When my girlfriend, Irene, stood on the top of the sand dune and looked up into the sky I knew she was getting ready to make an important announcement about our love relationship. We had come to the beach every morning after having been separated for years. We had talked to one another by phone, but it was hardly the same. So, after nearly three years of separation, we were trying it again for what it was worth. Anyway, she stood on top of the sand dune, looked up to the sky and said “I love you....but I am not in love with you.” A jolt of emotion turned into a ball and hit me in the stomach. What, then, was our relationship and how did we fit into an array of any possible love relationship? Just as William James wrote his classical study, The Variety of Religious Experience, one could write a similar book on the variety of the love relationship. In fact, Irene’s announcement had plunged me into a search for meaning. Before I ran off to a relationship counselor to get love advice, I wanted to understand what relationship advice was all about. Just what was the difference between loving and being in love?

A semantic analysis yielded the following: being in love in a classical sense was what the Greeks called EROS.  This was roughly equivalent to what we now call romantic love. It is a state of mind, charged with imagination and sexual energy. Some philosophers said this type of love was madness or insanity. One does not see their beloved as they actually are; they see them in ideal form. Moreover, a person in a state of romantic love will often do irrational things. For example, they may lend money to a person who will only squander it. To please their partner they may engage in sexual practices that endanger their life, submit to physical distress or contract HIV. Romantic love can provide the basis for inappropriate behavior. Let I was now ready to explore other types of the love relationship. After doing my research on the love relationship, I was somewhat relieved that Irene and I had not taken this path. We could share the type of love called feliatas, the love between a brother and sister or a father and a son. In Million Dollar Baby, Clint Eastwood abandons the usual Hollywood narrative of a romantic relationship sprouting between an older man and a younger woman. Instead, he builds a strong father/daughter relationship that is mutually supportive. What they share is felicity. Another form of love that steers one away from a roller coaster ride and the inevitable breakup, is agape. Agape is love of BEING. One is grounded in reality but in love with being alive. There is a deep appreciation of life in all its forms. This type of love is often found in religious conviction.

What Irene felt for me was a combination of brother and sister love and love of life manifested in us. Not as tragically dramatic as a person willing to be physically misused, nor as dangerous as being encouraged to have sex with a carrier of HIV, but in the long run more fulfilling. There is a high mortality rate on romantic love. Irene and I had a talk about these forms of love and as we walked down the beach we counted ourselves lucky to be avoiding the roller coaster, disease and perversion, the need for relationship help, relationship advice, and foremost on our list—relationship break up. We had circumvented a marriage based on a false premise and the probable consequence of divorce. Looking out at the ocean, Irene recited verse from the Bhagavad-Gita: “Of all that is material and all that is spiritual in this world, know for certain that I am both its origin and dissolution. I am the source of all material and spiritual worlds. I am all-devouring death, and I am the generator of all things yet to be. ...behold now my opulence, hundreds of thousands of varied forms multicolored like the sea. Time I am, destroyer of the worlds, there is no Truth superior to me. Everything rests on me, as pearls are strung on a thread.” Irene and I continued our walk on the beach. She revealed to me that day that she had become disillusioned with Christianity and was leaning toward Hinduism. I had discovered new ways of interpreting and experiencing love. I had discovered a new love relationship.