What we seem to lack is an education. The Greeks, for example, and later the Scholastics, already had a much more sophisticated way to speak of love than we se

What we seem to lack is an education. The Greeks, for example, and later the Scholastics, already had a much more sophisticated way to speak of love than we seem to. As I wrote elsewhere, love can be erotic and agathonic. Within each we can make finer distinctions, and we can speak of various varieties of love depending on the object (love of father vs. love of son; love of wife vs. love of mother). Love is not an emotion, even if emotions accompany various kinds of love. Ultimately, love is a desiring of the good for oneself or for another. We desire the good because it perfects us or because it perfects another. Our cultural understanding of love is often very infantile, and that's on the milder end of the spectrum. The very idea that you would leave your spouse because you've "fallen out of love" is preposterously childish.