The Four Loves: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

Lewis begins this chapter with “the humblest and most widely diffused of loves,” which humans have in common with animals. In Greek, such love is called storge; Lewis calls it Affection. Storge is specifically the kind of affection that parents and offspring have for one another. A mother (human or animal) nursing her young is an obvious image.

The image also presents a paradox. Babies have an obvious Need-love, while Mothers offer Gift-love. In another way, mothers, too, have a Need-love for their young; they can’t not give birth, or they’ll die, and they must either nurse or suffer. In this way, the Gift-love is also Need-love. It’s a Gift-love that “needs to be needed.”

Affection goes beyond the mother-child relationship. Almost anyone can be an object of Affection; it is not a very discriminating form of love, and the people it unites may not seem to be well suited to each other. It overcomes all sorts of barriers—between age, sex, class, and even species. Literary examples include Dox Quixote and Sancho Panza, or even Mole, Rat, Badger, and Toad in The Wind in the Willows.

Affection has some criteria, however. The object of Affection must be familiar. It usually begins without one’s noticing it. It’s also humble, modest, and unrefined. The Appreciative Love, discussed earlier, plays an inconspicuous role in Affection; most often, we take objects of affection for granted instead of praising them loudly and publicly.

It’s important to note, however, that Affection doesn’t always exist apart from the other loves. It enters other loves and even becomes the medium through which those loves are expressed. For example, making a friend isn’t the same thing as becoming affectionate; but when you have an old friend, you feel affection for all kinds of familiar characteristics of that person. Even erotic love is best experienced with this “homespun clothing of affection.”

Though Affection is not very discriminating, it makes certain appreciations possible in a unique way. Affection has a special ability to unite people who wouldn’t otherwise be drawn to one another. It broadens our minds beyond our own particular tastes. This often shows up among people with whom one is “thrown together” in a family, college, or other such environment. It enables a person to find things to appreciate in a broad cross-section of humanity. It leads from noticing to toleration to enjoyment.

At this point, danger appears. Affection is such a simple, humble, and patient form of love that we could be led to equate it with “Love Himself”—that is, we could come to believe that when fully developed, affection is all we really need. But that’s not true. In fact, Affection can be a cause of unhappiness. Its characteristics are ambivalent, meaning that they can cause suffering as well as good. Something of this can be seen in the sickly sweet songs and poems of popular art. The problem with these is that they equate Affection with goodness; but Affection is only an opportunity for goodness, not the thing itself.

Part of the problem is with Need-love—craving the Affection of others. People generally think they have to merit friendship or erotic love yet feel entitled to affection. Withholding affection, in fact, is regarded as “unnatural.” There’s a degree of truth here; there’s an instinctual element of maternal love, for example. And given the right conditions, Affection does tend to grow fairly easily and naturally between people. However, those same conditions can also naturally foster distaste.

When someone is unlovable, their “ravenous” Need-love can become suffocating for those around them. (King Lear’s need for his daughters’ love is an example.) Their self-pity makes others feel guilty for their inability to love them back. So, the “‘built-in’ […] character of Affection” can be distorted in an ugly way. The informality of home, for example, can be abused when parents use it as an excuse to be disrespectful to their children.

The courtesy of Affection has much to do with tone. Teasing and banter work when they’re expressed in the right tone and at the right moment. The deeper the Affection, the better a person knows what those are. But “the domestic Rudesby” abuses the liberties of Affection in order to serve his or her own ego. Often, the same person will confuse those liberties with real Affection and fault the other person for objecting to their rudeness.

It’s important to mention jealousy as well. Every kind of love is susceptible to it. This is especially true for Affection because it relies on the old and familiar, so it regards change as a threat. This can happen when one sibling takes up a new interest, and the other feels left behind. The other will become fiercely jealous and, in response to the “animal” instinct of Affection, even try to sabotage the sibling’s rival interests. It also happens when a family member converts to a new religion, or when a member of a lowbrow family becomes an intellectual.

Affection as a Gift-love can also be perverted. Lewis mentions a recently deceased woman named Mrs. Fidget, whose family has cheered up a lot since she died. Mrs. Fidget often claimed to live for her family, and that was true. She did all the laundry and made hot meals every day, even though her family begged her not to. She fussed and labored over them until they had to do things to help her, so that she could do all the things that they didn’t want done for them in the first place.

This is an example of Gift-love gone to an extreme. The purpose of Gift-love is to eventually make the giver unnecessary—for example, to feed children so that they can one day feed themselves. The natural tendency of Gift-love—which is often a maternal instinct—is to want the object to receive the good only itself can give. The instinct has to be tamed by a higher form of love that simply desires the object’s good, no matter where that good comes from. Until that happens, this “ravenous need to be needed” will keep inventing needs to fulfill, imagining itself to be unselfish.

It isn’t just parents who do this—the Affection of patron for protégé can work similarly. One example is Emma and Harriet in Jane Austen’s novel: Emma only wants Harriet to have the sort of happy life that she can give her. It’s also a special danger for university professors, who should want their students to someday become their rivals. But this doesn’t always happen; sometimes a professor can’t bear independence of thought in a former pupil, even if that’s theoretically what the professor wanted to create.

The need to be needed also manifests sometimes in the pampering of animals. Lacking an outlet for this need elsewhere, sometimes a person will indulge a pet, usually a dog, until it’s in a practically infantile state and not thriving as an animal should. And the animal, unlike a person, can’t defend itself. Someone who prefers animal companionship to human should, Lewis thinks, examine their real reasons.

Some believe that these cases are merely “neurotic,” but Lewis doesn’t believe they’re simply pathological (though sometimes they can be). If we’re honest with ourselves, everyone has felt these temptations. It’s not a question of disease, but of human sin.

Secondly, when people object that “common sense” will prohibit the abuse of Affection, they’re actually making the point that the mere feeling of affection isn’t enough. It needs reason, balance, and an altogether higher form of love than Affection itself can be. If a person tries to live on Affection, it will “go bad.” A grievance- and resentment-fueling love like Mrs. Fidget’s actually contains a great deal of hate. It’s an example of how Affection, when it becomes a god in a human life, can become a demon.