"Love is God? C.S. Lewis & The Four Loves"

My brother Sam has been recommending that I read C.S. Lewis' The Four Loves for several weeks now. So I stole it from him and I'm reading it. I'm just 57 pages into the 147 page book and already it is resonating deeply with my experiences of failure in love. Lewis' words so often do the seemingly impossible work of sorting out incredibly subtle and destructive distortions and perversions. In the introduction the sly mistake of 'making love a god' is put well: 

"We may give our human loves the unconditional allegiance that we owe only to God. Then they become gods; then they become demons. Then they will destroy us and also themselves. For natural loves that become gods do not remain loves. They are still called so, but can become in fact complicated forms of hatred."  (pg 8)

Lewis goes on to describe the demon that Affection (storge) can become when it becomes a god. He notes that all the unhappy homes are not unhappy because affection is absent, but that "it can be present causing the unhappiness" and that  Shakespeare's King Lear is an 'unlovable old man devoured with a ravenous appetite for affection". 

"The most unlovable parent (or child) may be full of such a ravenous love. But it works to their own misery and everyone else's. The situation becomes suffocating. If people are already unlovable a continual demand on their part (as of right) to be loved, their manifest sense of injury, their reproaches, whether loud and clamorous or merely implicit in every look and gesture of resentful self-pity, produce in us a sense of guilt (they are intended to do so) for a fault we could not have avoided and cannot cease to commit. They seal up the very fountain for which they are thirsty. If ever, at some favoured moment, any germ of Affection for them stirs in us, their demand for more and still more petrifies us again. And of course, such people always desire the same proof of our love; we are to join their side...  

All the while they remain unaware of the real road, "If you would be loved, be lovable."   (pg 41) 

When love becomes a god, it becomes a demon.  Without submission to God, even the very best gifts from God will destroy us and those around us.