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Love can be characterized by passion, caring, intimacy, and commitment. Elements of romantic love include attachment, caring for the other person's happiness as much as your own, and sharing private thoughts and feelings. Rubin developed scales to measure liking and loving as a way to assess attitudes toward others and measure the complex feeling of love. Sternberg's triangular theory of love identifies three components - intimacy, passion, and commitment - that characterize different types of love such as infatuated love, empty love, companionate love, fatuous love, and consummate love. Maintaining consummate love, which represents the ideal relationship, may be difficult.
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- 1. Love is a feeling t hat may be charact erized by passion and caring and by int imacy, passion, and commit ment . (DeVito, 2001; Sternberg, 1986) Elements of Romantic Love Attachment - The need to be cared for and be with the other person. Physical contact and approval are also important components of attachment. Caring - Valuing the other persons happiness and needs as much as your own. Intimacy - Sharing private thoughts, feelings, and desires with the other person. Rubin’s Love Scale This questionnaire is designed to assess the attitudes a person holds about others. The questions were sorted according to whether or not they reflected feelings of liking or loving. Love is not a concrete concept and is therefore difficult to measure. However, Rubin's scales of liking and loving offer a way to measure the complex feeling of love. Rubin's research marked an important step forward in our understanding of romantic love and paved the way for future research on this fascinating topic. Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love Liking in this case is not used in a trivial sense. Sternberg says that this intimate liking characterizes true friendships, in which a person feels a bondedness, a warmth, and a closeness with another but not intense passion or long-term commitment. Infatuated love is often what is felt as "love at first sight." But without the intimacy and the commitment components of love, infatuated love may disappear suddenly. Empty love: Sometimes, a stronger love deteriorates into empty love, in which the commitment remains, but the intimacy and passion have died. In cultures in which arranged marriages are common, relationships often begin as empty love. Companionate love is often found in marriages in which the passion has gone out of the relationship, but a deep affection and commitment remain. Companionate love is generally a personal relation you build with somebody you share your life with, but with no sexual or physical desire. It is stronger than
- 2. friendship because of the extra element of commitment. The love ideally shared between family members is a form of companionate love, as is the love between deep friends or those who spend a lot of time together in any asexual but friendly relationship. Fatuous love can be exemplified by a whirlwind courtship and marriage in which a commitment is motivated largely by passion, without the stabilizing influence of intimacy. Consummate love is the complete form of love, representing the ideal relationship toward which many people strive but which apparently few achieve. Sternberg cautions that maintaining a consummate love may be even harder than achieving it. Sternberg stresses the importance of translating the components of love into action. "Wit hout expression," he warns, "even t he great est of loves can die" (1987, p.341). Consummate love may not be permanent. For example, if passion is lost over time, it may change into companionate love.