Love
-We have this idea of love in our culture and it is a requirement of a long-term mateship
Love and Marriage
-Is a very new idea
-In ancient Rome, you married for economic and political reasons
-Happiness and pleasure was not what marriage was about
-Love was thought to be dangerous and doomed
-During the middle to high ages, there was something special for the aristocrats--courtly love
-An aristocrat woman would be approached by a young knight and he had a quest--to love
someone
-This was a time of a lot of romanticism
-Shakespeare’s time (1500s)--writes about marriage and happiness but this was more of a fantasy
at the time (the idea that love is doomed is still prevalent)
-Romantic era (late 1700s-1800s)--starting to focus on love as a positive thing, maybe a long
term relationship based on love could work
-But the idea that you had to marry based on love was not prevalent
-The vast majority of marriages around the world are still arranged--the hope is that they will get
along, have a good marriage and possibly fall in love
-Arranged marriages are often about family ties and keeping social classes together and that love
will eventually follow
-For a 100 years love and marriage have come together, but before that they were separated
-In our culture now, the love can die out
What is love?
-Sternberg’s Triangular theory of love: love is a multifaceted and complex thing and we have to
define it carefully in order to understand things
-Romantic love
-Companionate love: often valued in other cultures, and is present in marriages
Triangular Theory of Love
-There are three building locks of love (3 points on the triangle)
1. Intimacy: the warmth you have in any relationship with anyone (an emotional component)--
involves things like understanding, communication, support and sharing
2. Heat/Passion: the motivational or drive component of love, the drive to be with someone (the
sexual component)
3. Commitment: a cognitive decision that you are going to spend your life wiht this person, you
are devoted to the relationship and are going to work to maintain it
-These can be on a continuum (high, medium or low)-- but we are only going to talk about high
and low -If you are low on all three of these things then you are experiencing non-love--its unrelated to
love and has nothing to do with someone (an acquaintance with no ties)
-If intimacy is high but the other 2 are low, then you are experiencing friendship (you have
liking, and really like to spend time with a person)
-If high on passion and low on the other two then you are experiencing infatuation, you have a
crush, you have a drive to be around them (you don’t really know them but you want to be
around them)
-If high on commitment and low on other two then you are experiencing empty love, you have
no intimacy and no passion but you have decided to stay with them, this is viewed as the end
point of a relationship in our culture but in arranged marriages this is the beginning point of love
and once you get to know them you can experience intimacy and passionate love
-High intimacy and high passion= romantic love --this does not have commitment e.g. a summer
love
-High intimacy and high commitment= companionate love--this does not have passion e.g. a
long happy marriage (they like one another and have warmth with one another)--these
relationships survive
-High passion and high commitment= fatuous love--they are good looking and you want to have
a lot of sex with them and you want to commit with them so you get married (when you don’t
even know the person) --probably likely to have a quick divorce e.g. Las Vegas marriage--in the
heat of the passion you decide you want to spend the rest of your life with this person
-If you are high in all three then you have consummate love e.g. someone who is just about to get
married would have consummate love
-Passion is likely to go up and down so you can go back and forth from companionate love and
consummate love
More on Romantic Love
-It is made up of passion and intimacy
-Often in romantic love, the warmth (intimacy) becomes a desperate hot love, affected by the
passion
Where does passion come from?--its the drive and motivation in a relationship, it is arousal
-If you feel arousal around someone and you think it indicates that you must love them, then
thats the passion
-The reason why
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