What is love?

Introduction

According to psychologist Robert Sternberg, love can be considered to have three main components: passion, intimacy, and commitment. Passion is sexual arousal and an intense desire to be with another person; it is expressed through hugging, kissing, and sexual intimacy. Intimacy is a feeling of closeness and connectedness and is expressed through communication and doing things to support the other person. Commitment is a decision that one loves the other person and wants to maintain that love over time. Commitment is often expressed through fidelity, and the institution of marriage makes one’s commitment legally binding.

The amount of love that one feels depends on the strength of these three components. The kind of love one feels depends on the mixture of these components. One might have a commitment to a partner but feel little passion; or one might be passionately in love but not be able to communicate the deep feelings that go with intimacy. The amount or kind of love one partner experiences in a relationship might not be the same as the other partner’s experience. Misunderstandings often result, for example, when one partner thinks the relationship contains commitment and the other partner sees the relationship as only a passionate one. Finally, a loving relationship can change over time. In marriage, the passion may fade over the years, while intimacy and commitment bloom.

Passionate Love

Passionate love is the kind of love sometimes described as “love at first sight.” It occurs suddenly, and one feels as if one has fallen into love. Passionate love is a state of sexual arousal without the intimacy and commitment components. One knows that one is passionately in love when one is always daydreaming about the other person, longs to be constantly with the other person, and feels ecstatic when with the other person. Passionate love thrives on unavailability. As in unrequited love, either the loved one does not reciprocate the intensity of the lover’s affections or the lovers cannot get together as often as they wish. Being loved is reinforcing, and some psychologists say that passionate love may survive only under conditions of intermittent reinforcement, where uncertainty about when one will be reinforced plays a major role. Romeo and Juliet’s passionate love, for example, was inflamed by the prohibitions of their feuding families.

In passionate love, partners idealize each other. They engage in perceptual accentuation, or seeing what they want to see. Only the good features of each other are noticed and enhanced. The more the partners live in the illusion of their ideals, the more intense is the passionate love. Passionate love really is “blind.”

Most people think of passionate love as being true love, and many people think that passionate love is the only kind of love; they expect passionate love to last forever. Despite their expectations (and wishes), passionate love does not last. Indeed, passionate love appears to last a maximum of two and a half years. After that time, according to Charles Hill, Zick Rubin, and Letitia Paplau, almost one-half of dating couples report having broken up. As partners become more familiar with each other, illusions are shattered and the passion wanes. Unfortunately, some people believe that this is the end of love.

Romantic Love

For many people, however, love does persist—in the form of romantic love. Romantic love is passionate love with the added component of intimacy. The romantic ideal, which has existed since the medieval time of courtly love, looks much like passionate love. It contains the belief that love is fated and uncontrollable, strikes at first sight, transcends all social boundaries, and mixes agony and ecstasy. This ideal is very much alive today; it is reflected in romance novels, motion pictures, and advertisements. Psychologists have found that this type of love is a poor basis for marriage, which requires steady companionship and objectivity. If a relationship is to survive, romantic passion is not enough.

Rubin has shown that there is a type of romantic love that contains intimate communication and caring. In his study, loving feelings of dependency, exclusivity, and caring were contrasted with the type of liking that exists in friendship. Men, more than women, tended to blur the distinction between liking and loving. Both sexes, though, often experience liking the person they are in love with. Rubin also noticed that one can tell if two people are “in love” simply by observing them: Partners who are strongly in love exhibit more mutual eye contact than partners who are weakly in love.

Intimacy without passion or a long-term commitment is experienced as liking. One feels closeness, bondedness, and warmth toward the other—as one does in friendship. There is a willingness to let the other person see even the disliked parts of oneself and a feeling of being accepted when these parts are disclosed. Intimacy includes open communication, acceptance, and the sharing of oneself and one’s resources. There is a high degree of trust in intimate relationships.

Companionate Love

When commitment is added to intimacy, one experiences what psychologists Ellen Berscheid and Elaine Walster call companionate love. There is a deep attachment that is based on extensive familiarity with the loved one. Companionate love often encompasses a tolerance for the partner’s shortcomings, along with a desire to overcome difficulties and conflicts in a relationship. There is a commitment to the ongoing nurturing of the relationship and to an active caring for the partner, even during rough times. Marriages in which the physical attraction has waned but intimate caring and commitment have increased are characterized by this type of love. When researchers asked couples who had been married for at least fifteen years what kept their relationships alive, they put long-term commitment at the top of the list. The romantic passion that brings a couple together is not the force that keeps them together. Each partner must trust that the other is committed to nurturing support, acceptance, and communication in the relationship.

Attraction

Psychologists have used theories and laboratory studies to answer the basic question, “Why do some people have a happy love life while others have unhappy relationships?” Part of the answer comes from the partner one chooses.

One may think that opposites attract, but psychologist Donn Byrne has shown that people are attracted to those who are similar to them in attractiveness, interests, intelligence, education, age, family background, religion, and attitudes. Researchers have noted what is called a “matching phenomenon” when choosing romantic partners. This phenomenon is described as a tendency to choose partners who are a good match to ourselves in attractiveness and other traits. Studies have shown that those who were a good match in physical attractiveness were more likely to be dating longer than couples who were not well matched, and that married couples are more closely matched in attractiveness than couples who are casually dating. Furthermore, Rubin and his associates have found that dating couples who eventually broke up were less well matched in age, educational ambitions, intelligence, and physical attractiveness than those who stayed together.

Another factor that is extremely important in predicting attraction is proximity. Studies have shown that most people marry someone who lives in the same neighborhood or works at the same job; and it is not simply a matter of physical proximity, but a matter of how often one crosses paths with the potential mate that determines the likelihood of romantic involvement. Overall, people tend to like and be attracted to those who have the potential to reward them. People tend to be attracted to those who are similarly attractive, who share their opinions and attitudes, whom they have grown accustomed to meeting, and with whom they have shared positive experiences.

Love in Relationships

After one finds a partner, whether one is happy or unhappy in love depends on the relationship one creates. According to Cindy Hazan and PhilipShaver, both adults and teenagers recreate the same type of relationship they experienced with their parents during childhood. Secure lovers create an intimate relationship that is neither excessively dependent nor independent. They bring a secure sense of self and an interest in developing the independence of their partner into the relationship. Avoidant lovers are overly independent. They get nervous when their partner gets too close because they do not trust the other person completely. Anxious-ambivalent lovers are too dependent; they often worry that their partner does not really love them or will not want to stay with them. Thus, many lovers end up playing out the script that they were taught as children.

Men often follow a different script from that followed by women when they are in love. Men tend to choose a partner on the basis of physical attractiveness, while women emphasize interpersonal warmth and occupational status. Romance involves both passion and affection; men, however, tend to get hooked into the passion first, while women tend to want the affection as a prerequisite to sex. As the relationship matures, men want the affection as much as the sex, and women get equally excited by sexual stimuli as do men. Who, then, one might ask, are the real romantics? Men agree with more of the statements about romantic love; they fall in love more quickly; and they hold on to a waning affair more so than do women. After the breakup of a relationship, a man feels more lonely, obsessed with what went wrong, and depressed than does a woman.

Indeed, men and women may inhabit different emotional worlds. Men and women both want intimacy, but they express themselves differently. Men are more likely to be doers and women to be talkers. For example, a man will wash a woman’s car or bring her flowers to show he loves her, while a woman will tell a man how much she loves him. When asked what causes an emotion such as love, men will say it is something in the world outside themselves, such as seeing an attractive woman. Women, on the other hand, will attribute being in love to positive interactions with others or to internal factors such as moods. These socially learned differences between men and women in their styles of intimacy are often a source of tension between them. Women sometimes want men to talk more, while men will want women to stop talking. Finally, some men will sacrifice intimacy because they fear loss of independence, while some women sacrifice independence because they fear a loss of intimacy.

History of Research on Love

Psychologists have approached the topic of love from a variety of perspectives. In the early 1900s, clinical psychologists looked at love mainly in terms of its sexual component. For example, Sigmund Freud defined love as sublimated sexuality. By the middle of the twentieth century, humanistic psychologists such as Abraham Maslow, Erich Fromm, and Carl R. Rogers saw love as including the empathy, responsibility, and respect that is characteristic of friendship. Next, there was an attempt to measure love as distinct from friendship, with Rubin creating his liking and loving scales.

Since love involves emotions, motivations, and cognitions, Walster and Berscheid drew on the earlier work of Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer to devise a multifactor explanation of love called thetwo-factor theory. They theorize that love arises when a person is physiologically aroused and labels that arousal as love. For example, being in a dangerous situation creates physiological arousal, and, if one is with an attractive partner, one could feel that the sweating palms and pounding heart mean that one is falling in love. Researchers have found that men approached by an unknown, attractive woman as they crossed a dangerous bridge were more likely to ask her out and indicate attraction than men approached by the woman while crossing a sturdy, safe bridge. Studies show that watching scary movies, riding on roller coasters, and exercising are all arousing activities that increase the likelihood that people will be attracted to one another.

Social psychologist Byrne tried to explain both the passionate feeling and the friendship feeling as arising from the reinforcement one gets from one’s lover. People like, and love, people who give them rewards, whether the reward is sexual gratification or a feeling of being needed.

Although many social psychologists have focused on separate concepts, such as interpersonal attraction, social exchange, and cognitive consistency, to explain love, Sternberg combined all these concepts in his triangular theory of love. Sternberg contends that liking and loving are interrelated phenomena and that there are different types of love that develop from different combinations of liking and loving. Sternberg’s theory explains the difference between a partner’s love for his or her child and lovers’ love for each other.

Historically, conceptions of love have been tied to economic conditions and to social role definitions. One example of these economic conditions is the Industrial Revolution, which moved men out of the fields and into the factories. Women also moved—from the fields into the home. Men’s social role was to produce; women’s was to love (provide nurturance and intimacy). These roles created societal expectations for the nature of love. Thus, one’s expectations determine whether one will be satisfied or disappointed with love. For example, Western society often expects a woman to define herself in terms of her relationship with a man; love is closely linked to sex and marriage. Yet women live longer than men, which often means that a woman will be living without a man in her later years. Women can retain society’s expectations or can change their expectations so that they can connect with others on a basis other than traditional concepts of love. Psychologists will continue to investigate changing expectations about loving relationships.

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