Usefulness, Approval and Agape (part 1)

I am reading a book entitled “Kitchen Table Wisdom” by Dr Rachel Naomi Remen.  It’s a pleasant book to read; the chapters are short but very satisfying, maybe 2 or 3 pages with a brief story and some of the author’s insightful discussion.  I never used to be a fan of short stories but my reading style has changed with age; I no longer can afford late nights under the covers reading chapter upon chapter, falling asleep only upon the end of the book or against my will, head pillowed against the pages.  Short stories allow me to be a more responsible consumer of books, little nuggets of reading slipped in before I go to bed; just enough reading to help calm me and resettle my mind for sleep.  Dr Remen’s book has served that purpose perfectly.  It has also given me several insights to chew on and hold up against the shape of my own life for comparison.  One of the chapters talks about love versus approval:

“Few perfectionists can tell the difference between love and approval. Perfectionism is so widespread in this culture that we actually have had to invent another word for love. “Unconditional love”, we say. Yet all love is unconditional. Anything else is just approval.”

I read this several times, realizing how much it pertained to my personal experience with love and being loved.  I have always both sought and greatly appreciated the approval of other people.  I don’t necessarily consider myself a compulsive people-pleaser, but there is certainly an insistent voice in my head which becomes strident and shrill when I/it feels that I may have failed to meet the expectations of others.  I talked to my counselor about this quote and my feelings about the concept—it fits with other issues we’ve discussed, in particular some of the relationships which have been impacted when I have failed to meet expectations, when I have disappointed people in my life. 

Several days after reading this quote, I read somewhere else (honestly can’t recall where) a passage about how most us love what is useful to us, that much of love has to do with utility and personal benefit, a “what have you done for me lately” kind of relationship.  This statement also resonated with me, particularly because a significant portion of my emotional energy lately has been sucked into what feels like a midlife crisis—my children are seniors in high school and college, nearly “grown and flown”, and hypothetically I could retire from my military career any day now.  When I think about my husband and my children and their love for me, there is a part of me that is convinced their “love” is only a utilitarian love for me—making dinner, baking cookies, paying for car payments and insurance and vacations and new clothes; this is what I do, this is why they love me. 

Is “love” just some combination of “approval” and “usefulness”?  

One of my favorite books—a formative book for me as a person and as a Christian, impacting both my faith and my worldview—is “The Four Loves” by CS Lewis.  In it, Lewis outlines the 4kinds of love—3 of which are strictly human forms of love, and the 4^th love is perfectly demonstrated only by God.  The 4 loves are affection, friendship, erotic love and unconditional love.   Storge, or affection, is a bond of empathy and fondness (such as one feels for a small child or a pet), something which makes few demands but also has few expectations for the beloved and is found in families, such as between parent and child.  Philia or friendship-love is the bond formed by choice between like-minded, like-interested people; it does not rely on bonds of biology but is chosen.  Eros is sexual love, a possessive and appreciative love for a beloved other; this Lewis differentiates from the purely physical and more general feelings of Venus.  Finally, Lewis discusses Agape, the unconditional love of God which depends not at all on the characteristics of the beloved; the Agape love of God has no need which must be filled by the beloved, it is purely and exclusively and sacrificially gift-love.  

Taking the 3 human loves—Storge, Philia, Eros—in contrast with my question—is love only some combination of usefulness and approval—I find the answer to be “yes.”   Even Lewis talks about each love as some combination of “need-love” and “gift-love”, with “need love” referring to a utilitarian perspective held toward the beloved.

Philia, the love of friends, is composed of some approval—“we see eye to eye; we share the same interests and therefore validate one another; you are wonderful because you are similar to me”—but also of usefulness—“it’s us against the world, we friends together keep each other strong.”  Eros is also split between approval and usefulness—the approval one has for beautiful, desirable, enjoyable things; and the sense that an object of sexual desire is also useful in fulfilling that desire, and also useful in upholding one’s own self-image as being desirable.

Storge, the affection and fondness held toward pets and children and other relatively useless things is mostly “approval.”  It is an aesthetic approval held for cute kittens and wide-eyed babies.  There is also an irrational component of Storge—why do we hold this affection for the curmudgeonly long-time customer, the irascible elderly relative, those who are neither useful nor worthy of approval?  In this way, Storge has a facet of Agape love—unconditional love—in that it is somewhat “gift love”, love that expects nothing in return.

One type of love which I do believe Lewis missed was the love of small children toward parents; this kind of pure need-love based upon the helplessness and dependency of the child and the position and power of the parent.  This is a utilitarian love that by nature must be selfish; children have no choice but to be needy. And the one who can meet those needs is then by virtue of that transaction, loved.  In this way it is almost like the Venus which Lewis mentions in context of Eros; a love based purely upon biological urges and un-negotiable needs.

And so here I am.  I am no longer needed in this raw and helpless way by my children.  I am less physically desirable in an objective way, the pure “Venus” way. Both of these biologic, transactional “loves” are fading…giving me the feeling that I myself am fading, becoming both less necessary and less desired. I have failed—perhaps because I was not taught—to replace the Storge relationship of my young children with the Philia between parents and adult children.  I have failed to grow Philia out of the Eros and Venus of my marriage—possibly because the seeds of Philia were never there to begin with, possibly because those seeds germinated early but were withered by life.  I have largely outgrown the unconditional approval, the Storge, of my parents and biological family; I am no longer the small child viewed with affection and fondness no matter my mistakes.  I am instead someone who made and makes mistakes, who is too geographically removed to develop Philia toward, a virtual stranger.  I have accumulated too few Philia relationships, found it too difficult to deepen or sustain them.  

I think possibly my vaunted sense that love is either usefulness or approval comes from a lack of friends in my life.  It would seem that making friends is the solution to a midlife crisis—that’s really what I’m writing here. But that I feel that I lack the ability, the time, the instinct, the self-confidence, to make and keep friends. This sense of not being desired, approved or useful for anyone is how I’m defining midlife crisis.  It is Philia that is the optional love, the love that chooses rather than is based upon predetermined urges and relationships.  This loneliness and sense of being unmoored is a what it feels to be un-chosen in  time period where nearly every aspect of my relationships is optional—I am not needed and am un-chosen.  

The natural course of this discussion splits into 2 directions:  toward notions, methods and theories of making friends and being a better friend; and of the Agape love of God, His unconditional love toward me that means I am always chosen by Someone who has no “need” of me at all.  And probably these are intertwined together.  If I know that I am chosen and beloved by God, I can be a better—stronger, wise, a frankly less-needy—friend.  What a topic it would be, to simply write about how to be a better friend, how to make friends; a kind of navel gazing, that—an unraveling of my substance from one end in order to knit that same substance into something else on the other end, to create something out of the limited supply of myself.  That method against the backdrop of my own deeply felt obsolescence, uselessness, undesirability would be a recipe for disaster, for more hopelessness, emptiness and despair.  And so the approach must be this:  exploring who I am in relationship to the unconditional, boundless Agape love of God—the God Who approves of me not for my own sake but for the sake of His beloved Son; the God Who has no need of me but calls me into fellowship with Him in service to the world.  Only with that substance can I knit myself together in Philia with other people, to be a friend who is both desired by and useful to others, because I bring to them the Agape love of God.