English has one word for love. You use it for your spouse, your pizza, your dog, and your favorite hoodie. This is insane.

The Greeks had six. Not because they were more romantic, but because they understood that "love" is actually several completely different neurochemical events that we've lazily collapsed into one word. And this linguistic poverty is actively destroying your relationships.

The Six Loves

Eros — Sexual passion. The thunderbolt. Dopamine-soaked obsession that makes you stupid and reckless. You can't stop thinking about them. Every text lights up your brain. Touch is electric. This is your nervous system flooding you with chemicals designed to override rational decision-making long enough to reproduce.

Evolutionary function: reproduction. Get you bonded enough to create offspring before the chemicals wear off. Shelf life: 18-36 months before it metabolizes into something else or nothing at all. The Greeks knew this. That's why they had a separate word for it. Eros isn't forever. It's not supposed to be. It's the spark, not the fire.

Philia — Deep friendship. The bond between people who've chosen each other. Slower than eros, more stable, based on mutual respect and shared values. You actually like this person. You want to spend time with them even when your genitals aren't involved.

What soldiers feel for each other. What long-term partners have if they're lucky. Philia is the love that survives boredom, survives crisis, survives the mundane reality of daily life. It's built on actually knowing someone and choosing them anyway.

Storge — Familial affection. The love between parents and children, siblings, extended family. You didn't choose it. It's installed at the firmware level. The attachment system itself. Can survive almost anything, which is both its strength and its trap.

Storge is why you can simultaneously hate your family and love them. Why you can be furious at your sibling and still show up when they need you. It's pre-rational, pre-choice love. The kind that persists even when it probably shouldn't.

Agape — Unconditional love. The kind that doesn't depend on reciprocation. Selfless, universal, traditionally associated with divine love. The love God supposedly has for humans. The love that gives without expecting return.

In practice: rare as hell and often confused with codependency. Most people who claim agape love are actually just self-abandoning. True agape requires enormous security—you love without attachment to outcome. Most humans can't sustain that. We're too needy.

Ludus — Playful love. Flirtation, teasing, the early dance. The butterflies. The chase before the catch. The excitement of not-quite-having someone yet. Not meant to last—it's the appetizer, not the meal.

People who chase ludus forever are running from the deeper stuff. They want the high of newness without the work of sustaining. Serial infatuation instead of actual intimacy. Ludus is delicious but it's not nourishing.

Pragma — Mature, enduring love. What long-married couples have when they've survived enough together that the relationship becomes load-bearing infrastructure. Not exciting. Not passionate. Just solid. The love that shows up.

Built through compromise, patience, and the decision to keep choosing each other. Pragma is the love that gets you through cancer, through financial collapse, through the death of a child. It's not about feeling butterflies. It's about being a team.

Why This Matters for Your Attachment Style

Here's the thing: your attachment style determines which of these loves you're naturally drawn to—and which ones terrify you.

Anxious attachment craves eros and ludus because the intensity feels like proof of connection. The passion, the obsession, the can't-stop-thinking-about-them feeling—that's what love is supposed to feel like to the anxious nervous system. But the instability of these loves triggers constant anxiety. When eros fades, as it always does, anxious people panic. They think the relationship is dying. They chase the intensity, trying to resurrect it.

Anxious types often struggle to trust pragma—it feels too quiet, too boring, like something must be wrong. Steady, calm love without constant drama doesn't register as love. It registers as complacency, as settling, as the prelude to abandonment. They need the intensity to feel safe, which means they never actually feel safe.

Avoidant attachment is comfortable with philia at arm's length and might perform ludus well, but eros feels threatening (too much vulnerability) and pragma feels like a trap (too much obligation). The loss of self that comes with eros—the obsession, the dependence—terrifies avoidants. They pull back right when eros would naturally peak.

Pragma feels like obligation. The entanglement, the interdependence, the you-need-me-I-need-you of long-term partnership feels like a cage. Avoidants often confuse storge-level tolerance for love because it doesn't ask too much. They can feel familial affection without having to actually be vulnerable.

Secure attachment can move between all six relatively fluidly. They can handle eros without losing themselves—they enjoy the passion without making it their entire identity. Build philia without walls—they can be genuinely vulnerable in friendship. Accept storge without resentment—family obligation doesn't feel like martyrdom. And grow into pragma without feeling imprisoned—commitment feels like safety, not suffocation.

Secure people experience the full spectrum because no type of love activates their defenses. They can meet each love where it is.

Disorganized attachment often experiences eros as simultaneously magnetic and terrifying—the same person feels like safety and danger. The intensity pulls them in, then frightens them, then pulls them back. This makes every love type unstable because the nervous system can't settle. One day pragma feels safe. The next day it feels suffocating. The love itself hasn't changed. The nervous system's relationship to it has.

The Conflation Problem

When you only have one word for love, you make category errors constantly.

You mistake eros for pragma and wonder why the passion faded. (It was always going to—that's what eros does.) You married during the eros phase when everything was electric, and now three years in, you're wondering if you fell out of love. You didn't. Eros metabolized. The question is whether you built philia or pragma underneath it before it faded. If you didn't, you're just strangers who used to fuck enthusiastically.

You expect storge to feel like eros and resent your family for not giving you butterflies. (They're not supposed to.) Familial love is comfortable, stable, occasionally irritating. It's not passionate. Expecting your spouse to give you both eros and storge—excitement and comfort—is asking one person to be two different kinds of love simultaneously. Some can. Most can't.

You confuse agape with codependency and call your self-abandonment "unconditional love." (It's not.) Real agape loves without needing anything back. Codependency needs desperately while pretending not to. If your "unconditional love" leaves you resentful, exhausted, and martyred, it's not agape. It's people-pleasing with a spiritual veneer.

You chase ludus your whole life because pragma sounds like settling. (It's not—it's building something.) The thrill of the chase feels like being alive. Pragma feels like death. But ludus is cotton candy—delicious, insubstantial, gone in minutes. Pragma is the meal that sustains you through winter. One feels better. The other keeps you alive.

The Evolutionary Stack

These loves aren't random. They evolved in a specific order for specific functions:

Storge came first—mammalian pair bonding for offspring survival. The attachment system itself. Before humans had language, before culture, we had the mother-infant bond. Storge is hardwired into the limbic system. It's older than cognition, older than choice. You can see it in rats. This is the foundation everything else builds on.

Eros emerged to override rational decision-making long enough for reproduction to happen. Temporary insanity by design. Your genes don't care if this person is good for you long-term. They care that you fuck them enough times that pregnancy happens. Eros is the override button evolution installed to get you past your better judgment.

The neurochemistry is precise: dopamine for obsession, oxytocin for bonding, testosterone for desire. The cocktail makes you stupid on purpose. By the time you sober up, ideally there's a baby.

Philia evolved for coalition building. Hunting parties. War bands. Cooperation beyond kinship. Humans are weak individually. We survive through cooperation. Philia is the glue that holds non-family groups together. You need to trust the person next to you in the hunt won't let you die. That trust is philia.

It's slower than eros because it's built through repeated cooperation. You don't fall into friendship. You build it, over months and years of showing up for each other.

Pragma is the cultural software that keeps pair bonds stable past the eros expiration date. Agriculture needed it—you can't run a farm with someone you met last month. You need a partner who'll still be there in twenty years, through crop failures and hard winters.

Pragma is the decision to keep choosing someone after the chemicals wear off. It's cultural because it requires values—commitment, loyalty, partnership. These aren't instincts. They're taught.

Ludus and agape are more recent, more cultural, less universal. Luxuries of abundance rather than survival necessities. You can only play with courtship (ludus) when you're not desperately scrambling to survive. You can only give without expectation of return (agape) when you have enough that giving doesn't threaten you.

These are the loves of civilization, not subsistence.

Implications for Relationship Structures

Different relationship structures emphasize different loves:

Traditional monogamy is designed for storge → eros → pragma pipeline. Lock in during eros, build pragma before it fades, add storge when kids arrive. The structure assumes eros will fade and that's fine—pragma takes over. The couple becomes a team, raising children, building assets, weathering life together.

This works when both people successfully transition from eros to pragma. It fails catastrophically when one person thinks eros fading means the relationship is over. They leave, seeking eros with someone new, and wonder why the second marriage follows the same pattern.

Polyamory often tries to maintain multiple eros connections, which is metabolically expensive. The ones that work long-term usually transition at least one connection to pragma or philia. You can't maintain three eros relationships simultaneously—the neurochemical load is crushing. Most successful poly people have one pragma partnership (or several philia connections) and maybe one eros connection that will eventually transition or end.

The poly people chasing permanent eros across multiple relationships are usually burning out. Eros isn't sustainable. It's supposed to end.

Relationship anarchy prioritizes philia as the base—friendship as the default relationship, with other loves added or not based on what emerges. This works because philia is stable. You can maintain multiple friendships indefinitely. Adding eros or pragma to some of those friendships is optional. The foundation is solid regardless.

Swinging compartmentalizes eros (with others) from pragma (with primary partner). Keeps the loves separate rather than integrated. The primary relationship is pragma—stable, committed, load-bearing. Eros is outsourced to swing partners, kept recreational, prevented from deepening into anything that might threaten the pragma bond.

This works when everyone can actually compartmentalize. It fails when eros with a swing partner develops into philia or deeper eros, violating the structure's core premise.

The Diagnostic Question

When you say "I love you" to someone, which love are you actually expressing?

When they say it back, which love are they expressing?

If you're saying eros and they're saying storge, you're having different conversations. You're feeling passionate obsession. They're feeling comfortable familiarity. You want intensity. They want stability. Same words, completely different experiences.

If you want pragma and they want ludus, you're building different things. You're trying to build a partnership that weathers decades. They're enjoying the chase and will leave when it stops being fun. You'll be devastated. They'll be confused why you expected permanence.

The mismatch destroys relationships. Not because anyone is wrong, but because you're speaking different languages while using the same words.

The Greeks wouldn't have had this problem. They had the vocabulary to be precise. We have to work harder to know what we actually mean.

The question to ask yourself: Which loves do I actually feel? Not which ones do I think I should feel. Which ones are actually present in this relationship right now?

The question to ask your partner: Which love is this for you? Don't accept "I love you" as an answer. Get specific. Is this eros? Philia? Pragma? Are we building the same thing?

Your attachment style shapes which loves feel safe, which feel threatening, and which you've convinced yourself you don't need. Anxious attachment chases eros because it feels like proof. Avoidant attachment settles for philia because it doesn't ask too much. Secure attachment can access all six. Disorganized attachment cycles through them chaotically.

Knowing the taxonomy is the first step to knowing yourself. The second step is being honest about which loves you're actually capable of sustaining. Some people can do pragma. Some people can only do ludus. Neither is better. But knowing the difference determines what kinds of relationships you can actually maintain.

The English language's poverty isn't just linguistic. It's relational. By collapsing six distinct experiences into one word, we've made it nearly impossible to communicate what we actually mean. Learning the Greek taxonomy isn't academic. It's survival.