Tom,
Would you say love means the promotion of well-being? Would you say that love in a fuller state is the promotion of well-being and affection?

Makes me wish we had in English the AGAPE, PHILEO, STORGE, EROS distinctions for love that Greek does. We tend to think only in terms of the last three and hardly know the first one. And don’t we tend to conflate the most beautiful AGAPE with the other three?

I wonder if feelings of disaffection sometimes accompany authentic expressions of love? It seems that loving our enemies and the “afflicted” (to use Simone Weil’s term) can sometimes evoke feelings of discomfort, even disgust.

Thanks for the responses!

Curtis - I would say that love always promotes overall well-being.  And I’d say that affection may or may not promote overall well-being.

Jim - I affirm the value of all these Greek love words.  But the definitions given each vary significantly.  I’ve identified almost 20 definitions of agape, for instance, offered by major 20th century theologians. Part of the task for today’s theologian of love is carefully to define what he or she means by each Greek love word.

Andrea - Yes, I think disaffection can sometimes accompany expressions of love. Such disaffection has an emotional element for sure, but it is not the warm and glowing emotions we typically identify with affection and fondness.

Thanks again to all of you!

Good post.  Seems like love is a necessary but insufficient.  Would wisdom or truth be the necessary guide?  (Hense the title of this blog?) Parsing love into its various strands is not enough to understand the place and nature of love.  What does the parsing?  Who does it?  Reminds me of a sermon I preached once entitled, “Why Love is Not Enough”.

When defining and filleting the various aspects of love into its various parts, I continue to come back to the question “how am I able to parley what I think and do about love into helping myself and others become more loving”.  When I keep the simple thought that love is something I do I get a lot of milage from it.  Not very academic, but I this is where I live and touch the lives of others.

I “love” the topic. Two questions for clarification:

Would you say that love always promotes well-being, or always *intends* to promote well-being. Otherwise stated, if we intend well, but have bad judgement (or simply bad luck), is it no longer an expression of love. Perhaps a man helps buy and maintain a car for his wife, intended for good, but inadvertently she gets in an accident while driving.

It stands to reason that love naturally results in action. However, would you say love *always* requires action? Does love require that we have someting to give? Perhaps one with a dreadful illness is no longer capable of taking any meaningful action for themselves, let alone another. Are they then no longer capable of love? Or what about a person who is persecuted for their faith, and as a result is denied any contact with their “loved ones.” I suppose prayer could be a remaining action, but perhaps not even that in the first instance. And with respect to prayer, if a person without faith is denied that, are they thus incapable of love in the absence of the ability to take physical action.

This is a hard one; I agree, basically, that in real life, love should be a verb, that is: put into action. So parents who, for instance, spoil their child into bad behavior, do not love their child in accordance to your definition, but… I would not have the heart to say they don’t love their child… They just haven’t put it into the right action, from our perspective. Maybe they just couldn’t. So as stated by Dennis: is it the action or the intention that counts, that makes it into a loving action ? Is love only measured by the result ?

Of course I agree that affection and fondness are not to be mistaken for love, love is always more, bigger, deeper etc. But can we ever say something worthwhile about the actions and feelings of another person, without being able to look into their hearts ? Can we ever be sure we are talking about the same thing, when talking about love, even ìf we are using a definition as the one given ?

Affection is the humblest love-so wrote C.S. Lewis. Lewis provides the example of the cat and dog enjoying each others company, even though neither would be prepared to admit it! Humility and perhaps even quietness are important within the context of apape. Charity (or love) does not boast, let not your left hand know what your right hand is doing etc.
Kindness is perhaps more superficial than affection. Kindness, according to Lewis ‘cares not whetherits object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes its suffering.’ True Love allevaites suffering and promotes virtue, advanced well-being in other words.

I agree with your belief that love is very different from affection or fondness. Our society over uses the word and the meaning of love far too much, all the way to the point where it is too watered down to carry the same meaning that it was originally intended for. If we look at I Corinthians 13….“love is patient, kind, does not envy, etc- that goes back to the very root of love. If the “love” that we have for something does not display those qualities, then it really isn’t LOVE.

As I was reading this, I kept thinking to myself that both affection and fondness are quite often elements of love. I am glad that you added at the end that they are possibly elements of love. I don’t think that many people realize this and so the term ‘love’ is overused. Because of this overusage, the word often loses it’s true meaning entirely. I know that previous to reading this I was among the people who had perhaps never thought of love as promoting overall well-being. But it makes sense to me. This definition has been lost over time and yet it is a definition that so many people need to hear in order to truly love.

I really like the topic of love as well. This is something that can be so hard for people to grasp and I am one of them. Many people do think love as always a feeling or confuse it for affection, but you can sometimes find that affection, that may be temporary in the wrong ways. We are all looking for something to make us feel good or loved, but we need to really look where true love can be found.

I really enjoyed thinking about these elements as they related to various relationships within my own life. I agree with comments that the term “love” is easily overused, misused, abused, misrepresented, misunderstood, etc., but I wonder how much of that is related to culture, religious convictions, personality of those using the term, and individual life experiences. I would venture to say that there may be something to ascribing individual values to the elements (affection and fondness) based on one’s personal experiences. I would say that I would put substantially more value towards the fondness element for my family over a fondness for the Seattle Mariners. Because each of us experiences (or processes) life differently, I would say that there is something to be said for how we each place value on these elements.

“When we say we love pizza, a puppy, or the Seattle Mariners, we typically have a feeling of fondness in mind. Fondness is an emotion emerging from our sympathetic/empathetic relational response to other objects or ideas.”

In reading this particular portion, I must admit that I do not agree.  Yes, at certain points, I feel sympathy for my car when its tires are low or I feel empathy for my favorite football team when they lose, but to say that I feel either of those emotions for a food would be untrue.  Sure, I am fond of pizza, but have I ever felt bad for it or tried to imagine what it was like in its shoes?  Not that I can ever remember.  I do not believe that this definition of fondness applies to everything.

I agree with the fact that our society has begun to use the word love to mean many things. Unfortunately a second choice to use as a term for fondness, like, has also been degraded. We now use the word as a gap filler and stutter. It would be best for us to reclaim the intentions of the words in our language and to use the words that are there by expanding our vocabulary.

There seems to be so much confusion with the word love, that the primary definition in a particular culture changes as the ideologies of that culture change. It also seems that pop culture has a great impact on the definition of love as well that is conveyed to the larger population through mass media. The problem is then not the fact that there are so many definitions of love, but the fact that affection and fondness seem to be actions that are more and more seen as loving behaviors. It is hard however to preserve a constant definition of love when every culture expresses love in slightly differing ways.

Love is a term that is overused, I find myself overusing it quite a bit actually. The sub-culture of the college campus is a place where I also feel it is grossly overused. I also believe that there is a mental picture of love that completely takes us over. While we may be experiencing feelings of ‘fondness’ or ‘affection’ we allow ourselves to believe we are experience ‘love’ which only widens the gap between the reality and the false comparison within our minds.

I totally agree that fondness and affection do not define love, rather they can be elements of love.  I also think that the phrase “I love you” when used (appropriately) in affectionate situations can be very can be a huge act of love in itself.  It makes me think back to all of the times that I have ever told someone I love them or someone told me that they loved me and I think that simple yet powerful phrase absolutely does promote the overall well-being of mankind.

I think we already have different levels of love in English. The context in which we say I love you or I love that can be understood by others as to how much you really love it or if you’re using it as a passing phrase. How we talk and the context before and after we talk about love tells others what we mean and how much we mean it. Unfortunately when it comes to writing this can be difficult to interrupt. I just don’t know how we could get the rest of the world to join our bandwagon of adding love words to our dictionary. Unless we find someway to have different words for love that are shorter than 4 letters. That’s the only way I could see it catching on.

Affection can be a component of love. To have affection towards the person/persons you love (family) is a component of love. Affection and lust can often be confused. Love is a strong word and can be used in many contexts. My love for hunting is completely different than my love for my fiance`. People in modern society have labeled the word love and in a sense have degrated its worth and power by using it to describe a fondness for a simple pleasure.

I spent some time rereading this posting in the light of a recent experience with the issue of differentiating affection (or rather, expressions of affection) from love. Although I would agree with the idea that there is a significant difference between affection and love, I think that it is really important to consider elements or “expressions of love” in terms of a physical manifestation of love. I wonder, then, if when we” intentionally” express affection for someone (as opposed to “something” such as the Mariners), are we not then expressing a specific type of love?