People say love is pure, painful, sweet, and complicated — all at once. The truth is, love has many definitions. Ask someone and they will give you their own definition of love. Our very own CEO, Maria Avgitidis weighs in the topic of having two kinds of love at – Elite Daily.
Maria Avgitidis, CEO of Agape Match and the host of Ask A Matchmaker podcast, explains that the difference may be between two different types of love known as eros and agape in Greek.
Eros is the beginning stage of love when what you’re feeling more closely resembles lust. “But you don’t tell someone, ‘I lust you,’” Avgitidis explains. “You say, ‘I’m falling for you.’” (Um, hi, that sounds incredibly familiar.)
This stage doesn’t last forever. “Naturally, as human beings, eros will plateau somewhere between month four and month seven,” Avgitidis says. “Once you plateau, you start to feel some distance. Those rose-colored glasses come off. Before, in that eros period, it’s impossible to see those [red] flags.”
At this point, a relationship will likely either fizzle out or grow even stronger. “Agape is the big love, the unconditional love,” Avgitidis says. “[The philosopher] Aristotle believed that agape is one soul’s recognition of another soul. And that is a form of acceptance.” It’s the type of love you have to choose, and it’s not based solely on instant connection or attraction. This is what keeps people together for the long haul.
In other words, getting engaged while you’re still in that “eros sphere” (which Bachelor stars typically do) is “risky,” Avgitidis says. There’s a good chance that once that plateau happens, you start to realize, “Our values do just fundamentally not align. Whereas before, you were accepting things because you were in eros,” Avgitidis adds. So could this eros phase, which doesn’t end until well after the show has wrapped, account for why Bachelor couples have such a low success rate?
Former Bachelorette Katie Thurston’s split from her fiancé Blake Moynes seems to support Avgitidis’ explanation. After six months together (smack dab in the middle of that eros plateau), the couple announced their breakup on Instagram, and their words were resonant of Avgitidis’. “[W]e ultimately have concluded that we are not compatible as life partners,” they wrote in their joint statement.
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