This week, we read The Four Loves, which discusses four types of love: Affection, Friendship, Eros, and Charity.  I found it really interesting to think about how all of these types of love work together and complement each other in a relationship.  For example, you can’t have a romantic relationship solely based off of lust, yet you need more than mere friendship.  The four loves work in harmony with each other.

        In the introduction, Lewis also discussed two larger categories of love: Need-love and Gift-love.  The ideal exemplar of Gift-love would be our Heavenly Father—He gives all He has to us, and is the embodiment of love itself.  There is nothing He stands in need of, but pours out blessings upon us.  We, on the other hand, exemplify Need-love.  There is nothing we can ever do to be able to begin to pay back God, and we do not need to.  Our love is a different kind of love, one of dependence and gratitude, like a child to its mother.  We not only have an innate need for God, but for love from those around us.  Beyond our constant physical needs, we need companionship, empathy, self-assurance, and intellectual stimulation.  We need comfort from those around us, and we need to feel important, we need to fulfill others’ needs in some way.  The list goes on and on, and it’s interesting to see how those four loves all revolve around the needs that innate to human nature.  The way we interact and form meaningful relationships with one another is through meeting one another’s needs.  And through recognizing others’ needs, we begin to learn about Gift-love—though we will never fully exemplify Gift-love in this life, I think we can come closer by learning how God loves us.