The Four Loves: 3. Affection

As it happens I'm hardly in an emotionally fit state to write about this vast and complex topic. This is not got to being particularly heartfelt or well thought out, therefore, but here goes.

Just as friendship can best be thought of as the love of equals, with birds of a feather flocking together and so on, affection can best be thought of as love between those who are not equal. Yes, children and parents are the best example, but I think one could just as easily make a case for children and hamsters, or masters and servants, or doctors (and nurses!) and their patients. This is the love that tugs at the "heart strings". It's the aching, visceral sort of love that one feels when a little boy falls over and grazes his knee, and when large blue eyes well up with tears. But of course it's also the love of giggles and tickles and hugs. And it's the love of someone smaller and weaker than yourself as he falls asleep in your arms.

Now, there are a couple of points that simply have to be made, and they both have to do with men (i.e. "and women"). More specifically, they have to do with the fact that just as friendship is a masculine sort of love, with men being more gregarious than women (from the boardroom to the clubroom - and indeed to the male-only sauna) so affection is thought of traditionally as a female virtue rather than a masculine one. There are, I think, two reasons why this is the case.

My first reason is, I imagine, pretty controversial, and it goes as follows. The four different loves affect different parts of the human body in different ways. To be more specific, three of the four loves affect the human body, with charity not necessarily affecting the body at all. In saying that, I am of course taking it for granted that the soul, wherein the love of the reason and the will that I call charity resides, can (continue to) exist outside of the human brain. If you don't accept such a (very ancient) philosophical premise, then let us say that charity is the love of the head rather than of the heart. The loves of the heart, then, are friendship, which is purely a love the heart, and sexuality, which is a love of, er, "down there"... and affection, which comes between friendship and sex and whose "seat" resides in between the loins and the heart. I think of affection as being chiefly the love of the tummy, in fact. It's the "butterflies in the stomach"-feeling you get when a beautiful eleven-year-old laughs at one of your jokes. It's that silky feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you noticed that a toddler has wandered off near a main road.

Where I'd get even more controversial is in diagnosing women as more prone to these feelings than men due to their different sexual physiology. From Hippocrates to Freud, the notion that women's emotions are affected by their uteruses has certainly been accepted by men, even if women themselves are nowadays less than happy to be thought of as being more prone to emotion. Indeed the modern term 'hysteria', as popularised by Freud, comes from the Greek hystera 'womb'. Whether there is much validity in this psychosomatic theorising, of course, I don't know. But what we do know is that women do like children more than men do, and they do spend a lot more time carrying them around with them (e.g. before they're born). To a certain extent it's more natural for a woman to clasp a child to her tummy than it is for a man to do so. And so on.

Now for my second reason, which is if anything even more controversial! And that is that I think the proximity of the viscera to the pudenda is such that the two sorts of love can frequently overlap and become confused. Or at any rate they can in men, whose visceral capacity to love is often overlooked in favour of his sexual capacity. This confusion is then compounded by society's ever deepening paedophobia and paranoia about sex and children (and reproduction, though that's for another time). Another problem (again, for anoether day) the increasing masculinisation of men. (Should come as news to the sort of American "conservative" who thinks the big problem with the modern world is that we've all gone a bit too girly!) Here of course Freudian psychoanalysis actually hasn't helped at all. Freud's crucial mistake was to think that friendship and affection were outgrowths of sexuality. A good enough theory, except that it was (Ahem!) bollocks. Specifically, it was completely backwards. Friendship, affection and sexuality are all part of a single emotional continuum. But sexuality itself is just one part of a larger human capacity, and that is the human capacity to love.

Examples from literature? Actually there are a couple I can think of off the top of my head. One is of course Lolita - on of very few genuine pedo classics. (I haven't read Death in Venice - quelle horreur! - but I have been told by those who have that in that work the man's interest in the boy is not erotic.) A non-pedo example of what I'm talking about would be in Graham Greene's little book The Heart of the Matter, in which the troubled hero falls in love with a sickly, vulnerable young woman who is young enough to be his dead daughter (as in Death in Venice - or at least the film-version) and then finds himself, without fully realising it, drawn into an adulterous relationship with her. How many men, I wonder, have caught sight of Macauley Culkin's bouncing blond bangs and felt not just natural affection, which is bad enough in today's butch and brutal world, but also inklings of something deeper still - which in today's atmosphere of paedophic paranoia actually frightens and disgusts them? (The fear nowadays amongst men is I think quite genuinely that if you like little boys then you must be a pedo - almost as if giving in to the one emotion will automatically open the floodgates to erections and precum whenever there's a kid in the room.)

For men, then, affection is "woman's love" in much the same way as friendship is a masculine sort of love. Whether sexuality is more masculine or feminine, of course, which arguably boils down to whether men or women are "sexier", I certainly am not qualified to say. The Victorians thought (or like to think) that women were less sexual than men (except of course for those harlots and strumpets who weren't, and so on). But given how immodestly most woman nowadays dress (even when compared to modern men, at least once the sun comes out), I'd be surprised if anyone really contended that nowadays.

Of course, one final point could do with being made once again. It is quite easy to have friendships and affections that are not loving. We do, however, still think of them as being friendships and affections, in much the same way as an excitable schoolboy might say that he "loves" chocolate eclairs, or indeed just as a dirty magazine might talk about "making love" when in fact what it's talking about has nothing to do with marriage, or indeed reproduction, and really consists of little more than a man masturbating inside a woman's vagina. (Languages other the English, which is in a fact an amazingly supple and subtle language, do not even make the distinction between "like" and "love".) The reason for this, quite simply, is that man is what C S Lewis (in his essential work The Screwtape Letters) calls a "hybrid" being. He is part spirit and part animal. It is possible, therefore, for his animal side to have appetites for various things without there being any rational element that directs him towards the wellbeing of that object. A dog likes his Pedigree Chum just as surely as he likes his pedigree chums. But he has no rationality directing him to treat one any better than the other. There is nothing going on his doggy brain more complicated than a series of Pavlovian conditioned responses.

For a love to be fully human, therefore, it needs emotion but it also needs reason. A man who just goes around "having sex" without thinking about it is, I think we can all agree, simply acting like an animal, not a human being. And irrational friendships and irrational affections can wreck a life just as surely as irrational sex can. But I would also stress the opposite point - that there is something not altogether human about pure, cold charity. It's all very well for angels, perhaps. But God Himself took on human flesh in order to love us with a human body. With true humanity comes human flesh and human complexity. For me, friendship, provided it is rational friendship, is deeper and more human than mere charity. (Personally I can't stand "charitable" people. They're snooty and stuck up and insufferable and priggish. Uncharitable people, on the other hand, in my experience tend to be fun to be with and just generally nicer human beings.) And in the same way affection is deeper, fuller and more human than mere friendship.

All of which leaves the deepest, fullest, most human - and most complicated! - form of love still to come!

[Golly! Looking at the time, I just noticed it's taken me an hour and half to write this post. I suppose time flies when you're really concentrating on something.]