirit, both literally with family, as well as non-family. It is why we have a need to invite humans and things like the new puppy into our circle of the familiar with affection and attachment. Lewis believes that “affection is responsible for nine tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our natural lives.” (p. 69)
Friendship (Phileo)
Friendship develops when someone we hold with affection enjoys the same people, pets or places we do. We develop a similar world view about allied things. We love the same things and enjoy participating in the same stuff. Companionship and collaboration happen between people who are doing something together from their joyful, affectionate matrix – as friends.
“Friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice. Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travelers. When the two people who thus discover that they are on the same secret road are of different sexes, the friendship which arises between them may pass into erotic love.” (p.85).
“Affection besides being a love itself, can enter into the other loves and color them all through and become the very medium in which from day to day they operate. They would not perhaps wear very well without it. To make a friend is not the same as to become affectionate. But when your friend has become an old friend, all those things about him which had originally nothing to do with the friendship become familiar and dear with familiarity.” (p.45)
When loving affection and friendship start to change and fade; when it is traumatized, forgets or neglects, we need to restore it with fidelity.
“There is no disguising the fact that this means goodness; patience, self-denial, humility, and the continual intervention of a far higher sort of love than affection or friendship, in itself, can ever be. That is the whole point. If we try to live by affection and friendship alone, Affection will 'go bad on us.” (p. 59, 71).
Erotic Love (Eros)
When affection and friendship is combined with physical needs for intimacy the married relationship takes on a special kind of loving spirit. “Eros wants the Beloved. The thing is a sensory pleasure; that is, an event occurring within one's own body. Now Eros makes a man really want; not just any woman, but one particular woman.” (p.120,121)
Commitment to life-long fidelity of affection and friendship is essential to genuine, erotic love.
“It is right to make a promise of life-long fidelity because the event of falling in love is of such a nature that we are right to reject as intolerable the idea that it should be transitory. In one high bound it has overleaped the massive wall of our selfhood; it has made appetite itself altruistic, tossed personal happiness aside as a triviality, and planted the interests of another in the center of our being. Spontaneously and without effort we have fulfilled the law (towards one person) by loving our neighbor as ourselves. It is an image, a foretaste, of what must become to all if Love Himself rules in us without a rival”. (p. 146).
“Affection besides being a love itself, can enter into the other loves and color them all through and become the very medium in which from day to day they operate. They would not perhaps wear very well without it. To make a friend is not the same as to become affectionate. But when your friend has become an old friend, all those things about him which had originally nothing to do with the friendship become familiar and dear with familiarity. As for erotic love, I can imagine nothing more disagreeable than to experience it for more than a short time without this homespun clothing of affection. (p. 45).
Unsustained, corrupted erotic love slides into ruin.
All married couples struggle. Most with cooling intimacy, some after the discovery of serious chaos producing problems like addiction or money scarcity. Others have a day-to-day grind that makes it difficult to maintain affection and friendship with time together, or with extended family and friends, in places they enjoy. As a consequence, erotic love’s unsustained and corrupted “strength, sweetness, and potential can also become a terrifying demon mercilessly chaining together two mutual tormenters, each raw all over with the poison of hate-in-love, each ravenous to receive and implacably refusing to give, jealous, suspicious, resentful, struggling for the upper hand, determined to be free and allow no freedom….” (p. 148)
A failing marriage is losing, or has lost, the ability to provide need-love; affection, friendship and sexual love. Joy is disappearing or gone. Need-love is maintained and regularly restored by choosing to freely give the love that comes from God.
Charity and Grace (Agape)
All these natural need-loves will not be life-long without commitment to the joyful gift-love of humility, charity, and grace when we and others need it. (p. 147, 148).
“Of all arguments against love none makes so strong an appeal to my nature as 'Careful! This might lead you to suffering.' There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.” (p. 154, 155) If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.” (p. 156)
“Again, natural Gift-love is always directed to objects which the lover finds in some way intrinsically lovable-objects to which Affection or Eros or a shared point of view attracts him, or, failing that, to the grateful and the deserving, or perhaps to those whose helplessness is of a winning and appealing kind. But Divine Gift-love in the man [and woman] enables him to love what is not naturally lovable; lepers, criminals, enemies, morons, the sulky, the superior, and the sneering. Finally, by a high paradox, God enables men to have a Gift-love towards Himself.” (p.164).
Sometimes we may feel like we are married to a leper, criminal, enemy, moron; and become sulky, feel superior, and sneer at the opinions and behavior of the one we love. We both need the gift of grace and forgiveness. And perhaps counseling to discover and choose patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving that can restore joyful love to the chaotic lives and increasing dissension of a married couple.
“But God also transforms our Need-love for one another, and it requires equal transformation. In reality we all need at times, some of us at most times, that Charity from others which, being Love Himself in them, loves the unlovable. But this, though a sort of love we need, is not the sort we want. We want to be loved for our cleverness, beauty, generosity, fairness, usefulness”. (p. 168). But we also cry out for the gift of grace.
Conclusion
It is genuinely hoped that both newlyweds and old married couples will continue to write with fidelity a joyful, loving, life-long story of affection, friendship, erotic love, and grace. Nurture both – love we need, and love we freely, unconditionally give – with “a faithful and genuinely self-sacrificing passion [that] will speak to us with what seems the voice of God.” (p. 9)
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1960.
Here is the Amazon Link to the Paperback edition that will permit a more careful look at the citations if you choose.