“Love is more than a noun – it is a verb, it is more than a feeling – it is caring, sharing, helping, sacrificing” – William Arthur Ward. Up til now, people have attempted to understand it , spanning from Ancient Greek with ‘agape’ or ‘eros’, to cultural constructs such as Confucianism with “ren”. However, it is still hard for someone to fully interpret the meanings encompassed in the word “love”, despite a lot of work in this field. Among these, the most widely recognized theory is Triangular Theory of Love which was written by Robert J. Sternberg in 1986 and complemented over time. In this blog, let me help you portray this postulate with three phases of a relationship.
Across several cross-sectional analyses, Sternberg divided “love” into three components representing the corners of a triangle: Intimacy, passion and commitment. These elements affect how people behave when they start, build and maintain their relationship. By understanding these elements, people, in some way, can evaluate their relationships and adjust accordingly.
Intimacy
The first component, intimacy, enables people in a relationship to have emotional warmth. It can be found through mutual interactions like holding hands, kisses or cognitive awareness such as showing vulnerability, self-disclosure. In a positive relationship,intimacy is expected to increase with the potential to rise and fall for short periods of time. Although in some studies, intimacy is considered essential to our physical health and psychological well-being, it is the less significant component in later stages.
Passion
Passion, on the other hand, is depicted as erotic and motivational factors of love. The definition of passion includes sexual attraction and strong emotions. Besides commitment, it affects the quality of a relationship a lot and decides if two partners can last long – term. However, “Love” cannot be maintained if it is based solely on sexual desirability.
Commitment
Commitment, the last part of the triangle, is the conscious decision to remain in the long-term relationship. Adaptive social comparisons, devaluation of threatening alternatives, willingness to make sacrifices for the partner are signs of commitment. In comparison with two other factors, it plays the most important role in relationship satisfaction.
In the next part of the blog, we will consider how three components change across different stages of love: attraction, building a relationship and maintaining a relationship.
Attraction
In the first phase, almost everyone starts feeling attracted to each other through intimacy or passion. There are varieties of factors influencing this process, including traits, personality, values, attitudes, closeness and familiarity, physical appearance, and reciprocal liking. Also, social norms and limited personal disclosure make the communication superficial. Commitment rarely appears at this stage. We can only see it in arranged marriage in some cultures or with political and economic aims.
Building a Relationship
At the second stage, the changes in the elements of love can be seen the most clearly because with the typical relationship, this time leads to the decision of marriage or not. Various information-seeking strategies are employed, such as passive observation, active seeking of information from others, and interactive methods including direct questioning and mutual disclosure. With respect to relationships with positive results, the levels of intimacy and passion increase the most, followed by that of commitment. Conversely, all of them decline resulting in a breakup.
Maintaining Love
Finally, when a couple enters married life, during the middle-age period, their intimacy and passion tend to reach the peak. Meanwhile, the commitment often decreases because of the challenges having to face after marriage, especially when years of nurturing children are over. In order to address these turbulences, maintenance strategies are implemented, including threat reduction, which involves managing conflict and addressing challenges, and relationship enhancement, which focuses on fostering connection and intimacy. Once a relationship gets over this difficult period, it reaches a stable stage known as companionate love which emphasises commitment and intimacy as passion wanes, especially at old age. However, if a relationship enters this model too early, it can lead to the risk of straying, seeking out passion and novelty with new partners while retaining the comfortable companionate relationship they have at home.
As we can see, each stage shows the difference in levels of three dimensions: intimacy, passion, commitment. Each of them plays a specific and important role in love so that the shortage of one factor can result in negative consequences. Hence, at any phase, a relationship needs the harmony of two partners to manage conflicts and mutual support.