Eros
Akin to limerence, eros is literally the love of Beauty. It is a highly sensual style of love. Erotic lovers choose their lovers by intuition or "chemistry." They are more likely to say they fell in love at first sight than those of other love styles.
Erotic lovers view marriage as an extended honeymoon, and sex as the ultimate aesthetic experience. They tend to address their lovers with pet names, such as "sweetie" or "sexy". An erotic lover can be perceived as a hopeless romantic. Those of other love styles may see erotic lovers as unrealistic, or trapped in a fantasy.
The advantage of erotic love is the sentimentality of it. It is very relaxing to the person doing it. The disadvantage is the inevitability of the decay in attraction, and the danger of living in a fantasy world. In its extreme, eros can resemble naïveté.
Examples of Eros in movies include The Blue Lagoon, Return to the Blue Lagoon, Pretty Woman, Working Girl, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Star Wars and Titanic.
In a genetic study of 350 lovers, the Eros style was found to be present more often in those bearing the TaqI A1 allele of the DRD2 3' UTR sequence and the overlapping ANKK1 exon 8. This allele has been proposed to influence a wide range of behaviors, favoring obesity and alcoholism but opposing neuroticism-anxiety and juvenile delinquency. This genetic variation has been hypothesized to cause a reduced amount of pleasure to be obtained from a given action, causing people to indulge more frequently.
Read more about this topic: Love Styles
Famous quotes containing the word eros:
“Test of the poet is knowledge of love,
For Eros is older than Saturn or Jove;
Never was poet, of late or of yore,
Who was not tremulous with love-lore.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Never had he felt the joy of the word more sweetly, never had he known so clearly that Eros dwells in language.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“Civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)