In the American culture we have the word love, but that word can have a different meaning on so many levels. I can say "I love you" to a family member or to a delicious pastry. But it reminds me as a kid how we would say "if you love ______ so much why don't you marry it?" We have to understand what love and the different meanings of the word is.
The word love can be broken down into four categories represented by Greek words that translate to love.
- Storge (Store-gay) is the love between a parent and child.
- Philia (fill-ee-ah) is the love between friends. The best way we learned about this one is that if you notice Philia contains the first four letters of Philadelphia which is the city of "Brotherly Love"
- Eros (air-os) which is where we get the word erotic which is the love between a man and a woman. It includes sexual love.
- Agape (a-gah-pay) is where you don't really have a bond with a person, but more of charity or Christ-like love for another. I think the best way to describe it is similar to the love a missionary has for his mission which he hasn't met all the people that occupies the area or those who won't accept the gospel but that missionary still loves them.
When a couple gets into a cohabiting relationship the man usually seeks out with the intent of having more sex, but the woman has the mentality of the relationship developing into marriage. There are four reasons why couples cohabit.
- Prep to marriage- this group of people are those that are engaged and decide since they are going to marry and eventually live with together why not start now at living with each other. This tends to be the more successful group out of all the cohabitors since it is in the direction of marriage.
- Trial cohabitors- This is where people are living with each other to test to see if it is worth taking that relationship to the next level for marriage, but not always specifically with marriage as the goal at the beginning. This is a way of easy out of a relationship so they don't have to mess up a marriage and go through all the paperwork of a divorce. This is one of the worst kinds of cohabiting due to the nature of couples looking for excuses to leave more than stay and develop to the stage of marriage. Even then when they get to that stage because they have already cohabited they think there are easy ways out so they are more prone to divorce. We learned in class that there was a lesbian couple that was together for forty years. They were the role model for the gay community saying, "why deny us our rights of marriage when we can live so long together as a couple?" They were able to be married and only lasted for 18 months of marriage and recently have filed for divorce. Cohabitation just is not good for marriage and can have lasting effects on it.
- Avoiding being alone- This reminds me of the story of Adam and Eve where God says it is not good for man to be alone. These cohabitors dont have the mindset of getting married, but just want to live together to be together. The individuals may not like being alone or on their own so they decide to live together to fulfill that need of longing for another person.
- Alternative to marriage-then there is the couple that doesn't have marriage in mind at all and decides to live together as a form of marriage. This is more common in European countries and becoming more popular in the US as well. People are seeing less and less of a need to marry because of all the troubles of marriage or possible divorce that a couple may go through. Studies have shown that the children of cohabiting parents have lower education level and social class.
No comments:
Post a Comment