Love, in regards to lifestyle relationships, is vital for healthy relationships. It is the glue, the bond, and the force that holds people together, bonding them into relationships.

However, many people misunderstand love in the lifestyle due to their cultural background. Some believe that love is all about ownership and possession while other thinks that love has no place in a hierarchical relationship. These opinions are biased and both represent extremes. They don’t tell the true story about love and how it bonds different people together.

To understand how love, relationships, and lifestyle are connected and how they influence each other, you need to start from the very beginning. Let’s take a look at the basic explanation of the word ‘love’ in Greek. There are four different explanations for the world ‘love’ – each of them explains meaning of this word in different contexts.

1. Philia: A form of love or fondness among friends.
2. Agape: absolute love, a form of love that can’t be lost or earned.
3. Storge: Familial love, love between family members.
4. Eros: intimate love, sexual passion.

Despite the fact that the Greek language has gone to limits to explain the word ‘love’, English language has failed to give us a comprehensive explanation of the word. Due to this problem, most of us don’t consider the meaning but only the feeling that’s attached with love. This feeling of love is directly taught through movies, television, and stories that we learned in our childhood. It ends up being a confused and a vague idea that people fail to understand and therefore they never realize its importance in their life and their relationships.

When you start participating in the community consistently, you start making new connections. Through those links, you begin to form familial bonds and new friends. These friendships are priceless and a perfect investment for long time. They are the people we meet regularly, have dinners together, and support each other during the hard time. These kinds of relationships come under the Philia. From this stage, rest of our lifestyle relationships are developed.

Sometimes you do have a relation within the family and this is known as a familial tie or Storge. With the time, you have heard more stories about loveless family experiences and childhoods as compare to jolly childhood experiences. This is the stage where we need to work and improve our lifestyles.

The love and devotion of storge and philia is quite easily accepted by the community without any commotion. But when it comes to hierarchical relationships, people are confused and they don’t accept existence of love easily. They believe that they need to have a separate relationship so that they can manifest love through it. They deny existence of love in hierarchical relationships. They have to develop other relationships to find love through sexual and romantic connection.

When it comes to eros, people are as confused as they are in the case of love in hierarchical relationships. They think that since they can’t control the act of ‘falling in love’, they can’t possibly control a situation. As a result, people started believing that Eros makes them weaker. This unbridled and tumultuous passion can actually reduce ability to make sane and wise decisions, especially when it is truly romantic love.

Image courtesy of the Dollar Club