It’s an ancient Greek word for love and it takes it root meaning from the word Philos which means friend.

Briefly explaining, Phileo is love on the level of casual friendship. Before you are friends with someone or you say you like something, there has to be things you like about the person or thing. Can be physical attraction, similar interests, etc

It’s a good kind of love in my opinion because God had this kind of love towards us and Jesus especially – He created everything and made man incharge of all His creations on earth, there has to be a special preference He has for us that He made us incharge else goats or cows could have easily been incharge.

To answer a question that may be coming to your heart, is this kind of love, phileo, enough to start a relationship may/should lead to marriage with someone? The straight answer is NO. Why? Let me first state that God should be the foundation on which every marriage and relationship is built else it has big potentials of hitting the rocks – No God, No relationship and I believe we understand what I mean by relationship here is a permanent one which we should hope to have instead of jumping from one person to another. If you are already in a marriage that’s not built on God, it’s not too late, just hand the marriage over to God and do what the bible says as a husband or a wife. To answer the question, 1. Physical attributes, personalities and all these things that cause people to have preferences change over time, so what happens when all you were attracted to is gone? 2. If because of some preferences you are thinking of a relationship with one person, if you see another person with something else you like and maybe more, you “fall in love” with that new person. Then what? Another person comes and the cycle continues.

According to Myles Munroe, phileo tends to be conditional love. As long as certain conditions exists, the relationship exists. If the condition changes, the relationship changes. Conditions in a relationship creates expectations, expectations inevitably result in disappointment.

So what is true love? We will get to find out in new posts to come✌

God bless!