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Feeling It This Strongly Was Never the Problem
You have seen the post. Eight Greek words for love, one of them is the one you are feeling, and the ancients understood you all along.
It is probably still in your camera roll, saved on a bad night, sitting between a parking receipt and a photo you have not deleted.
Most of that list is Canadian, and it is from 1973.
A sociologist called John Alan Lee published a book that year titled Colours of Love.
He surveyed people on how they behave in relationships. He sorted the answers into six styles. Each one got a Greek or Latin label, because the labels stuck.
Eros, ludus, storge, pragma, mania, agape. That is Lee's list, not Athens'.
The six names went out into the world and kept walking. Fifty years later they turn up in captions, in quizzes, and in the thing your friend sent you at midnight.
Pragma is the clearest tell. It is a real Greek word, and it means something nearer to a deed or a piece of business. Nobody in Athens was describing a sensible partnership that way.
This is not a complaint about Lee. His six styles hold up well enough as a description of how people behave, which is exactly why researchers kept them.
It is a complaint about the toga. The version that travels claims an authority it does not have. It also buries the older idea, which is better.
In the Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates list four kinds of madness that arrive from the gods.
Prophecy from Apollo, the rites from Dionysus, poetry from the Muses, and love from Aphrodite.
He is not filing love-madness under damage. He puts it in the same drawer as prophecy and poetry. The best things we get, he says, have come from madness, when it arrives as a gift.
Not a defect to be managed. Not evidence that you are built wrong. Not something to apologise for having felt in the first place.
That is a two and a half thousand year old argument that feeling it this strongly was never the problem. It is older than every framework that came later and made it sound like a fault.
What you do about it is a separate question. It is still yours. The madness can be a gift and still not be a reason to pay for somebody's company out of your own pocket.
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