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prestige. This kind of love is a true love, certainly.

When Paul discusses charitas at length in First Corinthians, Chapter 13, he says that it is selfless and forgiving, humble and mature. It is a true love, in that it is a spiritual and compassionate love. But it is also, ultimately, a spiritual love whose object is not a passionate and amorous sexual relationship, but a humane and universal relationship with all others.

It does not seem to fulfill what most people are thinking of when they say "I love you truly?" Not really. That's something different.

EROS

Eros is the Greek word for erotic love, romantic love. It is also the name for the powerful Greek God of love. In Antigone, Sophocles explains that Eros is irresistible, and controls both man and gods. This is a kind of totalitarian and dangerous love, because it makes us do things we know are wrong. Greek drama is replete with stories in which charitas, storge, philio and agape are all abandoned because of an overwhelming eros. Shakespeare's plays are filled with examples of how eros makes one stupid. Eros turns a man into a murderer and regicide. Eros makes a man kill his most beloved and innocent lover. Eros is dangerous.

Medieval writers, examining this, felt that the only cure for this raging romantic love was marriage, because marriage turned the impetuous eros into the civil and dutiful storge. They saw eros as a kind of illness with symptoms (like not being able to concentrate, feverish thoughts, etc.), and the prognosis was dire.

This is the kind of love that makes Lucentio, in Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, exclaim, "Tranio, I burn, I pine, I perish, Tranio." this kind of romantic and raging love is unwholesome and unsettling. It is imperious and irresistible. And it has become part of what we now think of as "true love." If one believes that one can fall into and out of love, then it is eros that we are talking about. But this is not a "true love" either, for it is fickle and ephemeral. It is passion devoid of compassion. It is ultimately selfish. So what is "true love?"

CONCLUSION

True love is a trope, a meme, a cliche. It is something guys say to get girls into bed. It is something women desire after reading too many romance novels. True love, if we were to be philosophical about it, is the selfless and wholesome love of charitas, but that doesn't apply to a lover, that applies to all others. Instead, though, romantic nonsense has filled our brains so that we think there has to be a kind of

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