what love is

Need-love cries to God from our poverty; Gift-love longs to serve, or even to suffer for, God; Appreciative-love says: ‘We give thanks to thee for thy great glory’; Need-love says of a woman ‘I cannot live without her’; Gift-love longs to give her happiness, comfort, protection–if possible, wealth; Appreciative-love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him, and will not be wholly dejected by losing her, would rather have it so than never to have seen her at all… it’s probably impossible to love any human being simply ‘too much’. We may love too much in proportion to our love for God; but it is the smallness of our love for God, not the greatness of our love for the man, that constitutes the inordinacy. C.S. Lewis, Four Loves, Ch. 6