LOVE

WOULD YOU MARRY A PERSON

IF THEY HAD ALL THE
ATTRBUTES YOU WANTED IN A
MATE, BUT YOU DID NOT LOVE
HIM?
 Love is new
• Marrying for love, rather than for other
more practical reasons (e.g. economic,
political, family) is a new concept.
• North Americans use romance as a
reason to marry to an unprecedented
degree.
 History of Love
• Ancient Greece: passionate attraction was
considered a form of madness. Instead, platonic
love characterized by nonsexual adoration was
considered ideal.
• 12th Century: Courtly love – knights sought love
as a noble quest. The knight was expected to
be unmarried, and the female married to
someone else. Marriage was not considered
romantic, but instead a matter of politics and
property.
 Over the next 500 years
• Love is desirable, but usually doomed,
because lovers have to marry other
people.
• 17th and 18th Centuries: English began to
believe that occasionally love can have a
happy ending. Yet, the idea that one must
feel love towards spouse was not
widespread.
• Today: Love and marriage go together.
 Types of Love: Triangular Theory
(Sternberg)
• Three parts of love –
• Intimacy
• Passion
• Commitment

These 3 components can vary in intensity.

 Triangular Theory
These three components can combine in different ways to
make several different kinds of love.
Nonlove: no intimacy, no passion, no comittment.
Liking: Intimacy is high, passion and commitment are low.
Infatuation: Strong passion, low intimacy, low commitment
Empty love: Strong commitment, low intimacy, low passion
Romantic love: High intimacy, high passion, commitment
may or may not occur
Companionate love: High intimacy, high commitment, low
passion.
Fatuous love: high passion, high commitment, low intimacy.
Consummate love: all three are present in high levels.
 Triangular Theory
• Amounts of components can change over
time
• Passion is the most variable
 Passion
• (Hatfield & Berscheid) Passionate love is
arousal coupled with belief that another person
is cause by arousal.
• Misattributions – excitation transfer.
– Dutton & Aron
Men who walked on the scary bridge used more
sexual imagery in TAT and were more likely to call
female research assistant.
– White, Fishbein, & Rutstein
• High arousal intensified feelings
• Doesn’t matter what type of arousal it was (a description of a
brutal murder, comedy film, but not boring description of a
circulatory system of a frog)
 Passionate Love and Thought
• Rubin’s love and liking scales
• If we have passion for someone, we think
a lot about them
• Also, the more we think about someone,
the more passion we start to have
• Passion makes us glorify and idealize
partners (hence love is blind)
– Goodwin, Fiske, Rosen, & Rosenthal
 Passionate Love

• Men report higher passion in the

beginning of relationships
• PEA (phenylethylamine) – a naturally
occuring chemical related to
amphetamines.
– Is in chocolate
– We become tolerant after 2 years
Passionate Love Does Not Last
• Fancy erodes with time and experience
• Novelty is exciting (Coolidge effect)
• Arousal fades as time goes by (PEA)
 Companionate Love
• High intimacy, and high commitment
• More stable, but also a little more bland
• Couples who were asked why their
marriages lasted for 15 years didn’t say
they would do anything for their partners,
or be miserable without them
• Of course, all these categories are fuzzy
 Styles of Loving (Lee)
• Eros
• Ludus
• Storge
• Mania
• Agape
• Pragma
• Perhaps better to think of these as overlapping
themes
• Which do you think men score higher in?
Women?
 Love and Age
• Age is confounded by experience or
duration of marriage
• Older people may hold more romantic
attitudes than younger people (Knox,
1970)
 Love and Gender
• Men and women are more similar than
different
• Men fall in love faster, more likely to think
if you love someone, nothing else matters
• Women are more cautious, and more
practical, and more selective about who
they love (love partners who are more
intelligent, have high status, and other
desirable traits)