The Dance Between Eros and Agape

I’ve spent much of the past few years contemplating the meaning of love and life given my personal cirumstances. I’ve always appreciated how Pope John Paul II explored it in his seminal Theology of the Body lectures, particularly the distinction he draws between eros and agape. Those early reflections conveyed a kind of purity and balance I’ve rarely encountered elsewhere.

There’s a dance between eros and agape, between the selfish and the selfless, the passionate and the pure. While I don’t ultimately agree with all of the conclusions John Paul II reached, I deeply respect how he articulated their intertwinement. His framing invites reflection on the tension between desire and devotion, and on how both can coexist in the human experience of love.

That tension came back to me recently while reading about Richard Feynman, not in the context of physics but of love. While researching some of his work from the Second World War era, I once again came across a letter he wrote to his wife, Arline, sixteen months after her death. It remains one of the simplest and most sincere modern expressions of love I’ve ever encountered, from one of the most brilliant scientific minds of the twentieth century.

Richard Feynman’s Letter to Arline

17 October 1946

D’Arline,

I adore you, sweetheart.

I know how much you like to hear that, but I don’t only write it because you like it, I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write it to you.

It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you, almost two years, but I know you’ll excuse me because you understand how I am, stubborn and realistic, and I thought there was no sense in writing.

But now I know, my darling wife, that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing. I want to tell you I love you. I want to love you. I always will love you.

I find it hard to understand what it means to love you after you are dead, but I still want to comfort and take care of you, and I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you. I want to do little projects with you. I never thought until just now that we can’t do that any more. You were the “idea-woman” and general instigator of all our wild adventures.

When you were ill you worried because you couldn’t give me something you thought I needed. You needn’t have worried. Just as I told you then, there was no real need, because I loved you in so many ways. And now it’s even more true, you can give me nothing now, yet I love you so that you stand in my way of loving anyone else, and I want you to stand there. You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive.

I know you’d tell me I’m being foolish and that you want me to be happy. You’d be surprised that I don’t even have a girlfriend (except you, sweetheart) after two years. But I can’t help it. I’ve met many nice women, but they all seem ashes. You are real.

My darling wife, I adore you.

I love my wife. My wife is dead.

Rich

P.S. Please excuse my not mailing this, but I don’t know your new address.

There’s something hauntingly beautiful in how Feynman’s words bridge the physical and the eternal, the space between eros and agape. In that space, love becomes something both human and divine, a force that transcends death itself.

This letter reminded me that love’s truest expression isn’t in perfection or permanence, but in presence, the willingness to give fully even when there’s nothing left to gain. Perhaps that’s where eros and agape finally meet, in the quiet act of loving without expectation, and remembering without end.