History and Types of Love

Brief History of Love

• Historically, marriages were based on political, economic, practical, or familial reasons.

• Nowadays, people generally require romantic love for marriage.

• Attitudes toward love have shifted over time across four dimensions,

• Cultural value: whether love is desirable

• Sexuality: whether love should be sexual

• Sexual Orientation: whether love should be same-sex or heterosexual

• Marital Status: whether love should be reserved for spouses

• In the past, love was considered madness.

• Over the course of 500 years, people began to view passionate love as desirable.

• The 17th and 18th centuries marked the beginning of the idea that romantic passion could lead to a happy ending.

Types of Love

• According to Sternberg's Triangular Theory of Love, three building blocks form different types of love: intimacy, passion, and commitment.
• Intimacy includes warmth, understanding, trust, support, and sharing and is emotional.
• Passion encompasses physical arousal and desire, excitement, and need and serves as a motive or drive.
• Commitment involves permanence, stability, wanting to continue the relationship, and devotion to maintain it and is cognitive.
• Each component represents a side of a triangle that describes the love shared between two people.
• The intensity of each component can vary leading to different shapes and sizes of the triangles.
• Love is a multifaceted component because of the combination of intimacy, passion, and commitment.
• The three elements change over time, with passion being the most variable.

Eight Types of Love

• Nonlove: lacks intimacy, passion, and commitment and involves superficial, uncommitted relationships, like acquaintances.
• Liking: High intimacy but lacks passion and commitment and occurs in friendships with genuine closeness and warmth.
• Infatuation: Characterized by strong passion, but lacks intimacy and commitment, seen in relationships when people barely know each other.
• Empty Love: Characterized by commitment without intimacy or passion and occurs in relationships that lack passion, where the decision to stay together is the only thing remaining.
• Romantic Love: Characterized by high passion and high intimacy, and it is not defined by commitment, like a summer love.
• Companionate Love: Characterized by high intimacy and commitment, but lacks passion and involves love for a close companion or long-term friendship.
  • More enduring than romantic love and more correlated with satisfaction
• Fatuous Love: Characterized by passion and commitment but lacks intimacy, when two people get together out of passion and commitment, but do not really like each other.
• Consummate love: Combines intimacy, passion, and commitment, it is sought after but hard to maintain.

A Psychological Perspective

• Lust: The sex drive is regulated by sex hormones and motivates individuals to mate and reproduce successfully.
• Attraction: Facilitates the pursuit of a romantic partner by driving pair-bonding and romantic love.
  • It is regulated by dopamine, which controls feelings of reward potentially responsible for the excitement, euphoria, and optimism.
  • It can affect areas of the brain affected by pain-relieving drugs, suggesting love can act as a painkiller.
• Attachment: Produces feelings of comfort, security, and connection to a long-term mate, regulated by oxytocin to keep couples together long enough to care for their young.
• Oxytocin: Promotes relaxation and reduces stress.
  • It occurs in companionate love, along with commitment and intimacy.
• Psychological systems regulate each component.

Romantic, Passionate Love

• Passionate attraction is a result of; physical arousal, like a fast heartbeat, and the belief that another person is the cause of that arousal.
• Romantic love is produced or intensified when feelings of arousal are associated with the presence of another attractive person.
• Arousal and adrenaline fuel and feed love.

Love Scale

• The lovescale portrays love as a multifaceted experience that involves both giving and taking.
• The key components are; intimacy, dependency, and caring.

Love is Blind

• Individuals may underestimate or ignore their lovers' faults and hold idealized images of them.
• Imagination is a major difference between love and friendship.

Compassionate Love

• Combines trust, understanding, empathy, selflessness, and sacrifice.
• Compassionate love involves having empathy for others and the wish to aid those in need.
• People who feel this love tend to share the pain or joy that their loved ones experience.
• They are attentive, empathic, generous, and care and concern.
• They provide their lovers more support, thus increasing satisfaction and commitment.
• Romantic love is blind, but compassionate love is more rooted in understanding strengths and weaknesses in partnership.

Styles of Loving

• John Alan Lee described six styles of love depending on intensity of intimacy, commitment, expectations, and desired characteristics:
  1. Eros: Erotic lovers are influenced by physical appearance and believe in love at first sight.
  2. Ludus: Treats love as an uncommitted game by trying to have multiple partners at once.
  3. Storge: Prefers long-term friendships and commitment over strong emotions.
  4. Mania: Demanding, possessive, and excitable.
  5. Agape: Selfless and treats love as a duty.
  6. Pragma: Seeks partners who will logically be a match.

Why does Love not Last?

• A fantasy outlook on love.
• Novelty fades, causing "self-expansion".
• Arousal diminishes over time due to less dopamine production which leads to less passion but more commitment.