The various kinds of love are classified by ancient Greek terms, of which the following are examples:
- Eros: (desirous love)
- Storge: (affectionate & pairbonding love)
- Agape: (charitable love)
- Pragma: (practical/pragmatic love)
- Philia: (friendship love)
- Narcissism: (self-love)
This list captures the more common forms of love, even though more subtypes could be added. Missing from the usual lists, however, is one of the more important forms of love for the contemporary era:
- Amour: (romantic love)
In the past romantic love was classified by the vague and meaningless catch-all label eros, a word that has lost all specificity and become little more than a synonym for the English word love – itself another nonspecific term. For that reason I have returned eros above to its original Greek meaning of desire, and designated romantic love by the popular European term amour.