04/02/2026
❤️❤️❤️
Seven Kinds of Love and Why Your Horse Is Better at Most of Them💘
Love has been aggressively downsized.
In the modern world, love is mostly marketed as a feeling. Preferably intense. Preferably validating. Preferably permanent. If it fades, flattens, or feels a bit off one day, we assume something is broken. The relationship. The other person. Or "us".
The Ancient Greeks were less sentimental and far more useful. They understood love not as one thing, but as several distinct forms that together supported a good life. Eros. Philia. Pragma. Philautia. Ludus. Storge. Agape.
What is striking is not how poetic this is, but how many of these forms of love modern life quietly bins while insisting we just need to feel harder.
We chase emotional intensity and validation while starving ourselves of shared purpose, competence, and belonging that does not require constant emotional performance or at least focusing on emotional monitoring everyone and everything around them. We ask romantic love to carry the psychological load once held by community, craft, contribution, and meaning. It is not built for that job. No wonder anxiety and depression are having a moment.
This also explains our deep affection for Pegasus.
Pegasus is not a symbol of love in Greek thought. He is a symbol of elevation, inspiration, and escape. He flies. He transcends. He cannot be held. He does not muck out stables. He is the exact opposite of follow through.
Which makes him a perfect mascot for how we now misunderstand love.
We want lift without load. Transcendence without traction. Connection without commitment. We want love to feel like flight and are baffled when it turns out to be mostly feeding, maintenance, and not losing your mind when things go sideways.
This is where horses enter the story. Not as therapy. Not as emotional mirrors. As work.
Horsemanship, when approached honestly, resurrects the unfashionable loves.
Philia comes back first. Trust built through consistency, clarity, and shared effort. Horses do not care how deeply you feel. They care whether your behaviour makes sense. Reliability is the currency. Tears are not legal tender.
Then there is pragma. The long game. Daily care. Repetition. Decisions that favour long term soundness over short term gratification. Love expressed as follow through rather than fireworks. Less Pegasus. More grit.
Philautia follows quietly. Not the affirm yourself in the mirror kind, but the sturdier self respect that comes from competence. You learn to regulate yourself instead of outsourcing that job to the horse. Confidence emerges not because you believe in yourself, but because you can now do the thing.
And then there is philia again, this time between people. Real horse communities are built on shared practice, shared learning, and shared responsibility. You belong because you contribute, not because you vibrate at the right frequency. There is humour. Disagreement. Growth. Occasionally a shared disaster. Bonding, but functional.
This does not mean horses cure depression or anxiety. But they do reintroduce forms of love that modern life has misplaced while busy optimising feelings. Love grounded in action. In usefulness. In mastery. In being reliably needed.
Horses are grounding and grounding is anchoring in life.
When love is allowed to be something you do, not just something you feel, it becomes far more resilient.
And your horse, inconveniently, already knows that.
Collectable Advice 148/365. Share or Save this and spread the idea that love is way more than you obsess over. But no copying, pasting and AI'ing - that's not cool.😎
And I have REBUILD (in comments) in April and what you will discover through this aligns with this post ❤
