The late Oxford don of Chronicles of Narnia fame explores various kinds of love: Affection, Friendship, Eros, and Charity.

There are a number of ways to talk about different kinds of love. One distinction is between “Gift Love” and “Need Love.” Gift Love is the kind of love that impels a father to work hard and save money for his family and even die for them. Need Love is the nurturing kind of love that an overwhelmed child looks for in his mother’s embrace.

John tells us that God is love. It is clear that Gift Love is close to the heart of Love himself. God the Father offers all he is to God the Son, and so does the Son to the Father. Jesus gives all he is to the world. But is the other kind of love, Need Love, part of God? God is Love itself, and he doesn’t lack. We humans on the other hand, are incredibly needy, and we know instinctively we are from the moment we come into the world crying out for physical and emotional support.

It might be tempting to praise Gift Love and criticize Need Love, but the truth is more complex than that. If our yearning for love is simply a needy desire for someone else’s affection and nothing more, then it is dangerous and not love at all. But it would also be wrong to call Need Love simply selfishness. When children look for comfort from a parent or adults seek out a friend for companionship, this is not selfish. We cannot fault anyone for seeking that. It is, after all, not good for man to be alone. Moreover, it is harmful to deny that we have that impulse, and believe we are better off alone.

Another reason why Need Love can’t just be thrown out as corrupt is that it is impossible to talk about our relationship to God without talking about Need Love. The Christian understands all too well that we come to God mostly—almost entirely, perhaps, with Need Love. This is what we display when we ask for forgiveness for the wrong we do and support for the good we set out to do. As we grow in our faith, it becomes increasingly obvious that our existence is extremely needy, asking him to illuminate what is dark, and mend what is broken.

And this condition is not a purely evil one, which is why it is impossible to write off Need Love categorically. God is well aware of our Need Love and invites us to come to him so that he can fulfill it. We see this in Jesus’ encouragement for the weary and burdened to come to him for relief. In a strange paradox, Man comes closest to God as he realizes his neediness. Our recognition and plea for our Need Love to be satisfied is our strongest and most realistic impulse.

Affection is the humblest, most widespread, and least discriminating of loves. It is a nurturing and comforting kind of love that grows up and can almost sneak up on you in the form of familiarity between two parties. The Greek word for Affection, storge (STOR-gay) invokes familial images of parental tenderness toward children, and sometimes vice versa.

It is not strictly a human quality. It is instinctual in some animals, too. We see it between a cat and her mewing litter as she licks them clean and allows them to come close for warmth and milk. There’s both Need Love and Give Love in this arrangement—and the mother not only Gives Love, but her Give Love is its own kind of Need Love.

Affection is also the least persnickety of the loves. It doesn’t just bloom in the company of the romantically enticing (Eros) but can spring up in our relationships with the ugly, idiotic, and abrasive people in this world. Affection is no respecter of class, rank, age, or education level. Where friendship grows as people discover more moments of “You too??”,  affection does not depend on such commonality. It can form between children and the grouchy gardener who regularly comes by to trim the hedges or between a bright university student and a curmudgeonly old woman.

Familiarity is the foundation of affection. In friendship or romantic love, it is not uncommon for people to be able to identify the moment when it all began. The origins of affection are not that clear. We usually become aware of it after it’s already been there for a while.

Affection is distinct from the other forms of love, but it can weave its way into other loves. Affection for an old friend shows up in the aspects of the friendship that had nothing to do with its original formation: those little, incidental things that didn’t define the friendship but in hindsight added a wonderful texture to it. Erotic love abhors the modesty and mundaneness of affectionate love if it lingers too long.

There’s so much to Affection that is commendable. It is humble and unpretentious; it loves the unlovely; it keeps no record of wrong; it rebounds easily after fights; it shows us wonderful things that hide in plain sight. In some ways, this seems like not just a natural love, but Love Himself entering through the humble nooks and crannies of common life.

If you look at the literature of ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans, it becomes evident that Friendship was considered the greatest, deepest expression of human love. We see the same in Shakespeare’s works. In our own time, the importance of friendship is a concession, even a reluctant one. It’s supplemental rather than foundational, filling in any gaps that the spouse and family leave.

How did this happen? Part of the answer lies with the fact that you simply don’t know what you don’t have. Not many people experience true Friendship. 

Another reason is that Friendship is unique from the other loves in its unnaturalness. This is not a criticism. Affection and Eros are much closer to our primitive, biological instincts. Friendships are between individuals who, in order to associate, pull apart from their respective herds. It’s not uncommon for members of the different herds to be suspicious of such ties. It’s in this sense that Friendship is not natural: There’s far more autonomy and volition involved. It precisely the unnatural quality of Friendship that historically has elevated Friendship above other forms of love. Affection and Eros are far more visceral loves. But in Friendship, there’s a tranquil, rational oasis that offers reprieve from that. It is chosen, and it is in the choosing that we sense we are not just moved by our own instinct or the herd’s.

Our understanding of Friendship changed in the modern era with Romanticism, which emphasized a so-called “return to nature.” It exalted instinct. Then suddenly, Friendship, and all that it had going for it (the level-headedness, the rationality, and so on) began to become its undoing. Tears and emotion and sentimentality were elevated to a position of prominence in relationships.

Another important aspect of Friendship that elicits the Romantic’s ire is that there is a level of individualism to it that challenges the collectivist urge. To claim some people are your friends is to claim that others are not. Those who place the collective over Friendship denigrate Friendship.

For these reasons, Friendship has been going through a tough time the past several centuries, but we would do ourselves an inestimable service if we embraced the more ancient take on Friendship.

Eros naturally brings to mind the erotic, and while that might be part of Eros, we are speaking here of romantic love in its fullness. You can have animal pleasure without Eros, just as it’s possible to have Eros without sexual pleasure being a part of the romantic relationship.

We see this distinction made poignantly in George Orwell’s 1984. His hero (if you could call him that) presses the heroine about whether or not she enjoys what they do together sexually. He presses her until she tells him she adores it. “It.” This is significant. The exchange illuminates the difference between a more complex thing like Eros and mere sexual desire: Eros says, “I adore you” whereas sexual desire says, “I adore it.” The object of Eros is a person; it is relational. The object of sexual desire is pleasure. In the same way, “wanting a woman” is a misleading turn of phrase. When a horny man roaming the streets tells himself he “wants a woman,” what he means to say is he wants sexual pleasure and a woman is the instrument through which he can obtain it. He’s after a thing—not a person. Another way to think of the difference is that with mere sexual desire, a man wants a woman, but with Eros, he wants a specific woman. 

In Eros, the desire is for the beloved. Even when Eros is at its ecstatic zenith, it holds pleasure as a secondary perk. In the moment of sexual encounter, one could justifiably ask, “Whose pleasure?” Eros does away with the distinction of Need-Love and Gift-Love, as the line between giving and receiving becomes blurred. In a meaningful sense, to give is to receive and to receive is to give.

There is a lingering prudishness toward sex in modern culture. A laughably supercilious seriousness upholds a centuries-old intuition that the carnal aspect of Eros (“Venus,” we could call it) is dangerous and must be conducted with decorum and solemnity. Eros, it is believed, is somehow most pure when Venus is most subdued. Some theologians of yore worried that if Venus’ role in Eros became much more than perfunctory, the fires of sensory pleasure would spread and destroy.

But this is not the vision extolled in Scripture. Paul recommends singleness where possible, but it is not sex that he worries about pulling people away from single-minded devotion to God, but the ceaseless to-dos that are part and parcel to married life. 

Of course there is a sense in which sex is serious. The union of husband and wife is a shadowy reflection of God’s union with Man. Sex brings with it the possibility of new life and all the responsibilities that caring for that new life entails. It is also an experience with the potential to knit the lives and emotions of two people together. These are deep and important truths, but the grave tone that haunts the act of love like a specter reveals a misplaced seriousness.

It’s not just the prudish Victorians of old who treat Venus too seriously. Some others are serious in their attempts to resurrect ancient Phallic cults. Film and advertising are no exceptions to their serious treatment of sex. Their depictions of sex are sultry, intense, and enthralled—devoid of any levity or playfulness. Psychologists have adamantly instructed us about both the importance and seeming impossibility of sexual fine-tuning.

We are taking Venus too seriously. What our discussions and acts of love-making need more than anything is a good laugh. There is something comic about our situation: We carry within us these lofty, divine Eros passions—and yet this is inextricably tied to our clumsy attempts at expressing them bodily.

We are the butt of a divine joke, and it is for our good. It is far better for us to embrace the joke rather than languish in the wounded pride and self-pity that the slightest jolt or surprise in bed can prick.

In a word, there is a humorous aspect to Venus that modern society misses. The sooner we restore playfulness to the marriage bed, the sooner we will be able to enjoy that aspect of Eros and see sex for what it is: part of a game. And of course, with any game, there are risks and collisions and things that don’t go according to plan. We’ll be better lovers if we can have a sense of humor about it.

Affection, Friendship, and Eros: These are the natural loves that all people have the opportunity to experience in daily life. Each is good, as far as it goes. There is joy to be found in all of these, but they will remain only sweet glimpses—and eventually turn from sweet to sour (and bitter) if they are not connected to a deeper kind of Love. There is a Love that gives meaning to the natural loves. It is because of this Love that we can revel in the other loves in the first place.

We can understand this relationship further if we think about a garden. What separates a garden from mere wilderness is an attentive hand. There’s a part that someone must play in tending a garden, but without warmth and light and rain, all our labor amounts to nothing. In the same way, Friendship, Affection, and Eros are like the rakes and spades and fertilizers we would use to cultivate thriving, loving relationships, but we must recognize the limitations of these tools, that we are the cultivators of gardens—not their progenitors. The true glory of a garden comes forth because of sources descending from the heavens. We are dependent on Something intervening and graciously bringing forth life.

In some sense, the beauty that emerges in a garden—the sights and scents and textures—can’t be credited to even the most skilled gardener. Even the very first gardener, placed in Paradise and walking with God, needed God’s grace to continue bringing forth fruit and flower—how much more so for us who till cursed ground?

We must be careful not to elevate Friendship, Affection, and Eros so high that we forget the Fount from which these blessings flow. They must submit to Charity, the highest of loves, Love Himself, or they have cut themselves off from the Source and will dry up into isolated pools of dejection and resentment. When these good but lesser loves come between us and our humble submission to Love Himself, we will ultimately lose natural and divine loves. It is when these loves are properly ordered that we can affirm, along with Augustine, that our souls were restless until they rested in God.