Written by Anna Alexiv
The words we use for things are always changing. We love a good label, and there is always someone insisting that what we used to call one thing should now be called another. But love, across decades, centuries, and millennia, in all its many forms, has stayed exactly the same. We see it in films, read about it in books, and crave it in real life. Sometimes it’s hard to spot. But to borrow from one of those very famous, and very on-theme, British films: if you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling you’ll find that love actually is all around.
The Greeks wouldn’t reduce love to a single term. They used eros, philia, storge, agape — wanting, friendship, family feeling, and love given to someone who can’t repay it. Plato was interested mainly in the first. For him eros wasn’t really about the person who provoked it; the attraction was a symptom, and its true object was something permanent behind the person — Beauty itself, which the beloved only happened to be an instance of.
Aristotle found this too abstract to be much use. He kept love particular: it lives between two specific people and nowhere else, and the best kind — chosen, mutual, between people of good character — should be valued above the involuntary kind, because it was chosen by the whole person, not just something that befell them.
For the next thousand years love was measured not by what it is but by where it leads, and it led to God. Augustine described it as a kind of homesickness — “our heart is restless,” he wrote, “until it rests in you” — every smaller desire really a wrong turn on the way home. Aquinas settled on the phrase that still turns up in ordinary conversation: “to love is to will the good of the other.” Less something you feel than something you keep choosing to do.
Then explanations turned inward. Spinoza defined love as a change in the person feeling it rather than a fact about the person felt for: “love is nothing but joy accompanied by the idea of an external cause.”Schopenhauer denied it was personal at all. Behind any romance he saw “the will-to-live of the species,” using two people to reproduce and calling it desire so they’d comply.
Kierkegaard , however, distrusted romantic love for the reverse reason: not that it’s impersonal but that it flatters, a love of yourself wearing someone else’s face. Against it he set the love you’re commanded to give a stranger — love as “a duty,” the one kind that survives the feeling passing. Nietzsche put words to the doubt lurking beneath every one of these: “ultimately it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.”
By the twentieth century the question was no longer what love means but what it requires of you. Erich Fromm called it “an activity, not a passive affect”, not something that happens to you but something you practise, which is why it can be done badly. Simone de Beauvoir, writing against a tradition that asked women to disappear into the people they loved, held that love works only as “reciprocity” — each person staying a full person rather than one becoming the backdrop to the other.
The writer Gloria Watkins (or bell hooks) put the standard in behaviour instead of feeling: “love is as love does.” While French philosopher Alain Badiou, arguing against a culture that wants love with the risk removed, called it “a tenacious adventure” — the work of holding a shared life together over time rather than just at the moment two people meet.
Twenty-four centuries separated Plato and bell hooks.hey would have made no sense to each other, and yet they were unmistakably after the same thing. The words we give love change from person to person and century to century. Our experience of it does not.
As the school year starts, with many of us leaving home for the first time, it can feel harder than usual to find love, of any kind and any definition. Being an international student going into my second year, I still feel at times that not only is home far, but that it’s nine hours ahead, asleep while I’m awake, so that even my longing has to wait its turn. I want to say something in the language I dream in, and there’s no one in the room to say it to. I can’t fully go back, either, not because the plane won’t take me, but because the home I’m aching for is partly made of time, and time doesn’t hold still, however much I want it to. Every time I go home, I find that it has moved an inch without me, and that I’ve moved an inch without it, and that I’ve become, quietly but permanently, a little foreign in both directions.
Other languages knew long ago that this ache had no cure, and named it anyway: the Portuguese saudade, the Welsh hiraeth, the Romanian dor. A longing for something I’m no longer sure existed exactly as I remember it. That it can’t quite be translated might seem daunting. But if the longing itself survives, then so must its source. And its source, the way it always has been, is love.
