Eros, from which we derive ‘erotic’ is the child of Aphrodite and Ares and the Greek counterpart to the Roman Cupid. He is associated with being the God of fertility, love and sexual desire. He randomly and mischievously aims his arrows causing people to fall in love, such as when he caused Apollo to fall in love with the nymph Daphne after he ridiculed his arching skills, and when he made Madea enchant Jason to obtain the Golden Fleece from her father King Aeëtes of Colchis.
Eros represents the symbolic archetype of the indiscriminating hand of fate, pairing up unlikely lovers in throes of passion and eroticism, completely beyond their will.
Eros toys with his victims - the Greek Poet Anakreon in 6th Century B.C. claimed “Like a blacksmith with his huge hammer, Eros has knocked me again and doused me in a wintry ditch.”
Whether love is indeed an unavoidable fate, or subject to ones will is a matter of question. In the Western world we often require love as a prerequisite to marriage and union, while many cultures in other parts of the world view love as a luxury that grows later within a union upon which financial and social needs are first met.
Through a love union one learns to explore the aspect of Self through other, learning selflessness and sacrifice, increasingly transcending the subtle lines of ego separation.
C.S. Lewis expands upon this notion in stating “The event of falling in love is of such a nature that we are right to reject as intolerable the idea that it should be transitory. In one high bound it has overleaped the massive of our selfhood; it has made appetite itself altruistic, tossed personal happiness aside as a triviality and planted the interests of another in the centre of our being. Spontaneously and without effort we have fulfilled the law (towards one person) by loving our neighbour as ourselves. It is an image, a foretaste, of what we must become to all if Love Himself rules in us without a rival. It is even (well used) a preparation for that.”