“The Four Loves” - 3 - Affection
Roots
Greek word storge is “affection, especially of parents to offspring” — Lewis’ Affection has also the “offspring to parents”.
A certain paradox: the parents’ Gift-love Affection is a Need-love — it needs to give. A Gift-love that needs to be needed.
Affection is the broadest love
Affection has fewest qualifiers
Heterogeneity. It can ignore barriers of age, sex, class, education… worlds — even species.
Affection must be familiar
We can always point to […] the hour when we fell in love or began a new friendship. I doubt if we ever catch Affection beginning. To be aware of it is to become aware it has already been going on for some time.
The dog barks at strangers who have never done it any harm and wags its tail for old acquaintances even if they never did it any good.
Affection is the humblest love
Where other loves prideful, Affection is modest (even ashamed).
It usually needs absence or bereavement […], [for Affection to bloom].
Comfortable, quiet. Affection itself would be grotesque, if it were loud and public. Old clothes, childhood trinkets, hometowns.
Though Affection could be mixed with the other Loves.
Affection makes bonds we wouldn’t choose
It’s not primarily an Appreciative love. We choose likeminded Friends and excellent Spouses, and say we were “made for one another”.
We learn to appreciate goodness beyond our own flavour and palate.
The truly wide taste in a library (and so in humanity) is one where we don’t choose our own catalog.
Affection creates this taste, teaching us first to notice, then to endure, then to smile at, and finally appreciate, the people who “happen to be there”.
Made for us? Thank God, no. They are themselves, odder than you could have believed and worth far more than you could have guessed.
Affection can become a demon
Affection may make claim to be pure divine love, due to its humble nature.
Is a lack of Affection why we don’t have “happy homes”? Actually, Affection itself may be the culprit.
Affection’s “unmerited bonds” can be taken for granted
While the other loves are merited, Affection may be assumed/presumed. And to not participate would produce Affection’s intended sense-of-guilt.
- Even if the receiver is intolerable.
- Even if the giver is suffocating.
“If you would be loved, be lovable,” said Ovid. Though the other loves are merited and Affection unmerited, we should not take it for granted.
Affection’s “informality in private” can be taken for granted
So easily rude. That goes both ways:
Who has not been the embarrassed guest at family meals where the [parents] treated their grown-up offspring with an incivility, which, offered to any other young people, would simply have terminated the acquaintance?
Family can so easily (or intentionally) throw out manners their own home. “We’re a happy family. We can say anything to one another. No one minds. We all understand.”
And it’s all done in perfectly clear conscience of Affection, since Affection takes liberties. “If you resent me, it must mean the defect is on you. I am hurt. I am misunderstood.”
Old clothes are one thing; to wear the same shirt till it stank is another. There are proper clothes for a garden party; but the clothes for home must be proper too, in a different way.
Affection has this nature, that (1) to be free to a stranger, and (2) formal at home, are both bad manners. But note the nuance:
The more intimate the occasion, the less the formalisation; but not therefore the need for courtesy.
Actually: the best Affection is subtle and sensitive and deep.
In public a ritual would do [enough to conceal preference]. At home you must have the kind of reality which that ritual represented, or else the deafening triumphs of the greatest egoist present.
To truly “say anything to one another” in private home, is to even break the rules that govern public courtesy. You can tease and hoax and banter, without wishing to wound nor humiliate nor domineer. Truly anything in the right tone and at the right moment (and intention).
Affection can be conservatively jealous
Closely related to its reliability on the “old and familiar”. We don’t want the “old, familiar faces” to become brighter and more beautiful.
Change is a threat to Affection.
Given two identical siblings in their childhood, and one sprouting a new interest: it raises a miserable desertion, comparable to a spouse’s infidelity. Ridiculing threat itself (contemptibly childish, or contemptibly grown-up), then sabotaging. Jealousy so instinctive, so fierce. A change of religious beliefs.
It is the reaction to a desertion, even to robbery.
Someone or something has stolen “our” boy (or girl). He who was one of Us has become one of Them. What right had anybody to do it? He is ours. But once change has thus begun, who knows where it will end? (And we all so happy and comfortable before and doing no harm to no one!)
Affectionate jealousy’s is double-edged
There’s a double-edge to this jealousy. Besides the obvious huff, “this new high-browed humbug”, there’s also a”:
“Supposing—it can’t be, it mustn’t be. But supposing [it’s all real]? Has the deserter entered a world which the rest of us never suspected? But if so, how unfair! Why him [and never opened to] us! [That prodigal]—being shown things that are hidden from their elders?”
Since that’s incredulous and unendurable, jealousy must conclude that it is, in fact, nonsense.
Parents are more comfortable. Their past unknown to their kids, they can claim “it’s just a phase”. “I’ve been there, and through, and I’m well to have left it behind.”
Affection can be wounded in the fall from domestic ethos (gambling, drinking, etc.) — but it is equally possible to break your mother’s heart by rising above your home’s ethos.
… that nationally suicidal type of education which keeps back the promising child because the idlers and dunces might be “hurt” if [the child] were undemocratically moved into a higher class than themselves.
Affection as a toxic Gift-love
“Mrs. Fidget” who “slaved for her family” who must give to and protect her family, even at their expense and growth. Detailed and realistic story. And the family members, being decent and Affectionate, had to oblige.
They did things for her to help her do things for them which they didn’t want done.
The Vicar says Mrs. Fidget is now at rest. Let us hope she is. What’s quite certain is that her family are.
ROFL that’s hilarious
Gift-love Affection must work to abdicate itself
But the proper aim of giving is to put the recipient in a state where he no longer needs our gift.
Children to feed themselves. Students to not need our teaching.
The hour when we can say “They need me no longer” should be our reward.
But the instinct on itself is insufficient. The instinct desires not the good of the object, but the good that it can give to the object. (1) Keep the objects needy, or (2) invent imaginary needs. (I suppose it can operate in converse for the Need-love — to keep the giver needing to give, or to invent imaginary needs for himself. like gma)
Story of Dr. Quartz, a professor, who banished his students after they asserted their independence—the independence which he had laboured to produce.
You can make a pet in Need of you. You can keep it permanently infantile, cut it off from animal well-being, and then compensate it with countless little indulgences—which only you can grant. You are too busy spoiling a dog’s life to spoil theirs.
Toxic Affection is tempting to everyone
We should not be too arrogant to scorn those, nor ignore, Toxic Affection.
“Only happens to the unnatural odd neurotic”—but this is a common universal human condition we have all been tempted by. We don’t solve it to become more adjusted to the world, like a “natural” physical disease solved by medicine. We only know one untainted Man, and he was not the psychologist’s perfect citizen, but accused of “having a devil” and nailed to wood.
“No problem, if you just give-and-take, have common sense and basic deceny!”—Aha! So Affection requires extra ingredients:
- 🧠 Reason — common sense
- ⚖️ Justice — stimulating Affection when it fades, and restraining it when it forgets or defies the art of love
- ❤️ Decency — continual intervention of a far higher sort of love than Affection, in itself, can ever be
Affection becomes a demon
Was Mrs. Fidget unaware? She always knew, that her acts spoiled your evenings. Yet she continues them, so:
- She would not have to face this fact: she was not necessary
- She would qualm the doubts of the quality of her love, proved much more by the labour of her life
- Even deeper: the un-Appreciativeness of the others, ever-wounding remarks on the ever-giving tree: provides the enjoyable guilty pleasure of resentment.
It was of erotic love that the Roman poet said, “I love and hate,” but other kinds of love admit the same mixture. If Affection is made the absolute sovereign of a human life, the seeds will germinate. Love, having become a god, becomes a demon.
🗣️🔥