Love - Great Love Stories
There is a great paradox running through many of the following works. Love makes life better precisely by making us vulnerable. Gilgamesh can grieve because he has loved Enkidu; Odysseus longs for home because he loves Penelope; Aeneas suffers because he must leave Dido; Dante‘s love transforms him; Jane Eyre risks loneliness rather than accept an unequal love; and the Little Prince discovers that the rose matters because he has given part of his life to her.
There is a strong overarching question: Is love primarily about finding someone who fulfills us – or learning to value another being beyond ourselves?
Much of the Western philosophical tradition distinguishes different forms of love precisely because romantic desire, friendship, familial attachment, and concern for another person do not necessarily operate in the same way.
Ancient world: desire, friendship, devotion
1200 BCE, Mesopotamia
The friendship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu transforms Gilgamesh from a self-centered ruler into someone capable of profound attachment and grief. Love makes us vulnerable to loss, but that vulnerability is precisely what awakens us to our humanity.
Homer
c.750 BCE, Greece
Love appears primarily as loyalty and attachment—to friends, family, comrades, and homeland—rather than romantic fulfillment. Achilles’ love for Patroclus shows that love can produce both tenderness and devastating rage, while Priam’s love for Hector ultimately restores Achilles’ compassion.
Homer
c.700 BCE, Greece
Odysseus and Penelope represent love as fidelity maintained through separation, temptation, hardship, and time. Lasting love is not simply passion; it depends upon loyalty, shared identity, perseverance, and the desire to return home to another person.
probably 1st millennium BCE
Physical and romantic desire are celebrated with unusual directness as sources of beauty, delight, and mutual longing. Erotic love need not be treated as something shameful or inferior; bodily desire can itself express profound appreciation of another person.
traditionally attributed to Valmiki
750 BCE – 500 BCE, India
The relationships of Rama and Sita explore love alongside loyalty, sacrifice, honor, and social duty. The epic also exposes a recurring human conflict: what happens when love for an individual collides with obligations imposed by society?
Plato
c.385 BCE, Greece
Love begins as desire for something beautiful that we lack, but it can educate us beyond attraction to one beautiful body toward beautiful souls, knowledge, goodness, and ultimately Beauty itself. Love therefore becomes a force capable of lifting human beings beyond possession toward wisdom and transcendence.
Aristotle
4th century, Greece
The highest friendship occurs when two virtuous people value one another for who they are rather than merely for pleasure or usefulness. Such friendship is essential to flourishing because a good life is not fundamentally solitary—we need people with whom we can share living, thinking, and becoming better.
c. 400 BCE – 200 CE, India
The Gita ultimately transforms love into bhakti: devotion to the divine that transcends attachment to one’s ego and the fruits of one’s actions. The highest love does not seek to possess but surrenders the self to something greater.
Virgil
29-19 BCE, Rome
Aeneas and Dido dramatize the tragic conflict between romantic love and duty: genuine love does not necessarily mean that lovers can remain together. Virgil forces us to ask whether abandoning personal happiness for obligations to family, people, and future generations is noble—or devastatingly unjust to the person left behind.
Ovid
8 CE, Rome
Love appears in countless forms—desire, obsession, jealousy, loyalty, narcissism, loss, and transformation—and frequently changes both lover and beloved. Ovid repeatedly warns that desire becomes destructive when love turns into possession and refuses to recognize the autonomy of the other person.
Spiritual and universal love
The New Testament: The Gospels
1st century
Love expands beyond family, friendship, and romance into agape: love of neighbor, stranger, vulnerable person, and even enemy. The radical measure of love becomes not what we receive from another person but what we are willing to give.
Augustine
397- 400 CE
Human beings inevitably love, but much unhappiness comes from loving temporary things as though they could provide permanent fulfillment. The central question is therefore not whether we love but whether we love the right things in the right order, with love ultimately directed toward God.
Murasaki Shikibu
c. 1008, Japan
Romantic love is beautiful precisely because it is fragile, temporary, and vulnerable to changing circumstances and feelings. The novel connects love with the Japanese sensitivity to impermanence: possessing beauty permanently is impossible, so love inevitably contains loss.
Attar of Nishapur
c. 1177, Persia
The soul’s journey toward God is portrayed as a journey in which ordinary attachments and the ego must gradually be overcome. Divine love ultimately dissolves the distinction between the seeker and what is sought.
Dante Alighieri
c. 1321, Italy
For Dante, the fundamental human problem is not that we love too much but that our loves become misdirected toward the wrong objects or in the wrong proportions. The spiritual journey therefore consists largely of learning how to love properly, culminating in divine love as the force ordering creation.
Romantic love and its consequences
William Shakespeare
c. 1595, England
Love can cross boundaries created by family, society, and inherited hatred, allowing two people to recognize one another as individuals rather than enemies. Yet intense passion without time, judgment, or reconciliation with the surrounding world can become tragically destructive.
Miguel de Cervantes
1605/1615, Spain
Don Quixote’s devotion to Dulcinea demonstrates our extraordinary capacity to create an ideal beloved partly from imagination. Cervantes asks whether we truly love another person or sometimes love our idea of that person.
Jane Austen
1813, England
Elizabeth and Darcy must overcome both inaccurate judgments of one another and genuine flaws in themselves before love can mature. Good love requires attraction, but also self-knowledge, respect, humility, conversation, and willingness to change.
Charlotte Brontë
1847, England
Jane refuses to accept a love that requires surrendering her moral independence and sense of self. Genuine romantic love therefore requires equality between two autonomous people, rather than domination or dependence.
Emily Brontë
1847, England
Catherine and Heathcliff embody a love so intense that the distinction between loving another and needing to possess them nearly disappears. The novel demonstrates how love without restraint, generosity, or respect for others can mutate into obsession and revenge.
Gustave Flaubert
1857, France
Emma’s expectations of love have been shaped by romantic fantasies that ordinary life cannot possibly satisfy. Flaubert distinguishes loving an actual person from pursuing the emotional experience we imagine love ought to provide.
Leo Tolstoy
1878, Russia
Anna and Vronsky show both the irresistible power of passionate love and the dangers of making romantic love carry the entire burden of life’s meaning. Through several relationships, Tolstoy contrasts passion with a quieter love built through family, forgiveness, responsibility, and shared daily life.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
1880, Russia
Dostoevsky contrasts abstract love for “humanity” with the much harder task of loving actual, difficult individuals. Genuine love is active: it requires responsibility, forgiveness, patience, and engagement with imperfect people rather than sentimental feelings about mankind.
Modern love: freedom, sacrifice and connection
Edith Wharton
1920, United States
Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska reveal the conflict between romantic desire, marriage, social convention, and responsibility toward others. Love sometimes expresses itself not through possession but through renunciation—choosing not to take what one desires because of the consequences for others.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
1925, United States
Gatsby’s love for Daisy gradually becomes inseparable from nostalgia, aspiration, status, and his desire to recreate the past. Fitzgerald asks whether Gatsby loves Daisy herself or an idealized version onto which he has projected his dreams.
Kahlil Gibran
1923, United States
Love asks us to give ourselves deeply while refusing to turn another person into our possession. Healthy love preserves both intimacy and separateness: two people can belong together without ceasing to be individuals.
Soren Kierkegaard
1847, Denmark
Kierkegaard distinguishes preferential love—romance and friendship—from the ethical and religious command to love one’s neighbor, including people we would never naturally choose to love. Love is ultimately not merely a feeling but something expressed through actions, responsibility, and concern for the particular person before us.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
1943, France
The Little Prince learns through his relationship with the rose and the fox that love makes another being unique because we invest time, attention, and responsibility in them. Loving someone means accepting that attachment creates both responsibility and the possibility of grief.
Boris Pasternak
1957, Russia
Love provides a realm of personal meaning and human recognition amid revolution, ideology, violence, and historical upheaval. Yet history demonstrates that even profound love cannot always overcome political circumstances, separation, and mortality.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
1985, Colombia
Love changes dramatically over a lifetime and cannot be reduced to youthful passion: it encompasses longing, marriage, companionship, sexuality, memory, aging, and persistence. Márquez leaves deliberately unresolved the boundary between extraordinary devotion and romantic obsession.
Note the following interesting comparisons:
Plato (The Symposium) versus Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics): Does love lead beyond the individual or more deeply toward them?
In the Symposium, attraction to an individual can become the beginning of an ascent toward increasingly universal Beauty. Aristotle places considerably more emphasis on the particular friend and the shared life: another person becomes valuable as someone with whom we live and pursue virtue. Plato’s account famously moves from bodily beauty toward Beauty itself.
Virgil (Aeneas) versus William Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet): Duty or love?
Aeneas sacrifices romantic love for duty; Romeo and Juliet sacrifice inherited social obligations for romantic love. Put beside one another, they pose a wonderful question: When love and duty conflict, which deserves our loyalty?
Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice) versus Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights): Does good love require reason?
Pride and Prejudice says, broadly, yes: love becomes better as Elizabeth and Darcy understand themselves and each other more accurately. Wuthering Heights explores almost the opposite possibility—love as overwhelming identification and passion unconstrained by ordinary rational or moral boundaries.
Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina) versus Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary) versus F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby): Are we loving a person or an idea?
Emma Bovary wants the romance she has imagined; Gatsby wants the Daisy inseparable from his imagined past; Anna increasingly needs romantic love to sustain an entire world of meaning. All three warn that love becomes dangerous when the real beloved cannot possibly compete with the ideal beloved created by our imagination.
The Gospels (The New Testament) versus Soren Kierkegaard (Works of Love): Must love be a feeling?
Both radically challenge that assumption. Kierkegaard’s Works of Love develops the Christian command of neighbor-love into the idea that genuine love is expressed in what we do, including toward people for whom spontaneous affection may be absent.
Gilgamesh versus Antoine de Saint-Exupery (The Little Prince): Why does love hurt?
Because love makes someone irreplaceable. Enkidu’s death devastates Gilgamesh; the Little Prince’s attachments make separation painful—but without those attachments, neither would have discovered the depth of relationship.