The Four Loves: Affection
Published on January 19, 2025

When we think or talk about love, it’s easy for our minds to wander to its most grandiose forms: romance, lifelong commitment, family, even self-sacrifice. While these forms are front of mind, the many ways we experience and choose to love contain their own richness.
In The Four Loves, his philosophical treatment of the different types of love, C.S. Lewis relies on Greek terminology to categorize the various ways love occurs in our lives. In this series, I will be walking you through his incredible work. We are deeply influenced by the world around us, that has lost so much awareness of what love truly is. In order to restore what we’ve lost, we can learn from masters like Lewis what it means to love and be loved.
A simple kind of love
Storgē, the first of the loves that Lewis discusses, translates to “affection,” particularly of an instinctual or familial kind. Lewis posits that, in a way, we should think of affection as a universal sort of bond–we could call it empathy, or appreciation, or many other terms.
“Familiarity breeds affection.”
Affection is, in a sense, the most common or familial of loves because it occurs not necessarily by choice, but by “accident” depending on the circumstances in which we find ourselves. We don’t choose to be related to our families, for instance; neither do we select every one of our coworkers or classmates. Still, a certain type of love arises between the people whose lives touch our – familiarity breeds affection, if you will.
A crucial kind of love
While affection seems small, Lewis says this love should not be downplayed. In fact, he says it’s “responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our natural lives.”
Part of why so much of our happiness depends on affection is because it pops up in multiple types of relationships: we feel affection not just in our familial relationships or with those we encounter frequently, but also with our deepest and most intimate relationships. Real affection flows through our daily interactions with our spouses, children, and dearest friends. It helps us both be truly present to someone, enjoy them, and allow them to do the same for and with us.
Lewis writes:
Affection teaches you first to notice people who are ‘there,’ then to bear them, then to smile at them, then to like them, and finally to appreciate them. Are they made for you? Thank God not! They are just themselves, stranger than you thought, and far more valuable than you supposed.
In affection, we are able to appreciate the people in front of us in a way we wouldn’t if we refused to love them in this simple, quiet, almost involuntary way. Through the eyes of affection, we’re able to enjoy the uniqueness of each individual as a facet of God’s creation. Though we’ll always naturally get along better with some people better than others, affection gives us the opportunity to see the best in everyone and offer them the warmth they deserve.
Though we’ll always naturally get along better with some people better than others, affection allows us to see the best in everyone.
Despite its commonality, affection is not indestructible. Rather, we must cultivate affection in all of our relationships by seeking to receive others as they truly are. Affection can be cultivated by spending your lunch break with the coworker that you tend to bypass, not waiting for the next family visit to catch up with your cousin and calling them instead, or learning about one of your spouse’s hobbies and delighting in it with them.
If we neglect affection–or worse, outright reject it–we risk our everyday relationships becoming more characterized by stiffness, distance, and self-centeredness.
A transformative kind of love
When we grow affection, this love helps us let go of our unrealistic expectations, look past our own noses, and simply be with others. With affection in our hearts, all of our relationships become richer: through choosing to simply delight in others, we can find there’s much more happiness in our interactions with others than we thought possible.
I will think of this thank you