You can love your partner, your best friend, and pizza. English uses one word for all three. The Greeks used four, and most of the time when people argue about whether something “counts” as love, they’re arguing because they’re using different Greek words without realizing it.

The four kinds

The ancient Greeks didn’t think of love as one thing. They named four distinct experiences:

  • Eros — passionate love. The butterflies, the chest-ache, the intense attraction to a specific romantic partner. The kind pop songs are about.
  • Philia — deep friendship. The love between people who share values, interests, and mutual respect. The friend you’d call at 3 a.m.
  • Storge — familial love. The natural affection between parents and children, siblings, family. Often the most taken-for-granted.
  • Agape — unconditional, selfless love. Caring about another’s wellbeing without expecting anything back. The hardest to fake and the hardest to sustain.

These aren’t ranks. They’re different emotional experiences that happen to share a single English word. When someone says “I love you but I’m not in love with you,” they’re usually saying philia lives, eros is gone.

Plato’s Symposium: love as an argument

In Plato’s Symposium (around 380 BCE), a group of friends spend a dinner party making competing speeches about love. It’s one of the most influential texts on the subject ever written, partly because Plato refuses to give a single answer:

  • Phaedrus says love is a cosmic force and a moral educator — it inspires us to be our best selves.
  • Pausanias distinguishes Common Love (purely physical) from Heavenly Love (spiritual, educational).
  • Aristophanes tells the soulmate myth: humans were originally whole beings, split in half by the gods, and we spend our lives searching for our other half.
  • Diotima, channeled through Socrates, presents the most influential idea of all — the ladder of love.

The ladder of love

Diotima argues love starts narrow and, if followed honestly, becomes broader:

  1. Physical beauty — attraction to one beautiful body.
  2. All physical beauty — recognizing beauty appears in many forms.
  3. Beautiful souls — being moved by character, not just appearance.
  4. Beautiful knowledge — loving learning and wisdom.
  5. Beauty itself — pure contemplation of the Good.

Translation: mature love isn’t supposed to stay in step one. The intensity of early attraction is supposed to enlarge you — to make you appreciate deeper qualities you couldn’t have seen before. If it just stays at step one and dies when novelty fades, something has gone wrong.

This is one of the oldest arguments against the idea that love is just a feeling that finds you. It’s also an argument against the modern fantasy that you can stay in the new-relationship-energy phase forever.

Why this still matters

Next time you’re confused about what you feel for someone, the four-word distinction is genuinely useful. “Do I love them?” is a hard question. “Which kind?” is often easier. The hard cases — close friend you might be falling for, ex you still care about, family member who hurt you — usually become clearer when you notice you’re feeling more than one of these at once, sometimes in contradiction.

The Greeks didn’t think this was a problem to solve. They thought it was just how love actually works.