Love is a four letter word

This is my fourth attempt to write this post. My first attempt was two weeks ago, and so written before the last three posts of mine (and it's what held them up).

I may end up binning this attempt as well, but I'm going to try really hard not to. You see, this is an area so laden with linguistic limits and cultural baggage that actually expressing what I want to convey is almost impossible. There are also other things that make this difficult, but I believe I will come back to those later, so I think I'll just have to accept that this will be flawed, make it as good as I can and post it with the hope it is read sympathetically.

This is also the most exposing, most vulnerable post I have written. My last post, writing freely and candidly about sex was in part me working up to this greater exposition. Is it worth that vulnerability? Writing the other posts here have definately added to my understanding, appreciation and learning so I really need to do this. OK. Deep breath...

I want to write about the most subversive topic I know about. I want to write about love. I want to write about loving Lily, finding that I was in love with Lyra and the difficulty that the word "love" means different things. I hope to be coherent but am not confident that I will be. So, with your indulgence...

There I sat, tired and busy but happy on a Friday luchtime, reading a lovely thank you note from Lyra. I felt happy, peaceful and contented - and something deeper. I probed for what I was feeling, slightly absent mindedly. Then stopped with a shock. The only label that fitted that emotion was love! Oh my, this is a real worry. Think about what that term normally means. Does it mean trouble for what I feel for Lily? Theres plenty of cultural assumptions that if you start loving someone that means love reducing for anyone else. Should I say anything or am I going to scare Lily and freak out Lyra? Damn, what does this mean?

OK, it was time to shelve this and think it through a little more rationally. So I did. I got through the day and I got through a busy weekend of family stuff and let it process a bit. I pretty much had to go back to first principles and work forward from there.

So, why was love the right word? Well there are a lot of different grades of attachment and I prize friendship highly (you get a hell of a lot more acquaintances than friends in my experience) but friendship isn't the right word. It covers the warmth, the affection, the wish to help and support, the concern with how they are doing and so forth. But actually, no it doesn't quite. There's something about the quality of affection that changes with someone for whom there is that powerful erotic charge and who you have shared passions with. An intimacy that has a different quality to it (This also makes sense of the number of lovers who, when our time together passed, have become firm and close friends. There is some pain involved in letting go of the desire and letting the relationship change, but you then have a rich warm friendship that would be a criminal waste to throw away).

Only, wait a second, that's rubbish isn't it. Families share love and that's not about that sort of connection. Hmm, so the word applies to several different things. That's not helpful. I've always been swayed by the argument that language shapes thought as well as vice versa. If you do not have a way of articulating a concept, it is harder to understand and experience. Our labelling from language and cultural norms is powerful and clearly not helping me to understand myself. So, what are the components? A real sense of warmth, affection, really powerful sexual desire and a desire to nurture. Oh, the nurture bit is interesting. It ties into affection and desire, so there's a wish to get to know better, a wish to help grow and also a wish to let her explore her sexuality and kink without any crises or negative experiences. Hmm, that's not even expressed well here, no way I could convey it clearly in conversation.

Then there's Lily. Does this mean I love her any less?

No, it doesn't. Feeling for my emotions for her shows me again just how strong and encompassing they are.

Hmm, re-learn old lesson. There is a cultural message that love is a limited resource, that if you begin to love another it is taken from the love you held for someone else. This seems deeply embedded in our culture. You can see it in the "saving all my love for you" love songs, you can see it in the medias inability to understand polyamory whilst blindly supporting serial monogamy in celebrities.

This is the wrong maths. The more you allow yourself to love, the more you are able to love. This has been true in my experience whether you are talking about how much you love one person, or multiple people.

In this situation, I found myself loving Lily more. How could I do otherwise? We had shared some fantastic experiences that increased our connection and our bond.

Part of the reason I think this felt odd for me is that being open hearted, being able to show real warmth in friendships and relationships, is something that is quite natural for me, but something that I closed off in a welter of bad experience and betrayal a decade ago. This need to shut down emotionally let me survive but poisoned one relationship with real potential and saw me settle into one that was cosy but companionable rather than passionate. A life lived without passion is not living, not for me, no matter how safe and comfortable life becomes.

Lily had taught me that I could love again, but opening this further was actually a little scary, a little painful. Without any conscious plan, Lyra had shown me I could love more than one person. This re-discovery is a very precious gift and one that I will always thank her for.

How she would feel about this remained a concern. Lyra comes across as such a free spirit that I would have hated to convey how I felt for her and make this sound posessive or constraining. But then nor did I want to hide away as some dirty little secret, I wanted to celebrate it but there was still that problem of language.

In the end I did manage to say something about it, the next time we slept together, and much of the feeling was matched by Lyra. We talked about it and hit that language limitation, but did talk about different languages having different terms for love. The next day she discussed the words and definitions of the Greek words for love with a friend with a decent background in classics. and wrote:

As for language, I think the greeks may well be our best bet.. if we take the four words agápe, éros, philía, and storgē in their original meanings then somewhere between éros and philía is probably the right word.


And I proposed Philieros. There, we had our word.

The only problem with this is that it may come without the usual cultural baggage, but it is equally devoid of the emotional weight of the term "Love". Still, its a start.

I appear to be made to love more than one. Interestingly this has also deepened my emotional attachment to close friends. It's left me more engaged in the world, more invested in people. It's a little scary as I'm just guaranteed to get burned a few times, but I wouldn't change it for the world.

Thank you Lyra, my Philieros.