The Four Loves: Eros

In the The Four Loves, Lewis describes the four kinds of love: Storge (affection), Philia (friendship), Eros (romance), and Agape (unconditional). I found our reading, focused on the Eros, or romantic love, to be extremely insightful. Especially, when our culture encourage us to do everything by feeling and impulse, it's a breath of fresh air to actually read a chapter that philosophizes love.
The first point that stood out to me was the process, Lewis describes, in which people go through when they fall in love.

Very often what comes first is simply a delighted pre-occupation with the Beloved -- a general, unspecified pre-occupation with her in her totality A man in this state really hasn't leisure to think of sex. He is too busy thinking of a person. The fact that she is a woman is far less important than the fact that she is herself.

Eros singles out the Beloved from everyone else, simply because she is herself. In a poetic way, Lewis describes the first moments when one falls in love.

Eros enters him like an invader, taking over and reorganising, one by one, the institutions of a conquered country. It may have taken over man others before it reaches the sex in him; and it will reorganize that too.

 Given that this is what comes first, it really shows how messed up the society is, especially when people meet after a drink and immediately have "the leisure to think of sex." I guess it also shows the complete lack of love in these activities.
Another part that stood out is Lewis' analogy of the carton of cigarettes.

 Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. How much he cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude to her five minutes after fruition (one does not keep the carton after one has smoked the cigarettes). Now Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. In some mysterious but quite indisputable fashion the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give.

 I like how Lewis always returns to the point that in Eros, the man does not desire just any woman, but specifically the woman he is in love with.