I Luv U, Don't Panic

I LUV U

Don't Panic

As millions of smug couples prepare to mumble sweet nothings to each other while scoffing heart shaped meals from overly-priced set menus this Valentine’s Day, could any one of them truly define love? As Jude so succinctly puts it in Alfie’s mockney brogue, ‘What’s it all about?’.

Such a seemingly simple term, love is arguably the most evocative, yet least quantifiable in the English language – and we only have one word for it. Sanskrit has 96, Persian has 80 and the ancient Greeks had four - Agápe, or Christian love; Philia, the love between friends; Storgé, familial love and Éros, the pagan sexual variety. Eros, son of the goddess of love Aphrodite, is often depicted in art (and hackneyed Valentine’s cards) as a winged youth armed with his bows and arrows. To the Romans he was Cupid, or Amor, who carelessly dispensed the frenzies and agonies of fertile lust at will.

His name is derived from the Latin cupido, ‘desire’, which in many myths has been the lover’s downfall. It was Aphrodite (variously symbolised as the dolphin, the dove, the swan and the lime tree) who awarded Paris the love of Helen of Troy, and we all know how that one ended. Aphrodite’s hunger for Adonis drove her to roam the woods and hunt stags only for her mortal lover to be killed by a wild boar, his blood sprouting the hue of pomegranate. And after the naughty couple Atalanta and Hippomenes failed Zeus, he changed them into lions as punishment. Harsh, but fair.

The Romantics thought they had love licked too. William Blake scribed: ‘Love seeketh not itself to please… And builds a Heaven in Hells despair’. Famed philanderer Lord Byron wrote: ‘There is no instinct like that of the heart’ while Victorian poet Elizabeth Browning later added: ‘Whoso loves, believes the impossible’. No one puts it better than modern day bard Dizzee though: ‘She came she got picked off yo, Nah it’s not a love ting, get lost hoe’.

Love is a just four-letter word these days, then. Meaning a zero score in tennis, looks like it’s game, set and match to Eros.

Words Helen Jennings