The Greeks had four different words for love: philios, storge, eros, and agape. This post is about four kinds of eros, four reasons people pursue each other romantically:
The first reason to pursue someone romantically is the same reason we pursue our family; because they are ours. When we say, "Love the one you're with," we are recommending this kind of love. When a couple has been together for a while, this can be the eros that keeps them together. It can also be what causes best friends to fall in love. Long distance is worrisome because it threatens this kind of love.
The second reason to pursue another person romantically is because you like the way that person lives his/her life and want to be a part of it. You want to be the hero behind the hero. This attracts us to people who sacrifice themselves for others, people who are (or are likely to become) parents, who have a ministry, a charitable nature, or cause. "I get you," means I can love you in this way. Modern society makes it difficult to earn such flattery at the age of first love, so it may be more likely among couples who meet later in life. Waiting for it might be foolish, however. It's fragile; no admiration lasts forever.
The third reason to pursue another person romantically is to conquer or save that person. We see a person with power--wealth, education, confidence, or sexual power--who doesn't seem to deserve it. They don't rise to the level of responsibility we think they should; in that sense they "play hard to get," and get under our skin. Our only hope of escape from this haunting "love" is to master our oppressor, so we try to bond ourselves to him/her, not out of admiration, but because of our own inability to forgive.
The fourth kind of eros is the pursuit of being pursued. It is gratitude intense enough to rise to the level of bonding. It is the kind of love we hope to win when we feed another's vanity, and perhaps the way a vain person hopes to love. It differs from the second kind of eros in that it involves admiration for what the other person does for us personally, rather than objective admiration. It shares the same fragility and gets even more competitive as we keep looking for someone else who can make us feel even more grateful...
A culture of monogamy and marriage (and arranged marriage) is biased towards the first kind of love. Given the fragility of the alternative kinds, it is understandable that we create such cultures.
