I’ve been thinking about love. It is, at base, what I write about. In both of my current works-in-progress, the hero and heroine have known one another for years, but faced powerful barriers to having a future together. I need to show a love that changes and grows as they do, until they can work through the problems.

In novellas, and particularly in short stories, I often make the hero and heroine separated lovers, old friends or at least acquaintances. Shorter formats give less time for the relationship to develop. People who don’t know one another can fall in love in a flash, but I need enough space to convince the reader that this love will last. That mixture of euphoria, infatuation, and lust that kicks our brain into a mating frenzy is wonderful while it lasts, but love is more than that.

I’ve written elsewhere about levels of intimacy, and why I don’t want to write at the shallow end of the intimacy pool. Today’s philosophical rambling is more about how to take things deep.

C.S. Lewis wrote a book called The Four Loves. He used Latin names but in essence, he talks about:

• affection — the love that arises from familiarity
• friendship — the love that is based on shared interests, activities, and points of view
• romantic — the love that binds a couple together and expresses itself in physical intimacy
• spiritual — the love God (whomever or whatever you suppose God to be) gives to us and that we give to God, which we show by giving to those in need, whether known or not, whether worthy or not.

You can see that you can burrow deeper into each of these, so you’ve got a kind of moving scale:

• affection — at one end, the slightly increased comfort a person feels with a stranger who belongs to the same club or who went to the same school; at the other, the love between parent and child
• friendship — at one end, people who have chatted with one another occasionally in an online group or met over coffee after bowling club; at the other, people who share ideas, experiences and activities, and who will put their own lives on hold to help one another
• romantic — at the one end, the flash-in-the-pan experience that is largely lust and need; at the other, a deep and unwavering commitment where the happiness of one is needed for the happiness of the other
• spiritual — at one end, spare change in a beggar’s bowl; at the other, a life lived entirely in service to rescuing sex slaves in Thailand or building wells in Kenya or providing school lunches in Baltimore or some other specific group of people in need.

Of course, in a couple worth reading about, by the end of the novel you’re going to have all four, to at least some level. At least one of them needs to start with some sense of commitment to those in need (because without that, they’re not the kind of people I want to spend several hours with). Over the course of the book, I want to see them develop quite a bit of affection, a good friendship, and a strong attraction that goes beyond the basics.  It takes time for those to grow. It takes time to show them.

It’s easier in a novel. Easier still in a series. One of the reasons I like mystery series with a couple as the main protagonists is that the author has time to explore how love changes and deepens, but you can get some of the way even in a novella. You can even hint at it in a short story.

That’s the challenge I set myself every story I write. That’s what I mean by a love story.