The triple theory of love and its three main components of love have long puzzled us. But what is love made of?
Love includes a wide variety of strong feelings. The answer to why we are attracted to someone and the components of a fruitful relationship has always been elusive.
According to Sigmund Freud, love is a search for the “ideal ego”, the image of the person one wants to become patterned after those whom one respects with the greatest respect. Abraham Maslow, the humanistic psychologist, believed that love is only possible when one reaches self-actualization. As theories about love move from being clinically based to being socially and interpersonally based, they become focused on types of love, rather than the ability to love.
The theory of triple love or the trinity of love
Robert Sternberg came up with a new theory of love, called the Trinity Theory of Love, consisting of 3 components:
- intimate
- passion and
- commitment.
Each component represents a general mix of feelings that lead to different types of love.
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Although everyone has different ideas about what makes them attracted to another person. However, the attachment we feel for another person is common to all.
This attachment that we feel to another person is based on physical and emotional contact. This association is difficult to interpret as there are several factors that may influence it.
- Intimacy
Intimacy refers to feelings of closeness, connectedness, and interdependence in loving relationships. Hence he includes within his competence those feelings which generate, essentially, the experience of warmth in a love affair.
In intimacy, there is a sense of great respect for each other. There is a definite desire to make each other happy, to reach out to each other and help each other when needed.
Sternberg’s prediction of this love was that it would wane as the relationship diminished, thus increasing predictability.
- Passion
Passion refers to the motives that lead to romance, physical attraction, sexual fulfillment, and related phenomena in love relationships. This is associated with strong feelings of love and desire for a particular person. This love affair is full of excitement and newness.
Passionate love is important at the beginning of a relationship and usually lasts for about a year. There is a chemical component to passionate love. Those who experience passionate love also experience an increase in neurotransmitters, especially phenethylamine.
- Decision/commitment
Decision/commitment refers, in the short term, to the decision that one loves another, and in the long term, to one’s commitment to maintaining that love.
These two aspects of the decision/commitment component do not necessarily go together, as one can decide to love someone without making a long-term commitment to love, or one can commit to a relationship without acknowledging that one loves the other person in the relationship.
Implications of the triangular love theory in relationships
According to Robert Sternberg, the three components of love interact with each other. For example, greater intimacy may lead to more passion or commitment, just as greater commitment may lead to more intimacy or, less likely, greater passion.
In general, then, the components are separable but interactive with each other. Although all three components are important parts of love relationships, their importance may vary from one relationship to another, or over time in a particular relationship.
Different types of love can be generated by limiting instances of different combinations of components.
Related: We Experience Three Types Of Love In Our Lifetime: Each One for A Specific Reason
The three components of love give rise to eight possible types of love when viewed together.
It is important to realize that these types of love are, in fact, finite states: it is unlikely that any relationship will be a pure state of any of them.
1) Lack of love simply refers to the absence of all three components of love.
2) A crush results when one only experiences the intimacy component of love in the absence of the passion and decision/commitment components.
3) Fascinated love results from experiencing the element of passion in the absence of the other components of love.
4) Empty love stems from the decision to love another and to commit to that love in the absence of the intimate components of love and passion.
5) Romantic love derives from a mixture of components of intimacy and passion.
6) Companionate love arises from a combination of the components of intimacy and decision/commitment.
7) Fat love results from a combination of passion and decision/commitment components in the absence of the intimacy component.
8) Perfect or complete love results from the perfect combination of all three components.
The geometry of the “love triangle” depends on two factors: the amount of love and the balance of love.
The differences in the magnitudes of love are represented by different regions of the love triangle: the greater the amount of love, the greater the area of the triangle.
The differences in the scales of the three types of love are represented by the different shapes of the triangles. For example, balanced love (roughly equal amounts of each component) is represented by an equilateral triangle.
Love does not only include one triangle.
Rather, it involves a large number of triangles, only some of which are of great theoretical and practical interest. For example, it is possible to compare real triangles with perfect triangles. One not only has a triangle that represents his or her love for the other but also a triangle that represents the ideal other for that relationship.
Finally, it is important to distinguish between emotion triangles and action triangles.
