Create Your Own Book of Love

An Eros Journal for Your Special Someone

Watch the video for the full details, it’s better than this low effort post :)

What’s the most romantic way to keep a journal? Who cares? You should, because the journal I have in mind isn’t just for you, it’s for your significant other. I’m talking about a journal of love (eros [ερως]) that you create as a gift for your special someone.  This is a journal wherein you right love letters to your spouse or your future spouse, collected all in one spot, and presented to as a gift on a special occasion.

Now why eros? Well here I’m pulling from C.S. Lewis’s Four Loves where Lewis recounts the four classical Greek words for love and their associated concepts:

1.     Storge: fondness, empathy, familial love.

2.     Philia: friendship bond love.

3.     Eros: romantic love (not just sexual desire or infatuation)

4.     Agape: Unconditional “God” love.

So this is a journal of romantic love for your significant other. If you want to read up on Lewis’s distinctions, grab the book here and support my work (it’s a really great book): https://amzn.to/4btjplV .

[I’ll note that my old professor, D.A. Carson, does a New Testament study of the four Greek words for ‘love’ as they’re used in biblical Koine Greek, and at least in refence to God’s love, Carson finds five concepts developed from these four words. Here’s a good blog post summary: https://www.ttschmidt.com/blog/5-ways-the-bible-speaks-about-the-love-of-god-difficult-doctrine-of-the-love-of-god-carson and here’s the book: https://amzn.to/48a8k6r ]

Back to the Eros journal. This is a place for you to share your thoughts, desires, and time-bound feelings with your spouse or future spouse. I started mine for my wife three years before I met her and four and a half years before our wedding. I included my life goals, prayers for her, for our future children, prayers to God to help me become a good man and the kind of man who could make a good husband. I added poems I found which I thought my future wife would enjoy. I made up some of my own poems for her. I added song lyrics and epigraphs and undying promises and devotions. I did this for the three years prior to meeting my wife just hoping that someday she’d actually come along. She did, and she’s awesome and she loved the journal when I surprised her with it on our wedding night.

Applications for you:

a.     Unmarrieds: want to get married someday? Consider starting an Eros journal for your future spouse today and add something like an entry a month. Address the entries with a general term like “wife”, “husband”, “babe”, “spouse”—I can’t continue this is making me uncomfortable, just pick something general!

b.     Marrieds: consider starting an Eros journal for your spouse to give them at a special time. Start it this Valentine’s Day and give it to them next year, or for a special anniversary. Don’t feel like you need to fill it all the way up—I didn’t fill it all before our wedding day. I continue to add to the journal and put it on my wife’s nightstand when there’s a new entry for her to read.

Watch the video for the details: