Have we, as a culture, forgotten what it means to love? From Netflix dramas to chart-topping music, love is almost always portrayed in one form: romantic, passionate, emotionally intense – eros. But what happens when we train ourselves to recognise only this kind of love? Have we quietly lost the ability not only to see, but to desire, the deeper and more enduring definitions of love that the ancient Greeks and Romans bestowed upon us: agape, philia, storge and caritas?

Scroll through almost any streaming platform, playlist or social media feed and you’ll notice that love is everywhere, but it is almost always the same kind of love: intense, immediate, burning quickly and narrated in heightened emotion. The storyline is always familiar: longing, attraction, heartbreak and reunion. Love, as we are shown it, is overwhelmingly eros: an all-consuming desire.

And when it is not, it is often dismissed. Storylines that depict steadiness are labelled ‘yawnsome’, as I discovered when reading reviews of The Madison, a neo-Western family drama that quietly portrays a marriage built not on volatility, but on friendship and discernment.

The danger here is not simply that we over-romanticise relationships, but that we begin to lose the ability to recognise other forms of love altogether. And when that happens, we may find ourselves less capable of sustaining love in a meaningful sense.

The Christian tradition has always understood love to be layered, expansive and transformative. Alongside eros, there is philia: friendship, loyalty, shared life; storge: familial affection, the quiet endurance of belonging; and there is agape: self-giving love, freely offered, not dependent on feeling or reciprocity. The Church also speaks of caritas: love made concrete in acts of charity, willing the good of the other in action, not merely emotion.

In contemporary culture, however, these distinctions are increasingly blurred. We are trained, by popular culture and the media, to consistently interpret and expect emotional intensity as the highest form of love. If it is not romantically dramatic, it is assumed to be lacking.

Eros, by its nature, is not self-sustaining; it rises and falls. So when a culture elevates it as the primary model of love, it sets people up for disappointment. We begin to expect permanence from what was never designed to remain constant in intensity; and when that intensity fades or changes, we assume something has gone wrong. Enter a culture of no-fault divorce.

In reality, it may be that we were never taught to recognise the forms of love that were meant to carry what eros alone cannot. St Thomas Aquinas famously defined love not as a feeling, but as ‘to will the good of the other’, and Venerable Fulton J Sheen famously described love as ‘a mutual self-giving which ends in self-recovery’.

It is not primarily about feelings, but about desiring another’s flourishing: their holiness, their happiness and their good. This is a far more demanding, and more stable, vision than anything offered by cultural scripts today.

If we cannot recognise anything beyond romance, we may eventually find that even romance itself becomes too thin to bear the weight we place upon it. Today, relationship coaches are seeing a surge of clients who want to learn how to recognise a good partner by retraining their nervous system to stop confusing drama with love. Because much of what is most life-giving actually does not look like a romcom at all.

True friendship, for instance, is built on consistency rather than intensity. It is the relationships that stay and do not require constant emotional performance that demonstrate a love that can withstand silence, disagreement and time. This philia is a form of love our culture often underestimates precisely because it is not easily commodified.

Similarly, storge – the love within families – is often taken for granted until it is absent. It is the lasting love of being known over time, of being shaped not through emotional peaks but through its steady, anchoring presence.

And then at the heart of the Christian vision is agape. It is not reactive or dependent on feeling, but rather deliberate, sacrificial and outward-facing. It is the kind of love that chooses the good of the other even when it is costly, inconvenient or unseen. This is the love Christ embodies, and the love He commands of us.

Reflecting on this, I have become increasingly aware of how easily we default to what feels most emotionally immediate. In my own life – particularly in seasons of growth, healing and re-evaluating what I value – I have had to confront how much of my understanding of love was shaped by cultural narratives rather than deeper formation.

There were moments where I mistook intensity for depth, or emotional highs for stability. And there were quieter forms of love I almost overlooked: friendship, steadiness, even the love of God, which does not always arrive dramatically, but is profoundly constant.

What I have come to realise is that maturity in love often involves learning to remain when the emotional noise and dopamine hits fade; to recognise that what is stable is not stagnant; and to understand that what is not romantic is not therefore lesser.

Christianity refuses to collapse love into sentiment, insisting instead that love is not merely something we fall into, but something we are formed into. It is not only a feeling to be experienced, but a virtue to be lived.

If we are only able to recognise eros, we risk misinterpreting, and failing to recognise, every other form of love we encounter. We may undervalue friendships that sustain us, overlook acts of quiet sacrifice, or struggle to receive divine love itself because it does not conform to the emotional register we have come to expect.

But agape does not compete with eros. It completes it, giving it depth and endurance. Without agape, eros becomes self-referential; without philia, life becomes isolated; without storge, we lose our rootedness; and without caritas, love becomes abstract rather than lived.

A culture that recognises only romantic love does not simply overemphasise romance; it becomes less capable of sustaining love in any form. So the answer is not to reject eros, but to place it within a fuller vision: one that includes friendship, family, sacrifice and charity, and that recognises that love is always meaningful when ordered towards the good of the other.