Mapping the kinds of loving
exploring the many concepts and words for love
“Simplicities are enormously complex. Consider the sentence 'I love you.'”
— Richard O. Moore, Writing the Silences
Love is notoriously difficult to capture conceptually. Perhaps this free bird should not be caged in language at all. Maybe we do not even need to describe it. Yet naming love can also bring clarity and depth to this profound human experience. In this spirit, here is an attempt to map some of the many kinds of loving that color our lives. Consider it a key to unlocking some of the nuances of affection's endless forms.
Love manifests in countless forms. Some loves differ in style—the actions they inspire or the ways they’re expressed. Others differ in content—who or what they are aimed at. In this post, I’ll map out varieties of love across these dimensions. We’ll explore familial bonds, friendships, romantic partnerships, and more. We’ll uncover loves soft and intense, rational and irrational, lasting and fleeting. Join me in appreciating this diversity. We’re profoundly fortunate to experience so many loves.
Why do we use a single overworked word for such a complex phenomenon? There are so many varieties of love, and I only describe a sample here. I think all humans are capable of experiencing these loves, even if they cannot name them. But expanding our linguistic capacities can allow us to recognize their subtleties. We can describe these loves better, act on them, and avoid closing ourselves off from them.
Disclaimer: All of the non-English words here are untranslatable. To some degree, all words involve valences and subtleties that can’t be translated, but these words are especially tough to transmit across linguistic boundaries. I’m almost certainly missing the full meaning! If you don’t speak the language, you probably won’t get the full meaning. And that’s okay - we can all just know our limits.
Internal and Conceptual Loves
These kinds of loves are focused inwards, or exist in our abstractions and ideas. They are not focused on a specific beloved person, but on wider and more general targets.
❤️ Generic love (in any sense). Can mean any, all, or none of the meanings below, from Latin/Greek unless specified otherwise.
♥️ <Love> as concept: the idea of love itself, viewing it from a meta-level not an object-level. What is <love> conceptually or philosophically? What does it entail?
“‘Love’ is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete.”
— Plato, Symposium, 29.192e.
💚 Philocaly: Platonic love. (From Greek, φιλοκάλη, "love of beauty"). Love in Plato’s own definition — the cultivated capacity to find the higher beauty in everything and everyone. This is the love of beauty, truth, and goodness for their own sake. It allows us to fall in love with the greatness and sublimity of reality itself. A platonic appreciation sees everything virtuous, meaningful, and real in the world around us. This eye for essence elevates people and places to their most ideal states. Unfortunately, in modernity, “platonic love” usually just means non-sexual or non-romantic. Plato would be rolling over in his grave to hear this!
💟 Philautia: self-love. (From Greek, φιλαυτία, "love of oneself"). To love others well, we must also nurture self-love. This is not narcissism, but rather compassionate understanding of one's own needs. It enables us to love freely, without clinging to relationships as crutches. It requires strength, wisdom, and deep empathy to love yourself as you would love a friend you care deeply about. This is the deepest gift one can give oneself: healthy, positive, and empowering.
“Only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of another person—without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other.” — Osho, Seeds of Wisdom
❤️🩹 Wabi-Sabi: Healing love. (From Japanese, "finding beauty in imperfection"). When love brings healing, it embodies this concept—a way of finding beauty in life's imperfections, accepting natural cycles of growth and decay, embracing one's flaws. Love rests here with calm wisdom, anti-fragile and content.
“To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love…When we learn to love and understand ourselves and have true compassion for ourselves, then we can truly love and understand another person.”
— Thich Nhat Hanh, How to Love
💛 Agape: Unconditional love. (From Greek, ἀγάπη, "love that transcends circumstances"). A deep, profound, unselfish, unconditional, and sacrificial love that transcends circumstances, the love of a divine being for their children; charity. This is the main word for Christlike love in the Greek New Testament.
Beyond introspection and contemplation humans experience myriad interpersonal loves — for the other conscious beings, objects, and people in our lives.
Familial and Communal Loves
These kinds of love aim at groups of people — families, communities, tribes, patients.
“Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.” — Elie Wiesel
🧡 Philia: Love between friends. (From Greek, φιλία, "friend”). An affectionate friendship between equals, loyalty to friends, analogous to brotherly/sisterly love but applied towards non-family. This is the love of camaraderie and companionship. It is loyal and supportive, and is founded on shared goodwill, trust, and values. Similar is the Tagalog concept of hyggelig—the open, warm friendship between two people who know each other deeply.
💜 Storge: Familial & communal love. (From Greek, στοργή, “affection” or “tenderness”). This captures the affectionate bond between parents and children, siblings, and even close friends who become like family. Storge is the comforting love of belonging to a tribe, culture, or country. It breeds loyalty and tribe-feeling, or jingoism and tribalism at its worst.
Dépaysement (French): country-sickness, “feeling of being out of one’s country/place,” the sense of missing one's native land when far away. A disorienting change, a pleasant or unpleasant sense of unfamiliarity.
Familismo (Spanish): a strong loyalty to one's family.
💝 Raham: Devotional love. (From Hebrew, רַחֲמִים, "compassion"). Devotional one-way love, love and care given as a gift—like from doctor to patient, caregiver to receiver of care. A mild, merciful, compassionate love full of tender affection.
Romantic Loves
Romance unfurls its own spectrum of experience. It is distinguished by its style, its form (usually exclusive), and by the degree of attention it focuses on the beloved. Romance sings with the madness of obsession, the blinding light of intoxication, or the swan song of partnerships outgrown. Intensity and sensuality often dominates the landscape of romantic passion. Often, romantic love stops there. But it can live beyond beyond the burst of fireworks, maturing into deep, life-defining relationships. Many are stirred by believing this love is fated, drawn by the gravity of destiny. Others emphasize the daily warmth and habitual intimacy of nurturing a close relationship.
The romantic is just a fragment of this vast landscape of love. Our culture fixates on burning romance. Amatornormativity is a word for the near-universal societal assumption that everyone prospers in exclusive romantic relationships. This myopic worldview places them at the pinnacle of a hierarchy of relationships, telling us that our romantic loves are the most important, the only loves that can give meaning to life. Especially in America, we are culturally obsessed with butterfly-filled, passionate, burning-with-intensity kinds of love. When other non-romantic loves arrive, we often overlook them. We can hardly even name them! We rarely appreciate their gifts. But there is so much more to love than dramatic thrills. Beyond the spotlight on fiery romance lives love’s full splendor. May we open our eyes to its full range.
❤️🔥 Eros: sensual love. (From Greek ἔρως, "desire"). Intimate sexual, sensual, physical, erotic passion. Usually focused on the body more than the person.
Kama (From Sanskrit काम, "pleasure"): A Hindu concept of sensory enjoyment, emotional attraction, and aesthetic pleasure. This idea is also used to describe sensory cravings, desires, wishes, longings.
💕 Ludus: Playful love. (From Greek λούδος, "playfulness"). Falling in love with a fluttering heart. In new flings, love often takes on this playful, casual pink flavor—euphoric butterflies, skittish hearts, and frivolous fun. Ludus delights in the chase, euphoria, the flirt, the tease. Yet when this is requited, it becomes the gentle violet of reciprocated enchantment or mutual butterflies.
Forelsket: The overwhelming feeling experienced while falling in love; early honeymoon phase, "new relationship energy.” (From Norwegian).
Gigil: The urge to pinch or squeeze something irresistibly cute. (From Filipino).
Kilig: The sublime rush you experience right after something good happens in love - like kissing someone for the first time. It can also refer to many kinds of romantic excitement, like butterflies and blushing. (From Tagalog).
Chmaltz: Overly sentimental, emotional love, often associated with sappy, romantic gestures. (From Yiddish).
💘El flechazo: Fated love, love at first sight, feeling as if you are "soulmates" or "meant to be," being struck by Cupid's arrow. (Spanish).
Trouvaille: A valuable discovery, lucky find, windfall, serendipity. (French).
Yuanfen: Relationship by fate or destiny. (Chinese, 缘分).
Koi No Yokan: The sudden realization on meeting a person that you are destined to fall in love. There is no implication that the feeling of love exists yet, just that a union is inexorable eventually. (Japanese, 恋の予感).
💗 Mania: Obsessive love, madness from combination of eros and ludus. Often unhealthy, possessive, destructive. (From Greek μανία, “obsessive love,” “frenzy.”)
Ishq (From Arabic عشق, “love or passion”): A passionate and unconditional love that consumes the heart and soul. An irresistible desire to obtain possession of the beloved (ma‘shuq), expressing a deficiency that the lover (‘āshiq) must remedy in order to reach perfection (kamāl).
“To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow - this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.” — Elizabeth Gilbert
❣️ Meraki: Adorned, artistic, and inspiring love filled with soul and creativity, sophisticated and well-expressed through poetry and art. Love as a mutual creative or artistic outlet - being muses for one other. (From Greek μεράκι, “to do something with passion, with absolute devotion, with undivided attention”).
“Love is the quality of attention we pay to things.” — J.D. McClatchy
💓 Lubić: Comfortable, settled, safe, homely love. This love is as simple as quiet moments curled by the fireside. It is sense of psychological safety in a relationship, not as fragile or intense as other forms of romantic love. Lubić's steady ember glows with safe familiarity and comfort—the wool blanket intimacy of entwining lives. (From Polish, "cherish" or "to be fond of").
Cwtch (Welsh): The safe haven given to you by a lover.
Cafuné (Portuguese): Running your fingers through a lover's hair.
Queesting (Dutch): The act of inviting a lover just to cuddle or chat in bed. commonly called “pillow talk” in America.
Amorevolezza (Italian): The quality of being loving or affectionate.
💖 Encantamiento: Enchanted, idealizing love, charmed or even being in love with the idea of the lover and desiring them intensely, often without the feeling being requited. (From Spanish, "enchantment" or "charm").
“Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws.” — Anaïs Nin
💌 Iktsuarpok: Waiting love. The restless anticipation in waiting for someone to come over, the checking to see if the one you adore is outside yet, the anticipation for their call, letter, or text. Generally, packaged, mailed, or written love. (From Inuit ᐃᒃᑦᓱᐊᕐᐳᒃ, “goes outside often to check if someone is coming”).
🫶 Orenda: love against limits; love finds a way. The powerful and determined decision to resist the spiritual energy of fate or the universe for the sake of love, the summoning of internal strength to change fate and love someone against the obstacles life sets before you. Love offered as support and dedication from a distance, across or against space and time. (From Huron)
This word is also the Iroquois/Haudenosaunee concept for the invisible spiritual energy inherent in people and their environment, which pervades in varying degrees in all objects. The living love in all natural things.
“If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.” — Slavoj Žižek
🖤 Kara sevde: “Black,” blind, or endless love (From Turkish, kör aşk, blinding love). The feeling of being lovesick, consumed by passionate, intense, and blinding love. This is not necessarily to the point of insanity or obsession, but it can be. The Persian poet Rūmī wrote about this often, and sometimes glorified or romanticized — “closing our eyes is a step to fall in love.”
La douleur exquise: (From French) the exquisite pain of wanting someone that you know you can never have, knowing you still want to be with them.
“Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws.” — Anaïs Nin
💙 Pragma: Enduring love (From Greek, πρᾶγμα, "matter"). A mature, enduring, realistic, and well-aged love based on mutual understanding, compromise, and shared goals, that has grown into a deep harmony beyond the casual. Growing old together, understanding one another, persevering through hardship. Pragma appreciates the value of partnership above all. It grows roots slowly over time, cultivating a mature garden that survives the weathering of life's storms. The silver resilience of pragma shepherds relationships gently into old age.
“Love is a tenacious adventure. The adventurous side is necessary, but equally so is the need for tenacity…Real love is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world.” — Alain Badiou
Lost loves
What is love? I don’t know, but whatever it is, it’s gonna hurt. This section describes some of the ways love can be lost and concepts for describing these emotions.
“There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love.”
— Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
💔 Desiderium: lost love or heartbreak. (From Latin, “desire” or “longing”). An ardent desire or intense longing for something gone. The beloved experienced as an intensely felt absence. Often accompanied by grief, regret, loss.
Saudade: The haunting desire for something never even experienced — a longing to long for something (From Portuguese). A nostalgic, solitary, melancholic, or lonely love that seeks the feeling of romantic love itself. More generally, a profound nostalgic longing for the absent beloved. The repressed understanding that one might never encounter the object of longing again.
“A love that seeks anything safe and disposable on earth is constantly frustrated, because everything is doomed to die.” — Hannah Arendt
Fernweh: Homesickness for an unknown feeling. (From German, "far-sickness") Feeling homesick for a place you have never been to. This could also be used to describe the feeling of wanting to have felt a kind of love—a second-order desire, feeling “nostalgic” for a love that you have never felt. You It is similar but distinct from heimweh, which means "homesickness.” It is also a term used to describe a strong desire to travel, explore new places, be somewhere new.
“After all, what is happiness? Love, they tell me. But love doesn't bring and never has brought happiness. On the contrary, it's a constant state of anxiety, a battlefield; it's sleepless nights, asking ourselves all the time if we're doing the right thing. Real love is composed of ecstasy and agony.” — Paulo Coelho
Razbliuto: Fallen-out-of-love. (From Anglicized Russian, Разлюбил тебя, "I used to love you, but no longer”) A sentimental feeling you feel towards someone you used to love but no longer do. Comes from the verb razlyubit (разлюбить), which means "to fall out of love.” A nostalgic or bittersweet emotion.
Litost: The hurtful feeling of unexpectedly seeing the person responsible for your heartbreak. (From Czech) Popularized by Czech writer Milan Kundera in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. He described it as "a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery.” Used to express a mixture of grief, remorse, and humiliation. It sounds like the wail of an abandoned dog.
Haan: Resentful but beautiful sorrow (From Korean, Chinese character 恨 for “resentment, hatred, or regret”). The reluctance to give up on an illusion, often one of love. The intense mental struggle to avoid the traumatic loss of identity that comes with the end of a loving relationship. Hope for a lost cause - used to describe a persistent yet unrealistic hope that something will improve.
“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.” ― Anaïs Nin
🤎 Alexithymia: inexpressible love, emotional blindness. (Latin/Greek, λέξιςθῡμός, “inexpressible” or “no-words-for-feelings”): A love we cannot say, where we are unable to identify exact feeling. It is vague or unclear, confusing, hard to understand — we are without a mind or will to speak it. The feelings are smudged together like paints mixed haphazardly on canvas.
L’esprit de escalier (French): the inescapable feeling of leaving a conversation and then remembering or thinking about all the things you should have said.
“An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word ‘love’ — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.”
— Adrienne Rich
🤍 Leucocholy: love as distraction. (Latin) Love of a person for distraction’s sake, casual love, the almost mindless feeling that accompanies preoccupation with trivial and insipid diversions. Originates from a 1742 letter by Thomas Gray, an 18th century poet: “Mine, you are to know, is a white Melancholy, or rather Leucocholy, for the most part; which though it seldom laughs or dances, nor ever amounts to what one calls Joy or Pleasure, yet is a good easy sort of state.”
Cavoli riscaldati (Italian, “reheated cabbage”): the halfhearted, misguided attempt to rekindle or restart a failed relationship.
“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
— Dostoevsky
Are all the pains of love and losing love worth it? That’s for you to say. But perhaps they simply come with the territory. Perhaps the joys are intertwined with suffering. The inability to love seems much worse than the temporary pains of losing it.
Why name love at all?
“We name mostly in order to control, but what is worth loving does not want to be held within the bounds of too narrow a calling. In many ways love has already named us before we can even begin to speak back to it, before we can utter the right words or understand what has happened to us or is continuing to happen to us: an invitation to the most difficult art of all, to love without naming at all.”
— David Whyte, Consolations
We can experience many loves that we cannot define. On the other hand, one can also easily define love and then have troubles experiencing it. We don’t want to fall into the philosopher’s trap of becoming so pompous and lost in abstractions that we cannot allow ourselves to submit to love’s fragile illusion. There is a real risk that over-analyzing love can hurt our ability to feel it. Understanding the first principles can seem both liberating and confining. It’s like knowing how to drive: once you master the car, it’s all smoothed out — you no longer experience the perilous adventure, the misgivings, the false starts, the wrong turns, and the glorious insecurities. Don’t let theory ruin your experience! Don’t yuck your own yum!
Towards New Ways of Loving
In the end, love eludes capture in language. It is a dance that takes a lifetime to learn, always revealing new steps and styles. Perhaps the finest moves are yet to be discovered—creative steps that are yet to be born. We must approach it with beginner's mindset, open, receptive to feeling, and open to experience. Love will not be mastered, dominated, or completely grasped. Its territory surpasses any map. This cross-cultural, cross-linguistic exploration is meant to sketch some points on this territory. These words are arrows that point toward a vast landscape of loving.
A life touched by all of these kinds of love is a profoundly rich and lucky life. Many of these are rare. Some people will have an exceptional depth of experience in a specific kind of love, while others will have exceptional breadth — feeling almost every flavor of loving on a regular basis. I’ve never felt some of the loves I describe here.
Love is also inextricably tied to imaginaries. The forces that kill love are often the same ones that create dead zones in the imagination. For example, instrumentalization is “the refusal of imagination involved in the denial of subjectivity” (Martha Nussbaum). To love someone, we have to engage in the constant imaginative effort of modeling their world and simulating their experience. To build a mutual world with a beloved, we have to imagine our union with them first. At the same time, we cannot replace loving a real, concrete, free human with just idle, wispy imaginings.
Love invites us to imagine new modes of human connection. This can be an act of radical imagination. When we open our minds to possibilities, we can explore uncharted forms of care, vulnerability, and interdependence. This allows us to reconfigure the boundaries of relationships, and reach more authentic ways of engaging one another. Love can expand beyond societally ingrained or culturally expected notions of romance or devotion. We can rewrite stifling relational scripts that stifle or expand cramped ideas of bonding. Relationships are thus a creative act, an experimental studio for crafting loving dynamics that nurture shared humanity, egalitarian reciprocity, mutual fulfillment, and existential completeness.
Humanity is blessed with so many flavors of love. Savor them!
Did you like this post? Let me know by engaging - sharing, subscribing, liking, or commenting! I wrote my undergrad thesis on the philosophy of love, so I have many more thoughts to share here. If you’d like to see more on this topic, express it!
Are you interested in learning more? Feel free to email me at jeremy.hadf@gmail.com and I can send you my interactive graphical map of loves, my more detailed table with a taxonomy of the kinds of love, my 100-page undergrad philosophy thesis, and my 120+ pages of notes, quotes, and sources on the philosophy of love and sexuality.
“Through love we imagine a new way of being…If love is an act of imagination, then intimacy is an act of fruition. It waits for the high to subside so it can patiently insert itself into the relationship.” — Esther Perel
I love the diversity and breadth of thought this represents.
I’m curious about the historical concept of love-anciently when Jesus said “love one another” did his audience understood it remotely the same as we do in modern America?
This is great! “Relationships are a creative act!”