Greek Love

Elspeth Diederix

In (late) honour of Valentine's Day, a meditation on different types of love.

Eros (sexual passion): Of course, our first entry is the one about sex. Most of my romantic relationships have been built on a foundation of sexual attraction; in the end, that attraction hasn't ever been quite enough to carry us over the times when Eros goes missing. When I was younger, sexual passion was a proxy for romantic connection: if he wants to get freaky, it must mean love. (As you can imagine, it has taken a lot to unpack that particular assumption, both in my own brain and in regarding the expectations I put on others.) And while I like and enjoy sex, there have been times, such as during the immediate postpartum and deep stress, when my sex drive is nil. When the times get tough and the sexual passion goes out the window, is there enough genuine affection and connection to maintain a bond?  What of eros then? When the fire of sexual passion banks down, are we left with glowing coals or ashes?

Philia (deep friendship): I met my bestie on Day One at the University of Toronto; we had a whirlwind friendship for a few months, a falling out that lasted another few months, and then a reconciliation that has stuck us together ever since. I met my bestie when a mutual friend connected us so I could help her with a sticky knitting project, and then we discovered that we have the same creative priorities. I met my bestie in the back of a school bus during a school trip to Toronto, and reconnected a few years at a local bar (me, drinking; him, serving). I met my bestie when our kids were in the same class, and I showed up crying at her house the day my marriage ended. I met my bestie in grade nine, and we have the same laugh about the same things. My top-tier, longstanding, deeply textured friendships? My god, my god, how lucky I've been. 

There is overlap between romance and philia, of course: the number of people who say "I'm marrying my best friend" is...a lot. Friendship, deep affection, deep love for the person as they are should be at the core of every relationship, but I don't think it's always there. The opposite of eros is revulsion; the opposite of philia is contempt. One-third of all marriages end in divorce. Make of that what you will.

Philia deserves a longer meditation from me, because it's truly been the through-line of my life. While, in my 20s, I yearned for a romantic partner, my friends were the ones who brought me the best joy. The heaviest griefs in my life have been around friendships gone sour—I mourned those for years, and still sometimes do. I am not downplaying my boyfriends and ex-husband, because those were important and often very good relationships, but my friendships ask different things of me, and deliver different things in return. Friendships don't have the relationship escalator that romance often includes; if you're very close, you might travel together or have a weekly standing coffee date, but most of the time, you're not trying to get to the next stage of friendship; you're just loving and enjoying each other. 

Ludus (playful love): This is the love I feel for my kid when they're being extra sweet at bedtime, and the love I feel for my cat when she plays fetch. This is laughing with my sister about the Connections at 11:47 on a Tuesday night. This is memes all day long. Deeply and meaningfully unserious.

Agape (love for everyone): Every so often, I have an experience that can only be called "being alive on this planet," and it fills me with awe, wonder, and a sense of cosmic connection. It's brought on by highlight-reel events like the solar eclipse or the aurora borealis, sure, but also by particularly beautiful sunsets and seeing fireflies at dusk. It's being in a dark room listening to music, or walking beside a body of water where I can't see the other side. It's the absolutely fed-up cashier taking a breath and saying "how can I help you?" when all she wants to do is hit the break room. It's walking through a gallery and seeing what we make with our hands, or the feeling of cashmere sweater, or listening to my dad laugh in another room. It is the sense that we're all in this together, on this little planet, and we are connected through sound and memory and touch and care. It's not particular, no me and them, just us, all together. It's earthy and sacred, just like we humans. 

Storge (family love): My last name means beloved in Polish. I've sometimes wondered when that was adopted or bestowed—what particular family was like, "Yes, we are beloved, it is who we are." I like being from people, my lineage of family members stretching back over time and space. I like my immediate family very much: the comfortable jumble of shared history, old grudges, half-remembered advice, hand-me-downs, jokes, affection, secrets, and connection. I like being a mother (but I will admit that single parenting is a sensory nightmare). I miss my grandparents and great-aunts and -uncles. I love when I am deemed an honorary auntie. The family bond is a sometimes weird one—would we choose these people? not always—but it has given me a place to learn what love is and what it can do.

Mania (obsessive love): When I met my first serious boyfriend, it was a love song: I had the physical sensation of falling, of electricity in my body, of feeling sick with it. I was not unprepared—I had been waiting to fall in love since my first encounter with Sweet Valley High—but I was not ready for the totalizing physicality of it. I was in love like it was a place. He was more experienced in relationships, and did not feel the same way—he liked me, yes, and we traded "I love you"s—I was into him in a way that was not totally rational. I loved loving him. When we broke up a year later, I was devastated; he moved on quickly. Obsessive love is not romantic; it was like being caught in a trash compactor. Reciprocal? Total insanity. One-sided? One-sided insanity. I don't know what my brain sparked on that made me feel this way—and I haven't felt it since—but that first boyfriend was my heroin and it fucked me up.

Pragma (longstanding love): Pragma obviously shares a source with the word "pragmatic," a matter-of-factness that defines the type of long-term partnership that comes after the fires of eros have burned down a bit. Pragma can feel a bit bloodless, focused more on rational action than emotional connection. But also: what is love, if not an verb? As in: who is picking the restaurant and booking the babysitter? What do you mean, you watched an episode without me? I will take out the trash if you finish the dishes. I got you a Fresca because I know you like it. You're a great partner. I'm proud of how far we've come. I'll drive for a while.

Falling Apart

Charlotte Chauvin

I am falling apart. I mean that physically, of course—there is a list of small complaints, from a touchy calf muscle that has pestered me since the spring, to the inevitable spectre of death that haunts us all—but also mentally and, to some extent, spiritually. 

The physical stuff is both the easiest and the hardest. I am 41 years old, a woman wading into the waters of perimenopause, which could be the cause of many or all or none of my chief concerns. I am fat, which could lead to high blood pressure, diabetes, or cardiovascular disease. Plus, I'm anxious, which means that in my head, I am already dead. My health tends to be where I put most of my existential worry; this is due to several immediate family members having had their own experiences with cancer, and the prevailing sense that none of us are safe from anything, ever. Each twinge and tremor is the big one. I second-guessing myself all the time—my pee smells like popcorn, but only once in a while; do I have diabetes or not? Should I investigate this scaly bit on my boob, or assume it's dry skin because it's January and so arid in my house that the cat and I regularly give each other static-electric shocks? Do I have a DVT, or do my boots just suck? When everything sets the alarms to blare, it becomes mightily hard to parse out the true fires from the regular human-body-nonsense smoke. 

I wish I could go to my doctor and be like, "what should my threshold even be?" but he will give me some line about trusting my gut, or he'll tell me not to worry (as effective a strategy as telling the wind not to howl), or he'll look at the lumps and the scaly bits and go "let's run some tests!" And then I will have to have tests, and wait for test results, and the process of doing that is so outrageously frightening that I might just die anyway of anxiety in the refractory period. If I was a different person, I would not fear the medical test result. I have so far (vigorously knocking on several different woods) avoided most major injuries, illnesses and diseases. My various lumps have all been benign. I know—I know—how lucky I am. And yet the fear remains.

Rationally, I can trace this feeling back to the one-two punch of my dad's brain surgery and my horrorshow of a labour & delivery back in 2015-2016. I know that getting slapped with the real torture of multi-day Big Pain absolutely rattled my relationship with my body. Hell, it took me years before I could exercise again, because breathing hard—like I did in labour—triggered panic attacks. My dad's cancer did the same thing, because sometimes, the lump is a big deal, and it is trying to kill you. Fear of death and fear of suffering walk hand-in-hand in Hieronymus Bosch's garden. 

I will acknowledge that aging does mean that the odds start tipping more towards serious stuff, when it comes to diagnoses, but historically in our house, age hasn't been the indicator it should be. My sister got her two cancer diagnosis before her 35th birthday—in cancer terms, she's considered a youth. So really, it could come for us at any time. And when I say us, I mean me. I have friends who blithely have mammograms and then just...put it out of their minds. This is not how I'm wired at all. I love my friends, but that is absolutely alien to me.

All of this to say: the process of aging, in this body, with this brain? I'm fucking terrible at it! So bad. I am constantly on edge. I'm also afraid of being a burden to the health care system by booking unnecessary appointments. I just braise myself in an oven of misery until I feel insane. 

Okay, so that's the physical stuff. The emotional stuff? Well, did you know that being a single mom is hard? The 1980s sitcoms were correct! I am grumpy as fuck. My kid goes to the city every other weekend, which is not a lot of time to do a full hosedown of my body, spirit, and house. I spend a lot of time nagging, which I fucking hate—I used to be a cool mom, and now I suck.

Really, if I'm being honest, I am still sort of sad about the end of my marriage? My ex moved on in about three months, which, like, fine. I decided to take longer, quite deliberately—I wasn't going to dive into a relationship that replicated all the issues of my marriage just because I don't like to eat dinner alone. I wanted to unpack, I wanted to reset. I wanted to feel like myself again. I like myself! Pretty much! Mostly!

And so I did that, and it was the right choice. But now I teeter—do I start dating again? Now? But I'm still fat and a little sad! I have wretched medical anxiety! I am a tenant, a member of the contract economy, and I sometimes shop at Walmart! Being separated makes me feel like damaged goods, and being a grouchy single mom, doubly so. I know my worth, but I feel like I should be on sale. 

(This doesn't even begin to touch on the sociopolitical grief that many of us, including me, are feeling. The recent Trump election and Elon's Nazi salute and the L.A. wildfires and the Neil Gaiman revelations and the looming sasquatch of Pierre Polievre and all of it are just such a collective head-squeeze. The phrase I can't even is overutilized on the internet, and really, we must even, but goddamn, I am so tired of bad men and climate change.)

My cocktail of medical anxiety—which comes and goes, through my life, but is really flaring up now—plus also feeling like *whisper voice* kind of a loser, plus, you know, the general state of the world, has led to a spiritual wailing. My life isn't hard, really, but it feels gritty—another cloudy day, a hair in my sandwich, late for school again. I'm a person who needs a fair amount of downtime, and my current life doesn't allow for much of that; or at least, not much that doesn't come with the shadow of what I "should be doing" cast over it all. 

And don't get me wrong: I am grateful for my body, even if it's constantly setting off alarm bells. I'm grateful for my kid, who will baldly tell me that I'm no fun in one breath and then leap into my arms with the next. I'm grateful for my work, my house, my family, my genetic legacy, those cloudy days, the walks to school even when we're late. I know I sound snide, or trite, but I truly do feel that way. But the gratitude is twined with feeling sad, and then feeling sad that I feel sad, and so on down the rabbit hole. I can't acknowledge the gratitude without saying: hey, it's been a hard time. I'm feeling rough. We're not doing toxic positivity in 2025, right? 

What this season of my life is teaching me is that I am not in charge. Not really. I can't control my body, or even how my brain reacts; I can only soothe the fretting parts of myself and do my best to get to the point of test results, even when it feels apocalyptic. I can't control my kid; I can only take a deep breath and remind us both that teeth need to be brushed and socks need to be worn. I can't control the weather; I can wear my best coat. And sometimes, my first response, my gut reaction, is small and mean; I can take a second to calibrate, even if that take a bit of energy. All those bit of energy add up, sure; but it's a muscle I'm building, not a battery I'm depleting.

Not being in charge feels like falling apart. It does not feel fun. But note: this is not a cry for help; this is for me to share the inside of my brain, to make it real, to externalize. I'm often scared to spit this poison out, especially because I feel stupid for having swigged it in the first place. This season of my life feels hard, like each fingerhold is being carved out of sheer rock as I reach for it. I hope that it is a mountain that I'm climbing. I hope the view at the top is good. I hope that when I get there, I can exhale.