Love and Will

Traditionally, four types of love are named.

1. The first is sex, or what we call desire and libido.
2. The second is eros: love as a drive toward reproduction or creation, which
   the ancient Greeks considered among the highest forms of being and human
   relationship.
3. The third is philia—friendship or brotherly love.
4. The fourth is agape, care for the good of another person.

“Every genuine human experience of love is a mixture, in different
proportions, of all four types.”

We began with sex only because our society begins everything there.

Eros, the deity of the ancients, has departed.

“Gone is the spirit of the life-giving arrows, gone the being who could
breathe life into man and woman, gone the bright festivals of Dionysus, the
incendiary dances and mysteries that stirred initiates more powerfully than
the celebrated drugs of our technical age, gone even the pastoral revels.
Eros has indeed become a playboy, hero of Pepsi-Cola bacchanals.”

Such are the new American gods. In Russia, the gods are ethanol-based instead
of Eros.

For eros means:

“…balancing on a razor's edge, those dizzying swings between anxiety and joy
that are directly connected with shock as an inseparable quality of love.”

And also:

“Love brings both pleasure and suffering.”

Eros, as a higher form of human relationship, includes the daemonic, the
Dionysian, and the mad.

“We fear both our daemonic impulses and our tenderness, which are of course
two sides of the same reality. To feel tenderness and live in harmony with
it, one must face the daemonic. Tenderness and demons seem incompatible, but
when one is repressed, the other disappears with it.”

If the whole essence of a person you love equals one hundred percent, how much
of it seems frightening, dangerous, or rough to you? Would you remove it?

Rilke said: 🌓

“If my devils leave me, I am afraid my angels will fly away as well.”

In a broad reading of the Pareto principle, twenty percent of one thing can
determine eighty percent of another.

“The daemonic and tragic element gives love depth and uniqueness, as in the
music of Mozart.”

Sullivan said:

“We love other people to the extent that we can love ourselves; if we do not
value ourselves, we cannot value or love others.”

Acceptance of the daemonic in oneself also makes it possible to accept the
daemonic in another. Then we do not seek to eradicate it from the other through
projection—a concealed wish to eradicate it within ourselves. This becomes a
condition for the development of genuine eros.

Erich Fromm also said that love begins with love for oneself, referring to
Scripture:

“Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Other elements of love are respect, trust, and communication, followed by care
and knowledge: an active interest in the development and life of the one who is
loved. This is how Fromm described the conditions for love. ❗

Beyond the daemonic, May also emphasized the relationship between eros, time,
and imagination:

“Eros requires time: time to absorb the significance of an event, time for
imagination to begin its work, for anticipation and experience to appear.
That is why a person in love wants to be alone, to wander without focusing on
anything and avoiding business; the lover gives eros time to do its work.
This importance of time is one of the qualities that distinguish eros from
sex.”

➕

And later, in the encounter itself, an eros of unbroken attraction and passion
would be unbearable if it never ceased. Eros therefore cannot exist without
affection—philia, brotherly love, and friendship.

“Affection is relaxation in the presence of the loved person, grounded in
recognizing that person as human. We enjoy being together and resting
together; we like the rhythm of the other's walk, the voice, the whole being.
This gives eros breadth and time to grow, time to set deeper roots.”

All this was written for us by people who lived through and observed it. It can
inspire us to try as well.

All of it:

“…takes us into virgin country, where we step onto unfamiliar and uncertain
ground. The only way out lies ahead, and our choice is either to retreat or
establish ourselves in this new land.

For in every act of love and will, we simultaneously shape ourselves and our
world.

This is what it means to conceive our future. ✈✈✈”