The Psychology of Love

One of the great obsessions, ideals, or aspirations of humanity, love could not fail to get under the microscope of psychologists, always passionate about cutting the thread in four and then tying it back together.

Unfortunately or fortunately, the carapace of renewal often catches the eye and the theory treads crookedly with reality ... However, fragments of these explanations end up striking and offering unexpected suggestions. Here are the four great theories of psychology about love and affection.

To like or to love?

Psychologist Zick Rubin suggested that the feeling of romantic love is composed of three elements: attachment, care, and intimacy. Attachment is the need to be approved, relieved, and to have physical contact with the other person.

Caring involves valuing your partner's needs and happiness as well as your own. Intimacy refers to sharing thoughts, desires, and feelings with the other person. Starting from these premises, Rubin developed a questionnaire to assess the attitude towards others, whose scales of pleasure and love underlie his conception of love.

Compassion or passion?

According to psychologist Elaine Hatfield, there are two main types of love: passionate and compassionate.

Compassionate love is characterized by mutual respect, attachment, affection, and trust.

Passionate love can be recognized through intense emotions, sexual attraction, desire, and affection. When these intense feelings are reciprocal, people feel happy and fulfilled.

Passionate love without reciprocity gives rise to feelings of isolation and despair. At the same time, Hartfield argues that passionate love is fleeting, usually lasting between 6 and 30 months.

According to the same theory, passionate love occurs when cultural expectations encourage love when a person's features coincide with your preconceived notions about an ideal partner, or when you feel great psychological excitement in the presence of another person.

Ideally, passionate love turns into a compassionate one, the second one being much more likely to stand the test of time. Although most people want to engage in relationships that combine the security and stability of compassionate love with the intensity of passionate love, this is very rare.

Love as a wheel of colors

In his 1973 book, The Colors of Love, psychologist John Lee compared types of love to a wheel of colors. As there are only three primary colors, Lee suggested that there are only three basic types of love: Eros, Ludos, and Storge. Elementary love can mix with the birth of nine other secondary types of love. For example, the combination of Eros and Ludos determines the appearance of Mania or obsessive love.

6 types of love

Primary types:

1 - Eros = the love of an ideal person

2 - Playful = love as a game

3 - Storge = love as friendship

- Secondary types:

1 - Mania (Eros + Games) = obsessive love

2 - Pragma (Ludos + Storge) = realistic and practical love

3 - Agape (Eros + Storge) = selfless love

The triangular theory of love

Psychologist Robert Sternberg has proposed a graphic model of love in the form of a triangle with the components of intimacy, passion, and commitment. Various combinations of these three characteristics cause the appearance of different types of love.

For example, the intertwining of intimacy and commitment creates compassionate love, while the fusion of passion and intimacy gives rise to passionate love.

According to Sternberg, relationships built on two or more components are more lasting than those based on a single one.

In this sense, Sternberg introduced the term "perfect love", describing it as a combination of intimacy, passion, and commitment, which has the quality of not degrading over time but which has very little chance of materializing.