C.S. Lewis on Love

(This is excerpted from C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity)

"Being in Love"

What we call being in love is a glorious state, and, in several ways, good for us. It helps to make us generous and courageous, it opens our eyes not only to the beauty of the beloved but to all beauty, and it subordinates (especially at first) our merely animal sexuality; in that sense, love is the great conqueror of lust. No one in his senses would deny that being in love is far better than either common sensuality or cold self-centredness. But, as I said before, 'the most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of our own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs.'

Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing. There are many things beow it, but there are also things above it. You cannot make it the basis of a whole life. It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling...

Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last, but feelings come and go... But, of course, ceasing to be 'in love' need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense - love as distinct from 'being in love' - is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, mantained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God...

'Being in love' first moved them to promise fidelity; this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.


Don't stop your heart from fluttering when it ought to. Don't deny feelings you always knew were there. You never know if you never try, what it feels like to hold the beloved one in your arms, to see the sun light up in the horizon once he smiles at you. Embrace, the essence of love, of two people from opposite genders realizing that they ought to celebrate the story of how it came to be.

"You understand me,
Embrace my fragility.
You keep me safe in a crazy world." - Corrinne May.