Have you ever finished a book you loved, handed it to a friend and said, “You have to read this,” only for the friend to respond, “It was fine”? That disconnect usually has nothing to do with the quality of the writing. It has everything to do with the type of love that reader was hungry for when they opened the book.
C.S. Lewis understood this principle and used it to write classics that have stood the test of time. Readers who love to read, read for love, but which kind of love the reader craves changes from reader to reader and from day to day.
The English language lacks specificity when it comes to love. I use the same word for my love of baklava, Texas, my wife, my children, and God. To explain the different kinds of love, C.S. Lewis went outside English to Greek, the language of philosophy.
Greek has at least eight different words for love. Lewis pulled out the four most distinct in his book, The Four Loves.
- Storge, the quiet affection for the familiar.
- Philia, the shoulder-to-shoulder bond of a shared mission.
- Eros, the face-to-face fire of romantic passion.
- Agape, the selfless charity that gives without demanding anything in return.
Lewis showed that the three lesser loves each carry their own proper hatred. Each also has its own path to corruption if left unsupervised and unsacrificed to agape, the highest love. Understanding the hatred that corresponds to each love is a powerful tool for propelling your story forward.
For novelists, this framework is your super weapon. Readers who pick up a cozy mystery because they crave storge are different from readers who pick up a romance because they crave eros.
To write a classic, a book that appeals broadly and across time, you must master the multiple loves. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings weaves philia, storge, agape, and even a little eros throughout. That is why it hits different every time you read it.
To discuss these four loves and how to incorporate them into your story, I interviewed Angela Hunt. She has written over 165 books, won multiple awards, written across dozens of genres, and holds a doctorate in biblical studies. She understands both the craft of fiction and the theology around what makes stories resonate with the human heart.
What value is there in an 80-year-old book about love?
Thomas: Is there any value in an 80-year-old book about even older concepts when it comes to love and reading?
Angela: I think so, because we see some of these concepts without recognizing them, and some have fallen out of popularity. Romantic love, eros, is big right now, but I think we’re neglecting philia, that brotherly love, which is at the heart of every cop movie. Lethal Weapon is the prime example. Riggs and Murtaugh start out antagonistic, not understanding each other, and by the end of four or five movies, they’re like family.
Thomas: Philia is the love between brothers, whether physical brothers or brothers in arms. The brotherhood created from the friendship itself.
Storge Love
Lewis starts with storge because it’s where all of us start. It’s the first love you experience when you come into the world.
Storge is one of the most underrepresented loves in fiction, and when life is crazy, when the world is uncertain, people crave it. All the cozy genres are driven by storge love.
Angela: I took my whole family to see The Sheep Detectives. Hugh Jackman plays a shepherd who reads murder mysteries to his sheep every night. Somebody murders him, and the sheep get together to solve the murder. Their blissful, idyllic life, where no sheep is ever sold for meat, has been destroyed. When the shepherd is murdered, they yearn for that life.
The sheep don’t talk to people, but they talk to each other, but they help this bumbling young cop get his act together and point him in all the right directions.
My husband hates movies that make him cry, but I was bawling. Something as simple as a young winter lamb with no friends who was cuddling up with an old ewe just broke me. The little lamb had been missing that affectionate mother love. Storge was on full display when it was restored.
How can storge give emotional stakes to big stories?
Thomas: Storge is most useful for authors as a backdrop for the other loves. Tolkien uses this well in The Lord of the Rings. As the stakes get bigger and the darkness grows, part of what makes it feel bigger emotionally is the hobbits’ constant storge love for the Shire. Frodo is constantly fantasizing about the wonderful food he’s going to eat when he gets back home. It’s what gives emotional stakes to everything else.
Marvel has lost that that storge context in the more recent films. It seems Marvel believes that the only way to ramp up conflict is to make the stakes higher. It’s not just the world at risk; it’s the metaverse, and all the worlds that could ever exist. That doesn’t feel any more critical than the world being at risk, and the world being at risk doesn’t feel more tense than my family being at risk.
Bringing it back to storge gives impact to what’s otherwise just an exciting book.
Don’t underestimate storge love for your romances or your adventure stories. The more violent your book, the more you need storge to give it context.
John Wick is a good example. The plot of an assassin seeking revenge has been done many times. John Wick hits different because all that violence has made a nest of itself in storge. What motivates him is his storge love for his dog, and by extension, his eros love for his wife. His wife gave him the dog, so by destroying the dog, the bad guys destroyed his life.
Angela: A female counterpart is Little Women, which takes place during the Civil War. The dad goes off to fight, and you’ve got the mom and four daughters, each with their own adventures. The whole thing is about the continuity of the family. Are they going to pull through? Are they going to use their wits and their emotional wherewithal to keep it together during the struggle of war? That is very much an example of storge love.
What is storge‘s proper hatred?
Thomas: Every love implies a corresponding hatred. There’s a common misunderstanding that the opposite of love is hate, but it’s not. The opposite of love is indifference.
Love requires you to hate the inverse of your love.
That’s what we see in John Wick. He hates these men who killed his dog with a hatred that can only be born out of love. He doesn’t hate them because he’s an angry person. He encased all of his guns in solid concrete. That was his old life, and he had to resurrect it because of love. The love and the hatred go together.
How do you work storge‘s hatred into a story?
Angela: You have to personify it somehow. I was thinking of The Walking Dead. The characters didn’t hate the zombies because the zombies didn’t have will. They were walking automatons. They hated the humans who tried to take advantage of the situation, who, instead of living by the old rules of morality, tried to enforce new rules.
Every season had a different bad guy, like the Governor with his rules, then Negan with his brutality. The characters hated the humans who were circumventing the rules of the old world.
Thomas: I often talk about Larry Correia’s book about a mother whose child has been kidnapped by vampires. She’s part of a monster hunter family. The baby, who is a child of prophecy, is going to be auctioned off by the vampires to whichever evil entity pays the most. The mom knows she has 48 hours to get her baby back, and she burns down half of Europe to do it.
That energy allows a mom to pull a car off of her child. Her hatred of these vampires is a hatred born out of love.
Of all the loves, storge is the one we all relate to.
How do you work storge into romance?
Thomas: Romance authors often overlook the opportunities that a storge angle offers. The trend in romance is for more eros and less of everything else. I think that’s a missed opportunity because, as Lewis points out, not all kisses between lovers are lovers’ kisses. Eros and storge go together. Sometimes the kiss between a husband and wife is more similar to a kiss between a mother and a child.
Angela: In a romance, you have a couple who meet, but they have obstacles keeping them apart. The end goal is always to create a life with this person, to have them next to you when you wake up in the morning, eating dinner together, just being friends.
I’ve been married 46 years, and there are seasons. There’s that beginning part, and after a while, it settles. All the early elements are still there, but by 46 or 50 years, it’s about friendship and companionship. My spouse is my best friend. The love matures.
Although you might say it’s going down the scale in intensity, it’s not. It’s becoming a more intense storge love. Your world begins to revolve around this other person.
A romance, if it’s going to be honest, will devote some time to the man’s previous family and the woman’s previous family, because they’ll bring elements from the home they grew up in and apply them to the future they’re hoping to establish.
What happens when storge and eros grow old together?
Thomas: The Greeks had their own word for what eros and storge grow into, and they called it pragma. which I believe is where we get the word pragmatic. It’s a long-enduring, practical, committed love, the steady, dutiful affection built over decades of marriage through compromise, shared history, and conscious choice to remain together.
There is almost no fiction that focuses on pragma. Even Lewis didn’t write about it. The only example I can think of is the TV show White Collar, which focuses on a young con artist in all the typical short-term flings, just eros all the time. He’s teaming up with an FBI agent to solve crimes, and the FBI agent is in a pragma, loving relationship with his wife. They have this fruitful, long-enduring, practical love that serves as a foil for the other character’s revolving door of love interests.
You don’t see that on television very often, or in books. This is an opportunity for fiction because I think there’s a longing in a subset of readers for their eros and storge to mature into full pragma.
Falling in love is like jumping into a pool, a metaphor from Lewis. There’s a very different enjoyment of jumping in as opposed to swimming. Swimming requires a different skill set, a different emotional approach, and persistence, because if you don’t keep swimming, you will drown.
Angela: Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series, particularly books eight, nine, and 10 are another example. Jamie and Claire grow into that kind of love. They’re still erotically attracted to each other, but there’s much more of “when are you coming home?” and “how do we get through this problem together?” The love between them is pragmatic, confident, and trusting.
One of the reasons we don’t see much pragma in books is that it takes years to develop, and few books cover a long enough time span. Gabaldon has done it because her books are almost 1,000 pages long, and there are 10 of them. That’s a lot of pages for a marriage to grow old in.
What’s the dark side of storge love?
Thomas: Storge has a dark side, which manifests as this smothering, “I’m loving you because I need to do these things for you.” How could an author work it into their fiction on behalf of a villain?
Angela: It’s a perversion of storge because true affectionate love says, “Yes, I like you, yes, we’re bonded in this way,” but it’s not suffocating. It’s the kind of love that gives freedom. For example, you love your cousins that you see every year at the family reunion, but if you start trying to intrude on their lives or direct and control them, that’s when you get this perverted version.
There have been a lot of thrillers about mothers who refuse to let sons go, bad mothers-in-law, and that sort of thing. That’s why when you get married, you have to leave your parents and become one with your spouse. Not doing that is the distortion of storge.
Thomas: The Grimm fairy tales feature this perversion in the villains quite a bit. Rapunzel is probably the platonic ideal of this storge perversion, where the mother figure has locked the daughter in the tower and doesn’t allow her to escape. Cinderella has the same kind of figure.
In the first versions of the Grimm fairy tales, these were often actual mothers. In the revised versions, the Grimm brothers swapped the mothers for stepmothers to make it more palatable to readers. It was very difficult to read about an actual mother during a famine, sending her children into the woods to starve to death. That’s one of the reminders of Hansel and Gretel, that sometimes famines are so bad, these are the things that happen.
Philia Love
Thomas: The next love is philia. Philadelphia is named after this love, the brotherly love. What is philia?
Angela: Philia is when two people come together. Sometimes a common obstacle brings them together, and they bond to overcome it. Others may band together to find a common enemy. War stories are always about fighting an enemy. Cop buddy movies are always trying to solve the crime.
My current story is a dual-timeline story. I have a man who’s a crocodile expert as the protagonist of one story and a young socialite as the protagonist of the current-day story. They really need to form this shoulder-to-shoulder bond because this island has become infested with Nile crocodiles in the Everglades, and it’s a recipe for disaster.
It’s not enough just for them to fight the crocodiles. They’ve each gone through a time of grief, and they both feel they’ve put God on the shelf along with their purpose for living. They come together over that, talking to each other about whether they’re alone out here, whether anybody’s listening. That bond helps them as they fight the crocodiles.
Thomas: In the ancient world, philia was seen as the highest form of love, higher than eros.
In the modern world, people see eros as the highest. There’s an over-sexualization of all the loves and a misinterpretation of ancient stories where we assume, “These two people loved each other deeply, it must have been eros,” because we don’t realize how philia works. Lewis called philia love the crown of life. It’s the love that says, “You see it too.”
We have a great example in the Bible. Jonathan believed that if God blessed him, he could take on the whole Philistine army, and he did. He attacked the Philistine army, God blessed him with an earthquake, and he and his armor-bearer routed the entire force.
Years later, David demonstrated that same kind of faith when he was fighting the giant. When Jonathan saw David, he said, “You see it too, that our faith is our strongest attribute, and all the political chaos happening around us matters less.” They had a love that David described as closer than between a man and a woman. That was the ancient view.
Later, Paul would say agape is the ultimate expression, but in the ancient world, Greek writers held philia on a very high pedestal.
One genre that does a good job with philia is romance, through the friends-to-lovers trope. There’s a common interest, “You see it too, when we’re trying to solve the crime together.” That common interest grows into eros. That’s the modern formulation, which sees friendship as a lesser love and eros as the ultimate. You grow from friends to lovers because being lovers is better than being friends in the view of modern readers, but that’s not how the ancients would have seen it.
Angela: I’ll never forget reading Anne of Green Gables when Anne meets Diana Barry. They talk, and Anne says, “You are a kindred spirit.” They recognized that in each other. They were girls who thought alike and appreciated the same things, and girls don’t always think alike and appreciate the same things. That’s another literary example, Diana and Anne Shirley, friends forever.
Thomas: Another good example is Project Hail Mary. Part of why it did so well is that audiences are craving pure philia undiluted by eros. The two characters can’t breathe the same air. They’re fundamentally different species. They literally can’t even touch each other. There’s zero eros, but they have that “you see it too” experience. They’re both at the same anomaly, both trying to solve the same puzzle for the same reasons. They’re saying, “This mysterious alien force is threatening my home planet. Oh, it’s threatening yours, too. Let’s work together.”
The whole emotional arc is not a science problem. That would be a boring story. It’s a story of two vastly different people learning to become close friends, so close that it’s the kind of love you would sacrifice your life to preserve. “Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friend.” That’s seen as agape, but it could also be seen as philia at its redeemed version, looking up to agape.
Another book that does this well is Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight series. The Way of Kings features Bridge Four, a group of outcasts, prisoners, and slaves who all suffer together. Through that suffering, they become brothers.
How can novelists incorporate philia love into their stories?
Thomas: Authors are often tempted to take the easy path with a friends-to-lovers story, and there are readers who want that. But there’s so much more to philia than friends-to-lovers. Friendship is its own reward.
Our society is experiencing a loneliness epidemic. People are lonelier than they’ve ever been since we’ve been measuring it. Loneliness will kill you faster than smoking will. I’m not advocating for smoking, but I am advocating for friends. We’ve gotten rid of so many of the mechanisms for making friends as a society, and people are longing for that in their fiction.
If your book can scratch that itch or give somebody courage to go out and make a friend, it could be a life-changing book.
Angela: Cheers was perfect for its time because the loneliness epidemic was just beginning. You had this various group of people who went to this bar, a bartender who was an alcoholic and couldn’t drink, all these unique, disparate characters, and they all bonded and became a surrogate family. Cheers was always the number-one show during its time slot because people identified with it. Its theme song says, “You wanna be where everybody knows your name.”
We’re all searching for that surrogate family, which is storge love again. We don’t want to marry them, we just want to be part of the group.
Maybe we need a series of novels about characters who come together at a beauty parlor or a barber shop. What a series that would make, because you could spin it off into all these different directions.
Thomas: Some of my favorite moments in the Marvel movies were when the superheroes were hanging out at Avengers headquarters, just chatting. In Captain America: Civil War, one of them pours himself a bowl of cereal, and they’re just existing. It was like a family discussing politics over dinner. Those quiet moments are lost in the more modern films.
Good writing is like good music. There are loud moments and quiet moments, and if you want the loud moments to hit, you have to let the quiet moments sit. You can have a quiet storge moment with the hobbits longing for the Shire, or a quiet philia moment that gives contrast.
What happens when philia turns dark?
Thomas: We should talk about the dark side of philia, because it is not goodness itself, as Lewis would say.
All the terms for a group of philia friends from the outside are negative. It’s a clique. It’s exclusionary. Philia expands beyond two people into a small group, but it doesn’t expand infinitely. There are limits. Research shows that 12 people is the limit for a small group, and then there’s Dunbar’s number, which is 150. Aboriginal tribes stay under 150. Roman military units stayed under 150. The typical church is under 150. When these entities get bigger, they often split into two.
For a core group of friends, it’s closer to 12. You can’t have 150 best friends, but you can have 12. Most Americans don’t have five, and some don’t have any. Right now, people think, “I wish I was in a clique.”
If your book can make somebody feel like they’re in a group, there’s a lot of power there.
Philia‘s hatred is betrayal. The traitor who breaks the fellowship or changes sides. Dante put traitors at the very bottom of hell. There’s no one worse than a traitor who violates the bonds of philia.
Angela: Out of Jesus’s 12 disciples, you had the one who turned betrayer.
Thomas: Sanderson has a betrayer as one of the villains in Bridge Four. You hate him far more as a reader than all the other, more evil, more powerful characters in the story. There are gods and dark forces, but you really hate the traitor in Bridge Four, because he broke the bonds of philia.
Angela: My husband and I have been watching MI5, a British series previously called Spooks. Last night, there was a new guy brought in who was working for the terrorists as a double agent. He killed this other girl, and as a viewer, my blood boils.
Another example of philia‘s betrayal is Of Mice and Men. George and Lenny form this bond, and they’re always talking about the little farm they’re going to set up with lots of bunnies. Because something happens in the town and Lenny’s action is misunderstood, a lynch mob comes after him. George commits a mercy killing. Society itself betrayed George and Lenny. Their vision was destroyed because people wouldn’t take the time to understand. Sometimes it’s society itself that turns on the group.
Thomas: Philia is the love that says, “You see it too, therefore we stand together.” It gives moral courage for the small group to stand against the larger group. It’s very hard to stand alone and say, “You’re all wrong.” It’s much easier to say, “We think you’re all wrong,” even if you’re hopelessly outnumbered.
The Lord of the Rings captures this well because at no point do any of the point-of-view characters do anything alone. They’re all on a team. The Fellowship of the Ring is all about philia. They form the fellowship, there’s the betrayal, the restoration, then the shattering.
Of the loves in The Lord of the Rings, philia is the strongest. Part of why it’s so resonant right now is that as the loneliness epidemic has expanded, people’s appreciation for the story has expanded too. Philia is a fierce defense of the shared good. In science fiction, it’s the partnership of minds against the darkness.
Angela: Even facing insurmountable odds, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or Thelma & Louise, who started on this cross-country journey and the more injustice from men they discovered, the more determined they were to resist it.
Eros Love
Thomas: From shoulder-to-shoulder to face-to-face. What is eros love?
Angela: It’s the romantic love where you find your reason for living in another person and surrender all of yourself and expect all of themselves in return.
There are all these variations. Somebody doesn’t commit as fully. You expect 100% sharing, giving, and faithfulness. To mess that up, all you need is one person not fully committed. Then you have the flip side of eros, which is wreck and ruin.
Thomas: One of the interesting distinctions Lewis makes in The Four Loves is that eros is not a required ingredient for marriage. A marriage is a socioeconomic union bound up in eternal concepts of duty, honor, and vows. There have been many virtuous marriages over the millennia held together by other loves, a storge love or even a philia love. While eros is wonderful in a marriage, it can also destroy a marriage.
Of the loves, it’s the most likely to destroy a marriage because eros can redirect one member outside of the marriage.
Eros is also fleeting. Somebody can be feeling eros in one moment and not the next. It’s also tricky, which leads to all the sexual humor across time and cultures. There’s a chaotic, comic nature to eros. The romantic comedy is an ancient form. Most humor doesn’t age well, but Much Ado About Nothing is still funny.
Angela: I think it’s a paradox, because when you love someone, you expect them to give you all of themselves.
If you take all, you’ve killed them, you’ve drained them, and you become their suffocator instead of their liberator. If you’re married to somebody who drains every bit of your energy and control and doesn’t allow you to exist as an independent person, you haven’t become a lover. You’ve become a demon, as Lewis says.
Too much eros is not a good thing.
Thomas: Society needs to rein in eros because if it is unrestrained, it can destroy a society the same way philia can.
Lewis gives the example that aristocrats can have very good philia among themselves, all the courtesy and kindness, but because of their in-group, they wouldn’t sacrifice one cigar to save a whole village of peasants from starving. You need legal institutions to prevent philia from going bad in the hands of the powerful and destroying society. You also need cultural institutions to guide eros. It’s the classic “fire in the fireplace, not fire burning down the house” scenario.
You can explore these four loves in your fiction. Allow your reader to learn about the destructive elements of these loves without having to experience the destruction themselves. It gives your story verisimilitude, a feeling that it’s a true story.
Why does the love between a rock alien and a human man feel real? Because philia is a real love. Even though the rock alien isn’t real and the story didn’t happen, the love is true. You can do the same with eros.
Angela: One of the things I teach about evoking emotion in readers is to paint the scene with things the reader will find familiar.
If I had a breakup scene in a kitchen, I’d describe the photographs with magnets on the refrigerator door, and the growth chart etched into the door frame. In Project Hail Mary, Grace and Rocky do a fist bump. Those things are familiar and common, so the reader is subtly thinking, “That’s just like my friends and me.” When Rocky is willing to sacrifice his life for Grace, we think, “I would do that for my friends.”
When I write a scene, I always try to sprinkle in three or four sensory details, something to see, hear, smell, taste, but you don’t want all of those in every scene. In the same way, we could look at an entire manuscript and ask, “Do I have friendship in here? Do I have familial affection? Do I have a sprinkling of eros?” That makes our characters more understandable and relatable.
What does eros hate?
Thomas: Anything that separates the lovers is what eros hates. I would venture that eros has caused more murders of passion across the centuries. Eros handles separation very differently from philia.
Philia is the love that will cause an army to defeat another army, but historically, armies didn’t do a lot of killing of other armies. Philia doesn’t mind separation much at all. It picks right back up where they left off when friends get back together. You have an old friend, you don’t see him for a couple years, and when you meet again, you pick up as if no time had passed, as long as there’s no betrayal.
It’s like when Gandalf goes off to deal with the Necromancer, the hobbits go on alone, then Gandalf returns and they pick up right where they left off.
Eros does not handle separation nearly as well. It will hate the source of that separation even if it seems good. The wife, who is saying goodbye to her husband going off to war, hates the war. She may have storge toward her nation and philia toward the cause, but she hates the war. Even if she knows the purpose is good, there’s a hatred connected there.
Your characters can have multiple loves pulling them in different directions simultaneously. “My husband must go to war to fight the orcs who could eat my children. I support the war, I love the cause, my husband is my ally, but I hate that the war is separating us.” That’s a complicated, bittersweet emotion.
A character can have philia toward their spouse but be tempted by eros for somebody outside the marriage. They have a moral choice. Do I pursue eros? Do I sacrifice my family on the altar of eros, or do I sacrifice eros on the altar of duty? There’s a lot of interplay you can have here that allows for depth and richness and resonance.
Angela: Always give your characters two choices, but make sure they’re both good options. A choice between bad and good is no choice at all. Have her husband go off to fight the war, and if he doesn’t go, the orcs eat her children. I would vote for the war in that case.
Thomas: If the choice is too simple, you lose the complexity. But not everything has to be complex. There is a longing for good guys and bad guys where you can have a wonderful sense of catharsis when the bad guys are crushed. Let them be evil, and let killing them be good.
How do these four loves impact your story’s longevity?
These four loves are eternal and a core part of the human condition. Agape doesn’t go in and out of fashion, although there may be a particular longing for a certain love at a certain time.
The loneliness epidemic has led to a real longing for books that scratch that itch, but the itch is always there. People have always longed for brotherhood, for companionship, for camaraderie.
Lewis talks about how you can live your whole life without ever experiencing philia or eros. In many ways, they’re optional loves.
But it’s impossible to live without storge. If you don’t get it in the first year of your life, you die. That was a common way of killing babies in the ancient world. They didn’t have abortion, but they had exposure, where they would leave a baby to the elements. Ancient Christians used to go to those places, gather those babies, and care for them. That’s how the very first orphanages were formed.
Agape Love
Thomas: This is a perfect transition into agape. We all agree on the English version of this love, which is charity. I think it’s the most foreign love for every generation. Every generation thinks they’re the first that doesn’t understand charity, but none of the generations understand it. It’s not natural. Walk us through agape.
Angela: Agape is divine love, unconditional love, the purest love. It seeks not itself. It’s not jealous. Just read 1 Corinthians 13. I think we resist it because we think it’s impossible and too much to ask of a human. That’s why it’s the way God loves.
We often interpret unconditional love as “God loves me just the way I am.” And He does when you meet Him, but He also expects you to change as a result of receiving His love.
When you have a newborn, you love them, and you try to meet their every need. When they start to grow, you want to mold them and teach them manners, compassion, and empathy, which are not natural to humans by design.
In the same way, God loves us unconditionally but is also teaching and training us and helping us to change. Forgiveness is part of that love.
Few of us ever master loving the unlovely or even writing about it.
One of my favorite stories is Les Misérables. Jean Valjean steals from the priest after being released from prison with no money. The priest says, “I meant to give them to you. Here.” That agape love so transforms Valjean’s life that he spends the rest of it giving that love to others. When someone extends that kind of love to you, it’s mind-blowing, and it’s a powerful way to show it in a story.
Thomas: Agape is the hardest love to receive because it’s selfless in a way the other loves are not.
Imagine a mother nursing her baby. She’s motivated by storge, but she also benefits from it. If she doesn’t nurse, she experiences physical pain. When she nurses the baby, she’s flooded with oxytocin, and she feels nurturing and virtuous. There’s a back and forth. The baby gets the love, and the mother benefits too.
The giving involved in storge, philia, and eros hints at the higher love of agape.
When fully redeemed, they give glimpses of different aspects of agape. The love in 1 Corinthians 13 is agape. Agape is patient, agape is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, is not self-seeking, is not easily angered, keeps no record of wrongs. Agape does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
How do you work agape into a story in a way that feels real and not cheesy?
Thomas: It’s probably the hardest love to work into fiction where it feels real. You can write a scene where somebody commits an act of agape, but, as the writer, you have to earn it.
The Les Misérables candlestick scene earns it. You really believe that the priest is acting out of agape as he gives these expensive candlesticks to Jean Valjean. How do you work agape into a story in a way that feels real and not cheesy?
Angela: You have to show that characteristic in the character from the beginning.
In Les Misérables, the priest finds Jean Valjean and says, “Come to my house. I understand you’ve had a hard life.” He gives him food, offers him a bed, and lets him sit by the fire. He’s demonstrating his innate goodness. Plus he’s a priest, and the reader knows this is a man who’s given his life to acts of piety.
When Jean Valjean steals the candlesticks and is caught by the police, it seems only logical for a pious priest to say, “I gave them to you, and here, you forgot the other ones too.” You plant the seeds at the beginning. Build the scaffolding that this character does these kinds of things, and the reader accepts it.
Thomas: Frodo walking up the steps of Mount Doom knows it’s a one-way trip. He could take the power for himself, but he’s sacrificing it. Agape is growing in Frodo over the course of the story.
At first, it’s philia and storge since he’s doing this as a favor to his family and Gandalf. As the reality of what he’s doing dawns on him, as the suffering accentuates, as the Shire falls farther into memory, as the darkness closes around him, agape is growing in his heart.
If it had started that way, it wouldn’t have been believable. You see him growing in it, and you see him failing in it, too. He gets to the edge and can’t take it anymore. He claims the ring for himself, triggers the prophecy, and Gollum bites his finger off. Showing him fail actually makes it even more believable.
Angela: In any novel, your character has a hidden need. At the beginning, there’s something he cannot do. Sheriff Brody cannot go out on the water. Scrooge cannot be giving and kind. Through the story, you see the character learning lessons, growing, striving, failing, so that by the end, they’ve earned the resolution, and the hidden need is met.
How do you build up to an agape moment?
Thomas: You get there by growing agape through the other loves.
You can cheat a little with the priest because you rely on massive civilizational, cultural scaffolding. The presumption is that his moral journey happened before the story started.
Without that, you have philia growing to the point where one of the band of brothers is willing to throw himself on a grenade to protect everybody else. It’s that sacrificial act, and you can get there narratively from any of the loves. Eros, storge, or philia could grow into agape. You can show that arc succeeding or failing, telling a tragedy or a comedy.
Few authors even aspire to portray agape because it’s hard. You can have a good story without it, or at least a bestseller. But if you want to write a classic, you’re much more likely to pull it off if you can earn agape. A lot of authors want to start there, and they end up with a cheesy agape scene that doesn’t make sense given where the characters were one page before.
Angela: You have to show it.
I keep thinking about Jaws. In the beginning, Sheriff Brody hates the water and will not go out on it. The first victim is a nameless girl found on the beach. He has no affection for her, none of the four loves. The second victim is a little boy who’s part of his community, he has storge love, and he’s struck by that.
They establish the shark hunt. Then a young man is killed, but Brody’s son is right there. He could have been shark bait, and he ends up traumatized in the hospital. Now it’s affecting his own family unit.
By the end, he’s willing to go out on the boat. In the very last scene, the shark’s coming for him, and he’s putting his life on the line, which is an agape act, to kill the shark and save his family and his whole town.
If a character is going to act sacrificially, you have to build up to the moment.
Can you pull off agape in a romance?
Thomas: Portraying agape is really hard in romance because the ways you would show agape often make the romance tragic, which moves it out of the genre. Eros takes you out of yourself, but you can’t show a romance taking somebody out of themselves and say, “Therefore, it’s agape,” because they’re benefiting from it.
How would you do it?
Angela: The first thing that comes to mind is Sommersby, where a man comes back from the war and he’s the spitting image of this woman’s husband, who was not a nice man. She falls in love with this lookalike, and they have happiness waiting on the shelf.
Then somebody comes to arrest him for something her husband did, and she’s told everybody, “This is my husband.” They take him off and hang him. He willingly surrenders himself so as not to cause her shame and embarrassment. He preserves her reputation and her love but destroys himself in the process.
A romance by definition has a happily-ever-after ending, and that isn’t it.
Thomas: You could work in agape through other characters. Some romances with somebody who has a wasting disease might get to agape, although that’s more likely just storge, a kind of storge that is happy to give and give to somebody who is ailing because storge is self-rewarding.
Angela: In A Tale of Two Cities, you have these men who look alike. He loves the woman, the woman loves somebody else, and that man is in prison and supposed to be hanged the next day. Sydney Carton visits him, changes places, and gives that wonderful speech so the man and the woman who love each other can be together. He sacrifices himself. He doesn’t get the girl, although she does get the man she loves.
Thomas: I saw a scene today on X from some movie. There’s a helicopter full of children trying to evacuate from a brush fire. There’s too much weight, and the helicopter won’t take off. The hero tells the pilot to dump the excess fuel. They’re taking their shoes off and throwing them out, and it’s still not enough.
He goes to the children and says, “I don’t really believe in miracles, but I want you all to pray. I’m going to count to three.” They close their eyes, they pray, and the helicopter starts to take off.
At first, you think it’s a miracle. Then you realize he’s no longer on the plane. He had the children close their eyes so they wouldn’t see him get off. The helicopter lifts, and one of the pilots sees him on the ground surrounded by fire, but they save the children.
Angela: That makes me cry just hearing it. Something about seeing depictions of that kind of love moves people emotionally. It’s so powerful because it’s so rare.
What is the best marketing advice you’ll ever hear?
Thomas: That’s our encouragement: work agape love into your fiction. It’s difficult to do well, and even harder to do without becoming cheesy or sentimental. But when you succeed, you create the moments that bring tears to readers’ eyes. You write the kinds of scenes people can’t stop talking about afterward.
In a sense, this has been a marketing episode all along.
Write books that awaken a longing for the good, the true, and the beautiful. Write stories that inspire readers to cultivate agape in their own hearts. Anyone can write a book focused only on eros. ChatGPT could probably generate one in a few hours. What’s harder is writing characters shaped by multiple kinds of love, by the tensions and conflicts between those loves, and by the painful process of growth. Hardest of all is showing those loves mature into genuine agape.
Good marketing can’t fix a bad book. Write the kind of book worth talking about.
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