Sternberg isn't the only psychologist who has developed a theory that explains how love works. Here are some other ones. Psychologist John Lee believed love to be like a color wheel. Love has three primary colors, and they can mix and match. The first color is Eros, which is passion.
This is the ideal relationship that most of us strive toward that has all three components: intimacy, passion, and commitment. It is the strongest and most enduring type of relationship, and Sternberg suggests that it is rare and difficult to maintain. To unlock this lesson you must be a Study.com Member.
The Changing Landscape of Love and Marriage. Celebrities breaking up, making up, and having kids out of wedlock. Politicians confessing to extramarital affairs and visits to prostitutes. Same-sex couples pushing for, and sometimes getting, legal recognition for their committed relationships.
Robert J. Sternberg. Decision/commitment refers, in the short-term, to the decision that one loves a certain other, and in the long-term, to one's commitment to maintain that love. These two aspects of the decision/commitment component do not necessarily go together, in that one can decide to love someone without being committed to the love in...
Psychologist Robert Sternberg's theory describes types of love based on three different scales: intimacy, passion, and commitment. It is important to recognize that a relationship based on a single element is less likely to survive than one based on two or more.
Robert Sternberg's triangular theory of love is a theory that proposes three components of love, which combine in different ways to create eight kinds of love (Sternberg, 1986). The three components of love in the triangular theory of love are intimacy, passion, and decision/commitment (Sternberg, 1986).
These three components are intimacy, passion, and decision/commitment. Each component manifests a different aspect of love. Intimacy.
Sternberg's 3 Components of Love Sternberg's theory, the concept of love is a triangle that is made up of three components. Some of these types of love are focused on the love between two people in a romantic or sexual relationship, but these types of love also apply to other forms of interpersonal relationships.
D., the triangular theory of love identifies three main components of love: intimacy, passion, and decision/commitment. Each of the three encompasses different emotions, with all three resulting in what Sternberg calls complete or consummate love.
If passion and commitment are present but intimacy is not, Sternberg calls the relationship fatuous love,as when one person worships another from a distance. But if couples share all three dimensions—passion, intimacy, and commitment—they experience consummate love.
The triangular theory allows for eight types of love: non-love, liking, infatuation, empty, romantic, companionate, fatuous, and consummate.
There are three types of relationships, and each influences how we love each other and ourselves: traditional relationships, conscious relationships, and transcendent relationships. Each kind of love is specific to the people within them. That is, each serves its own purpose.
The triangular theory allows for eight types of love: non-love, liking, infatuation, empty, romantic, companionate, fatuous, and consummate.
Sternberg's Triangular Love Scale (STLS) has 45 items, of which 15 measure Intimacy, 15 Passion and 15 Decision/commitment. Each of these items is evaluated with a Likert type scale, where one point represents “not at all”, 5 “moderately” and 9 “extremely”. There are no labels for the points in between those indicated.
It's been said that we really only fall in love with three people in our lifetime. Yet, it's also believed that we need each of these loves for a different reason. Often our first is when we are young, in high school even.
Robert Sternberg developed another theory of intelligence, which he titled the triarchic theory of intelligence because it sees intelligence as comprised of three parts (Sternberg, 1988): practical, creative, and analytical intelligence (Figure 7.12).
With that said, Sternberg believes that this form of love is hard to maintain. You can achieve this form of love early on, but keeping it that way is difficult. He believes that good couples need to have good communication with each other still and have a passion for making things work.
Usually, empty love results from a long marriage, where the two of you did have intimacy and passion at one point, but that is gone. However, the two of you are still together, be it for financial reasons or the kids. Arranged marriages can end up being empty love as well.
Finally, the eighth type of love, according to Sternberg, is consummate love . Consummate or complete love comprises all three points of the triangle: intimacy, passion, and commitment. This is compassionate and passionate love. Consummate love is often idealized, although it is very difficult to maintain long-term.
According to Sternberg, these components of love generate eight types of love. A relationship has a different type of love depending on which combination of intimacy, passion, and commitment. Consummate love or complete love is the combination of each of the three components of love: compassionate and passionate love.
Commitment is when you deliberately stay together with someone and make conscious plans for the future. Alone, your relationship is an empty love, where your relationship lacks a connection and a passion. Now, why would you be committed to someone if you didn't love them?
With passion, you can't stop thinking about the person, and every time you're with them, you have unexplainable feelings. Alone, passion is just infatuation. You have feelings for someone, but you never act upon them. Because of this, your infatuation tends to be short-lived.
The three points of the triangle are components of love. At the top, there is intimacy. At the bottom left, there is passion. At the bottom right, there is commitment. Let's unpack these three points first before we explain more about the theory.
Liking is at the top point of the triangle because it involves intimacy only. A basic friendship is an example of liking. Infatuation is at the left point of the triangle, and it involves passion only. Love at first sight is a good example.
Non-love is the only type of love that Sternberg defines that is not on the love triangle. This is because it's the type of relationship you typically have with an acquaintance, and it has none of the three love components. Liking is at the top point of the triangle because it involves intimacy only.
First up is romantic love. On the love triangle, it is located on the left side, between the intimacy and passion points. This is because it is characterized by the presence of both sexual passion and emotional intimacy. This is the type of love that a couple feels when their relationship is blossoming; they are drawn physically to each other, but also feel like best friends and enjoy spending time together. As romantic love lacks serious commitment, it is more prevalent in the teenage and young adult years.
The three components of the triangular theory of love. First, picture a triangle. Intimacy is considered the component at the top point of the triangle, while passion and commitment make up the side points. Also represented at each of these points are the types of love that only have one component.
After this lesson, you'll be able to: Explain the three main points on the triangle created by Sternberg's triangular theory of love: intimacy, passion and commitment.
Fatuous love is also called fantasy love because it's almost like the couple wants to be in love, but has no real emotional bond. A whirlwind courtship and marriage would be a good example, because the couple makes a commitment based on sexual fervor, without forming a deep emotional bond to stabilize the relationship.
This is the ideal relationship that most of us strive toward that has all three components: intimacy, passion, and commitment.
When you combine the fire of passionate infatuation and the bonds of commitment but don’t intimately like who the other person is, you get fatuous love. Whirlwind celebrity marriages and the clichéd quickie Vegas wedding can often be described as fatuous love, as can any ardent, committed connection built without much substance behind it. The lack of intimacy means that when passion mellows such relationships are often difficult to sustain (and also, depending on the level of commitment involved, tricky to dissolve!) 5
Consummate Love (Passion + Intimacy + Commitment) When passion, intimacy, and commitment are all three present, then the result is consummate love. The three components don’t have to be present in equal measure of course, but this ideal form of love must have at least an element of them all.
Companionate Love (Intimacy + Commitment) At the other end of the drama scale to romantic love is companionate love. When combined, commitment and intimacy make powerful emotional bonds, meaning that the companionate connection is stronger than simple friendship.
The triangular part of the theory comes from the fact that you can combine any two of these components to form more complex types of love – each combination forming a different side of a triangle. When you have a relationship that combines passion and intimacy for instance, you get romantic love.
The theory itself is straight forward. It starts with the three main components that Sternberg says lie at the heart of most human relationships: passion, commitment, and intimacy. Taken individually, these components form the three simplest forms of love – passion alone brings infatuation, intimacy alone equals liking, ...
In romantic love, the intimacy component brings a meeting of minds, while the passion component means that there’s physical attraction too. As glorious as this combination is, the lack of commitment means that romantic love is very much focused on the now rather than the future.
Empty Love (Commitment) Thirdly we have commitment, the active steps taken to preserve a relationship. It’s an essential part of any lasting love, but, when devoid of intimacy and passion, it’s a part that can feel more like a duty than a romantic choice.
Love has given Enkidu a new power, knowledge,and knowledge is power. This reflection of love goes outside the text to show that love has a way of opening up the mind to ideas bigger than one’s self. Enkidu is beginning to get in touch with his mental state. Now, he understands feelings and emotions; he comprehends the fact that he is lonely and has been his entire life. This is just the beginning of Enkidu’s intellectual growth.
The qualities that a person should look for within a soulmate is love, acceptance, and patience. When a person finds their soulmate, they have to fall completely in love
So, Sternberg’s triangle includes three ingredients of love – intimacy, passion, and commitment. The first one is intimacy . This kind of love is where you are attracted to someone’s fondness with you. This refers to the close, connected, and bonded feeling that comes naturally in loving relationships. This includes within its purview those feelings that give rise, essentially, to the experience of warmth in a loving relationship.
“A Love Song” is full of negative imagery, and suggests that love changes how one sees the world for the worse . In contrast the poem “Love’s Philosophy” uses positive diction and beautiful imagery to convey the idea that love is something to be desired by all. Both authors convey these themes using the literary devices of diction, imagery, and tone.
Intimacy. Intimacy refers to feelings of closeness, connectedness, and bondedness in loving relationships. It thus includes within its purview those feelings that give rise, essentially, to the experience of warmth in a loving relationship. Passion .
Empty love emanates from the decision that one loves another and is committed to that love in the absence of both the intimacy and passion components of love. Romantic love derives from a combination of the intimacy and passion components.
Some of these stories may be explicitly intended as love stories; others may have love stories embedded in the context of larger stories. Either way, we are provided with varied opportunities to observe multiple conceptions of what love can be. These stories may be observed by watching people in relationships, by watching media, or by reading fiction. It seems plausible, that as a result of our exposure to such stories, we form over time our own stories of what love is or should be.
In general, then, the components are separable, but interactive with each other.
Nonlove refers simply to the absence of all three components of love.
The triangular theory of love holds that love can be understood in terms of three components that together can be viewed as forming the vertices of a triangle. The triangle is used as a metaphor, rather than as a strict geometric model. These three components are intimacy, passion, and decision/commitment.
Differences in balances of the three kinds of love are represented by differing shapes of triangles. For example, balanced love (roughly equal amounts of each component) is represented by an equilateral triangle. Love does not involve only a single triangle.
It is just that the nature of your emotions and your relationship as a whole necessarily changes. When you get married, soon the honeymoon is over and you need to start not just fantasizing about your future, but also approach it pragmatically.
What awaits us on the road ahead. The first stages of a love last, according to experts, up to a maximum of three years. Infatuation just cannot last longer than that unless it is artificially maintained by either a long-distance relationship or, more detrimentally, by uncertainty and insecurity of one or both partners.
If you feel disconnected or frustrated about the state of your marriage but want to avoid separation and/or divorce, the marriage.com course meant for married couples is an excellent resource to help you overcome the most challenging aspects of being married.
In marriage, love is a complete and overall feeling that serves as the very foundation of yours and the lives of generations to come.
The first moments of falling in love with someone are, at the same time, the supreme high and the absolute deception. You surely know that feeling when you are convinced that your world finally acquired the ultimate meaning, and you only want for this emotion to last forever (even though after a few of such experiences, ...
Sylvia Smith Expert Blogger. Sylvia Smith loves to share insights on how couples can revitalize their love lives in and out of the bedroom. As a writer at Marriage.com, she is a big believer in living consciously and encourages couples to adopt this principle in their lives too.
2. Vent in healthy ways (in all phases of love) Learn healthy ways to express your disappointment, anger, or frustration. Be honest and authentic, and kind and loving in all stages of romance. Psychological research shows that the happiest couples are true to themselves. 3.
Love Phase 3: Emotional attachment or unconditional acceptance. A mature, healthy love relationship involves commitment, partnership, and even children. In this phase of love, you’re aware of both positive and negative traits in your partner, and you’ve decided you want to build a life together – and perhaps get married.
How Love Changes Over Time: The 3 Phases of Romance. It’s normal and even healthy for relationships to change over time. Love goes through stages, growing and maturing and changing as you do. These three “stages of love” will help you see how love evolves over time, and give you insight into your own relationship.
Mating is the evolutionary purpose of this stage of love; it creates strong physical attraction and sets the stage for emotional attachment. In this phase of love, endorphins soak your brain and you’re immersed in intense pleasure. Your partner is perfect, ideal, made for you.
Remember the first, most romantic phase of love. Relive your feelings of lust and attraction for your partner. Think about the traits you were once attracted to, and work to revive those old feelings. Don’t forget who you fell in love with.
In the second phase of a romantic love relationship, you may lose your appetite, need less sleep, and daydream about your lover on the bus, during meetings, in the shower. In this stage of love, the hormones dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin are racing through your body and brain.
4 Ways to Increase Love in Your Relationship. Love can bring joy, happiness and contentment to your life. Love is also a living, dynamic creature that changes, grows, and needs attention! Love must be nurtured. If you’re struggling to love and be loved, read 7 Ways to Know Your Relationship is Worth Fighting For.