How Many Types of Love Are There? Ancient Wisdom Meets the Ubuntu Lens

The Seven Greek Words for Love

Ancient Greek philosophers named seven distinct forms of love, each describing a different way people bond, commit, and care for one another. None of the seven is more real than the others — they simply describe different rooms in the same house.

Eros — Passionate, Romantic Love

Eros is the love most people mean when they say the word: intense romantic longing, physical attraction, emotional pull. It can be fleeting or lifelong, and it can bring out both the best in us and our deepest vulnerability. When it comes to expressing this kind of love through cultural celebration, you may find yourself weighing 5 reasons to or not to celebrate Valentine’s Day.

Philia — the Love of Friendship

Philia is the bond of deep, mutual affection between friends, chosen family, or a whole community — built on trust, loyalty, and camaraderie rather than physical attraction or blood ties. Many people find philia to be the most enduring love they experience across a lifetime.

Storge — Familial Love

Storge is the natural bond between parents and children, siblings, or extended family — often expressed less through words than through presence, protection, and shared history. It is frequently the foundation other kinds of love build on top of.

Ludus — Playful Love

Ludus is flirtation and infatuation without deep commitment — the lighthearted, in-the-moment affection often associated with new romance or a crush. It is not meant to last forever, and that is not a flaw; it is simply what it is.

Pragma — Practical, Enduring Love

Pragma is the love of long partnership: patience, compromise, and mutual investment built over years. It is less about intensity and more about the quiet work of choosing each other, again and again.

Philautia — Love of Self

Philautia is the respect and care you hold for yourself — not vanity, but the recognition of your own worth, and the boundaries that protect it. For a deeper look at why this practice is foundational, visit the importance of self-love and care.

Agape — Unconditional, Universal Love

Agape is love that asks nothing in return: compassion extended to strangers, to community, to the world, without requiring reciprocity. Ancient Greek writers described it as the love that transcends every boundary — the closest the Greek list comes to describing love as something larger than a relationship between two people.

What the Greek List Leaves Out: Ubuntu and the Love That Makes a Person

The seven Greek words all assume the same starting point: an individual self, deciding how and whether to love. Ubuntu philosophy — found across many Southern and Central African traditions, and articulated in the Zulu and Xhosa proverb umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu — starts from a different premise entirely: a person is a person through other persons. Kenyan-born theologian and philosopher John Mbiti gave this its most quoted formulation in African Religions and Philosophy (1969): “I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am.”

This is not a poetic flourish. It is an ontological claim — a statement about what a person actually is. In this framework, love is not something an already-complete self decides to extend outward. Love, care, and relationship are part of what makes the self exist in the first place. You do not become fully human alone; you become human through your bonds with others. Archbishop Desmond Tutu drew on this same philosophy when he wrote about interdependence and shared humanity in No Future Without Forgiveness (1999), and philosopher Mogobe Ramose has argued, in African Philosophy Through Ubuntu (1999), that ubuntu should be understood as a complete philosophy of being — not merely a pleasant ethic layered on top of individualism.

Where Agape and Ubuntu Meet — and Where They Part

Of the seven Greek forms, agape comes closest to Ubuntu’s spirit — both describe love that reaches past the boundary of a single relationship. But the two start from different premises, and the difference matters. Agape describes a self that chooses to extend outward, beyond its own edges, toward others. Ubuntu does not start with a bounded self that then makes a generous choice — it starts with the claim that the self was never bounded to begin with.

That distinction shows up in daily life, not just philosophy. In many African communities, child-rearing has traditionally been a communal responsibility, not a private, nuclear-family matter — the root of the now-familiar saying that it takes a village to raise a child. Grief and celebration follow the same pattern: a funeral or a wedding belongs to the whole community, not only to the immediate family. Belgian missionary Placide Tempels documented an early, imperfect version of this relational worldview in Bantu Philosophy (1945) — a text written through a colonial lens that later African philosophers, including Ramose and Kwasi Wiredu, have both drawn from and directly challenged. We hold that history honestly: the observation was real, even where the observer’s framing needed correcting by the people whose philosophy it actually was.

None of this makes the Greek list wrong. It makes it partial — a map drawn from inside a single self, asking what love feels like from there. Ubuntu asks a different question: what love makes possible between selves that were never separate to begin with. At Ubuntu Village, we hold both maps — the psychology of the individual heart, and the philosophy of a community that makes hearts possible in the first place. I am because we are.