Bigger Than Romance
When we think about love we tend to think about the moment where the world slows down and we catch a glance at our lover for the first time. The sparks fly and we feel the sting of Cupid’s arrow drawing us toward each other like an intergalactic love‑tractor‑beam. But what about the love for our friends or our family? What about our neighbours and community, our country, or even people we might never meet? Can we say that we love them?
In many ways, we can’t, or at least not in the same way. And, let’s be real, if you love your friend or your sibling in exactly the same way you love your spouse, there might be a few other questions to be asking yourself. But this idea of a love that extends out past our romantic interest has been around since we first started gathering in small communal groups. It’s a form of love that not only binds our belonging to those communities or families, but also shapes how we conceive of our enemies and the world as a whole.
For Aristotle, the key love‑word is philia, usually translated “friendship.” In the Nicomachean Ethics he argues that no one would choose to live without friends, even with all other goods, and that friendship is essential not just for individuals but for the political community. He links friendship to justice explaining that good laws are not enough if citizens do not actually bear one another goodwill. One of the things Aristotle emphasises is “friendship of virtue,” where each person loves the other “for their own sake,” as another self, and wishes and does the good for the other. (Kant later echoes this in a different idea with the idea that people are ends in themselves, never merely means.)
And of course this feels great to imagine: kicking it with our buddies, making jokes at all those silly people outside our group and, in a rare moment of vulnerability, muttering “I love you, man” before awkwardly gulping down our beverage or suddenly needing to use the bathroom. This is the easy face of philia. But Aristotle is also interested in how this kind of friendship holds a city together. Political friendship is the background trust, the sense that “we’re in this together,” without which a society (a polis) collapses into factions. The question, then, is how far this can stretch. What happens when someone isn’t really “one of us”?
Martin Luther King Jr., influenced by Gandhi, takes that question into the teeth of segregation and develops agape as a love that does not wait for reciprocity or equality of status before it acts. In his sermon “Loving Your Enemies,” he insists that agape “does not begin by discriminating between worthy and unworthy people, or any qualities that people possess,” but is “understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill for all.” Which, let’s be honest, is a pretty fucking hard thing to do in reality. It is one thing to love your mates as “another self”; it is another thing entirely to love the sheriff who drags you off to jail.
King is careful to say that agape is not sentimentality. You do not have to like your enemies. You do not have to feel warmth toward the people who are blocking your vote, underpaying your labour, or closing their doors when you need help. Agape is a decision to will their good anyway, to refuse to deny their humanity even while you resist their actions. Where Aristotle’s highest friendship is mutual and usually reserved for those already roughly equal in virtue and status, King pushes love out into profoundly unequal relationships like the oppressed and oppressor or the jailed and jailer.
That doesn’t mean King is simply throwing Aristotle out. In many ways, his move is dialectical and he becomes more Aristotelian than Aristotle. King agrees that a just society cannot be sustained by law and coercion alone; it needs a kind of civic love, a real concern for one another’s flourishing that goes beyond contracts and fear. But he widens the scope dramatically. In Birmingham, the problem is precisely that white citizens have refused Black citizens the status required for Aristotelian friendship. In the Letter from a Birmingham Jail, King uses the line the “single garment of destiny” meaning that whether you acknowledge it or not, we are already woven together. King is collapsing the category of enemy altogether by insisting on shared destiny.
Agape becomes the means by which the excluded insist on their membership and call the whole community to a truer form of itself. If Aristotle thinks a society falls apart without friendship between citizens, King shows you what it looks like when half the city is told they are not really citizens at all, but chooses to answer that with an even more radical insistence on shared life, not with violent revenge.
In practice, King’s notion of agape enacts a kind of one‑sided political friendship. Black communities act as if the cohesion already exists in just, equal form, addressing opponents as moral agents and potential partners even when those opponents refuse the role. Sit‑ins, boycotts and marches aren’t just tactics, they are a way of saying, “We will behave like citizens of a shared city, and in doing so we will expose your failure to be the friends you claim to be.” They dramatise the gap between the written in law and myth, and the experience lived on the street and in the workplace.
Skipping heartbeats and flushed cheeks might get more playlists and movie scripts, but the quieter, tougher love of friendship that becomes agape, the ‘I love you, man’ that somehow stretches all the way to ‘love your enemies’, is what actually holds a world together. Maybe the real question is what would happen if we started acting as if even our enemies might one day be our friends.