The Ingredients of Love

ROBERT J. STERNBERG
In:
T. F. Pettijohn (ed.), Sources : Notable Selections in Social Psychology
- DPG, 1994
From:
R. J. Steinberg, The Triangle of Love: Intimacy, Passion, Commitment
Ch. 4: The Ingredients of Love, Basic Books, 1988
9.3 ROBERT J. STERNBERC
The Ingredients of Love
Although love is an extremely important human emotion, only recently
have social psychologists attempted to study it scientifically. Researchers
recognize that there are different kinds of love, making i t difficult to general-
ize the results of studies on the subject. In an attempt to distinguish among
the various kinds of love, Yale psychologist Robert J. Sternberg has proposed
a triangular theory in which love consists of intimacy, passion, and deci-
sion/commitment.
Sternberg (b. 1949) earned his Ph.D. i n experimental psychology from
Stanford University in 1975 and then accepted his current position as IBM
Professor of Psychology at Yale University. Although wel l known for his
research in the emotional aspects of love, Sternberg's major area of study
has been in intelligence and thinking. The American Psychological Associa-
tion awarded hi m the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contri-
bution to Psychology in 1981.
This selection is from chapter 2, "The lngredients of Love," of Sternberg's
book The %angle of Love: Intimacy, Passion, Commitment (Basic Books,
1988). In it, Sternberg describes, in an informal, practical style, how the
three ingredients of intimacy, passion, and commitment combine to form
eight possible kinds of love. As you read this selection, evaluate Sternberg's
theory of love. Can you identify any other ingredients that should be in-
cluded in this theory?
Key Concept: triangular theory of love
A substantial body of evidence suggests that the components of inti-
macy passion, and commitment play a key role in love over and above other
attniutes. Even befoxt I collected the first bit of data to test my theory, I had
several xtasons for choosing these three components as the building blocks for it.
First, many of the other aspects of l ove prove, o n close examination, to be
either parts or manifestations of these three components. Communication, for
example, i s a bui l di ng block of intimacy, as i s caring or compassion. Were one
to subdivide intimacy and passion and commitment i nto their own subparts,
the theory woul d eventually contain so many elements as t o become unwieldy.
There is no one, solely correct fineness of division. But a division into three
components works well in several ways.. . .
Second, my review of the literature on couples in the United States, as
well as in other lands, suggested that, whereas some elements of love are fairly
time-bound or culture-specific, the three I propose are general across time and
place. The three components are not equally weighted in all cultures, but each
component receives at least some weight in virtually any time or place.
Third, the three components do appear to be distinct, although, of course,
they are related. You can have any one without either or both of the others. In
contrast, other potential building blocks for a theory of love--for example,
nurturance and caring-tend to be difficult to separate, logically as well as
psychologically.
Fourth,. . . many other accounts of love seem to boil down to something
similar to my own account, or a subset of it. If we take away differences in
language and tone, the spirit of many other theories converges with mine.
Finally, and perhaps most important, the theory works.. . .
Robert 1.
Stemberg
INTIMACY
In the context of the triangular theory, intimacy refers to those feelings in a
relationship that promote closeness, bondedness, and connectedness. My
research with Susan Grajek . . . indicates that intimacy includes at least ten
elements:
1. Desiring to promote the weyare of the loved one. The lover looks out for the
partner and seeks to promote his or her welfare. One may promote the other's
welfare at the expense of one's own-but in the expectation that the other will
reciprocate when the time comes.
2. Experiencing happiness zuith the loved one. The lover enjoys being with his
or her partner. When they do things together, they have a good time and build
a store of memories upon which they can draw in hard times. Furthermore,
good times shared will spill over into the relationship and make it better.
3. Holding the loved one in high regard. The lover thinks highly of and
respects his or her partner. Although the lover may recognize flaws in the
partner, this recognition does not detract from the overall esteem in which the
partner is held.
4. Being able to count on the loved one in times of need. The lover feels that the
partner is there when needed. When the chips are down, the lover can call on
the partner and expect that he or she will come through.
5. Having mutual understanding with the loved one. The lovers understand
each other. They know each other's strengths and weaknesses and how to
respond to each other in a way that shows genuine empathy for the loved one's
emotional states. Each knows where the other is "coming from."
6. Sharing oneseyand one's possessions with the loved one. One is willing to
give of oneself and one's time, as well as one's things, to the loved one. Al-
though all things need not be joint property, the lovers share their property as
the need arises. And, most important, they share themselves.
Chapter 9
Love
PASSION
7. Receiwing enzotional supportfiom the loved one. The lover feels bolstered
and even renewed by the loved one, especially in times of need.
8. Giving emotional support to the loved one. The lover supports the loved
one by empathizing with, and emotionally supporting, him or her in times of
need.
9. Communicating intimately with the loved one. The lover can communicate
deeply and honestly with the loved one, sharing innermost feelings.
10. Valuing the loved one. The lover feels the great importance of the part-
ner in the scheme of life.
These are only some of the possible feelings one can experience through
the intimacy of love; moreover, it is not necessary to experience all of these
feelings in order to experience intimacy. To the contrary, our research indicates
that you experience intimacy when you sample a sufficient number of these
feelings, with that number probably differing from one person and one situ-
ation to another. You do not usually experience the feelings independently, but
often as one overall feeling. . . .
Intimacy probably starts in self-disclosure. To be intimate with someone,
you need to break down the walls that separate one person from another. It is
well known that self-disclosure begets self-disclosure: if you want to get to
know what someone else is like, let him or her learn about you. But self-disclo-
sure is often easier in sameLsex friendships than in loving relationships, prob-
ably because people see themselves as having more to lose by self-disclosure in
a loving relationship. And odd as it may sound, there is actually evidence that
spouses may be less symmetrical in self-disclosure than are strangers, again
probably because the costs of self-disclosure can be so high in love. . . .
Intimacy, then, is a foundation of love, but a foundation that develops
slowly, through fits and starts, and is difficult to achieve. Moreover, once it
starts to be attained, it may, paradoxically, start to go away because of the
threat it poses. It poses a threat in terms not only of the dangers of self-disclo-
sure but of the danger one starts to feel to one's existence as a separate, autono-
mous being. Few people want to be "consumed by a relationship, yet many
people start to feel as if they are being consumed when they get too close to
another human being. The result is a balancing act between intimacy and
autonomy which goes on throughout the lives of most couples, a balancing act
in which a completely stable equilibrium is often never achieved. But this in
itself is not necessarily bad: the swinging back and forth of the intimacy pen-
dulum provides some of the excitement that keeps many relationships alive.
The passion component of love includes what Elaine Hatfield and William
Walster refer to as a "state of intense longing for union with the other." Passion
is largely the expression of desires and needssuch as for self-esteem, nurtur-
ance, affiliation, dominance, submission, and sexual fulfillment. The strengths
of these various needs vary across persons, situations, and kinds of loving
relationship. For example, sexual fulfillment is likely to be a strong need in
romantic relationships but not in filial ones. These needs manifest themselves
through psychological and physiological arousal, which are often inseparable
from each other.
Passion in love tends to interact strongly with intimacy, and often they
fuel each other. For example, intimacy in a relationship may be largely a func-
tion of the extent to which the relationship meets a person's need for passion.
Conversely, passion may be aroused by intimacy In some close relationships
with members of the opposite sex, for example, the passion component devel-
ops almost immediately; and intimacy, only after a while. Passion may have
drawn the individuals into the relationship in the first place, but intimacy
helps sustain the closeness in the relationship. In other close relationships,
however, passion, especially as it applies to physical attraction, develops only
after intimacy. Two close friends of the opposite sex may find themselves even-
tually developing a physical attraction for each other once they have achieved
a certain emotional intimacy . . .
Most people, when they think of passion, view it as sexual. But any form
of psychophysiological arousal can generate the experience of passion. For
example, an individual with a high need for affiliation may experience passion
toward an individual who provides him or her with a unique opportunity to
affiliate. For example, Debbie grew up in a broken home, with no extended family
to speak of, and two parents who were constantly at war with each other and
eventually divorced when she was an adolescent. Debbie felt as though she
never had a family, and when she met Arthur, her passion was kindled. What
he had to offer was not great sex but a large, warm, closely knit family that
welcomed Debbie with open arms. Arthur was Debbie's ticket to the sense of
belongingness she had never experienced but had always craved, and his abil-
ity to bring belongingness into her life mused her passion for him. . . .
For other people, the need for submission can be the ticket to passion. . . .
Social workers are often frusirated when, after months spent getting a battered
woman to leave her husband, the woman ultimately goes back to the batterer.
To some observers, her return may seem incomprehensible; to others, it may
seem like a financial decision. But often it is neither. Such a woman has had the
misfortune to identlfy abuse with being loved and, in going back to the abuse,
is returning to what is, for her, love as she has learned it.
These patterns of response have been established through years of obser-
vation and sometimes first-hand experience, which cannot be easily undone by
a social worker or anyone else in a few months. Probably the strangest learning
mechanism for the buildup of passionate response is the mechanism of inter-
mittent reinforcement, the periodic, sometimes random rewarding of a particular
response to a stimulus. If you try to accomplish something, and sometimes are
rewarded for your efforts and sometimes not, you are being intermittently
reinforced. Oddly enough, intermittent reinforcement is even more powerful at
developing or sustaining a given pattern of behavior than is continuous rein-
forcement. You are more likely to lose interest in or desire for something, and to
become bored, if you are always rewarded when you seek it than if you are
sometimes rewarded, but sometimes not. Put another way, sometimes the fun
is in wanting something rather than in getting it. And if you are never re-
warded for a given pattern of behavior, you are likely to give up on it ("extin-
Robert J.
Stemberg
Chapter 9
Love
guish," a s learning theorists would say), if only because of the total frustration
you experience when you act in that particular way
Prission thrives on the intermittent reinforcement that is intense at least in
the early stages of a relationship. When you want someone, sometimes you feel
as if you are getting closer to him or her, and sometimes you feel you are
not-an alternation that keeps the passion aroused. . . .
DECISION AND COMMITMENT
The decision/commitment component of love consists of two aspects-one
short-term and one long-term. The short-term aspect is the decision to love a
certain other, whereas the long-term one is the commitment to maintain that
love. These two aspects of the decision/commitment component of love do not
necessarily occur together. The decision to love does not necessarily imply a
commitment to that love. Oddly enough, the reverse is also possible, where
there is a commitment to a relationship in which you did not make the deci-
sion, as in arranged marriages. Some people are committed to loving another
without ever having admitted their love. Most often, however, a decision pre-
cedes the commitment both temporally and logically. Indeed, the institution of
marriage represents a legalization of the commitment to a decision to love
another throughout life.
While the decision/commitment component of love may lack the "heat"
or "charge" of intimacy and passion, loving relationships almost inwitably
have their ups and downs, and in the latter, the decision/commitment compo-
nent is what keeps a relationship together. This component can be essential for
getting through hard times and for returning to better ones. In ignoring it or
separating it from love, you may be missing exactly that component of a loving
relationship that enables you to get through the hard times as well as the easy
ones. Sometimes, you may have to trust your commitment to carry you
through to the better times you hope are ahead.
The decision/comrnitment component of love interacts with both inti-
macy and passion. For most people, it results from the combination of intimate
involvement and passionate arousal; however, intimate involvement or pas-
sionate arousal can follow from commitment, as in certain arranged marriages
or in close relationships in which you do not have a choice of partners. For
example, you do not get to choose your mother, father, siblings, aunts, uncles,
or cousins. In these close relationships, you may find that whatever intimacy or
passion you experience results from your cognitive commitment to the rela-
tionship, rather than the other way around. Thus, love can start off as a
decision.
The expert in the study of commitment is the UCLA psychologist Harold
Kelley.. . . For Kelley, commitment is the extent to which a person is likely to
stick with something or someone and see it (or him or her) through to the
finish. A person who is committed to something is expected to persist until the
goal underlying the commitment is achieved. A problem for contemporary
relationships is that two members of a couple may have different ideas about
TABLE 1
Taxonomy of Kinds of Love
Kind #Love
Decision/
Intimacy Passion Commitment
Non-love
Liking
Infatuated love
Empty love
Romantic love
Companionate love
Fatuous love
Consummate love
189
Robert 1.
Stemberg
- - - -- -
Note: + = component present, - = component absent
what it means to stick with someone to the end or to the realization of a goal.
These differences, moreover, may never be articulated. One person, for exam-
ple, may see the "end" as that point where the relationship is no longer work-
ing, whereas the other may see the end as the ending of one of the couple's
lives. In a time of changing values and notions of commitment, it is becoming
increasingly common for couples to find themselves in disagreement about the
exact nature and duration of their commitment to each other. When marital
commitments were always and automatically assumed to be for life, divorce
was clearly frowned upon. Today, divorce is clearly morr acceptable than it
was wen fifteen years ago, in part because many people have different ideas
about how durable and lasting the marital commitment need be.
Difficulties in mismatches between notions of commitment cannot always
be worked out by discussing mutual definitions of it, because these may
change over time and differently for the two members of a couple. Both may
intend a life-long commitment at the time of marriage, for example; but one of
them may have a change of mind--or hearb-over time. . . .
KINDS OF LOVING
How do people love, and what are some examples of ways in which they love?
A summary of the various kinds of love captured by the triangular theory is
shown in table 1.
Intimacy Alone: Liking
. . . Liking results when you experience only the intimacy component of
love without passion or decision/commitment. The term liking is used here in a
nontrivial sense, to describe not merely the feelings you have toward casual
acquaintances and passers-by, but rather the set of feelings you experience in
relationships that can truly be characterized as friendships. You feel closeness,
bondedness, and warmth toward the other, without feelings of intense passion
or long-term commitment. Stated another way, you feel emotionally close to
the friend, but the friend does not arouse your passion or make you feel that
you want to spend the rest of your life with him or her.
It is possible for friendships to have elements of passionate arousal or
long-term commitment, but such friendships go beyond mere liking. You can
use the absence test to distinguish merv liking from love that goes beyond
liking. If a typical friend whom you like goes away, even for an extended
period of time, you may miss him or her but do not tend to dwell on the loss.
You can pick up the friendship some years later, often in a different form,
without even having thought much about the friendship during the internen-
ing years. When a close relationship goes beyond liking, however, you actively
miss the other person and tend to dwell on or be preoccupied with his or her
absence. The absence has a substantial and fairly long-term effect on your life.
When the absence of the other arouses strong feelings of intimacy, passion, or
commitment, the relationship has gone beyond liking.
Passion Alone: Infatuated Love
Tom met Lisa at work. One look at her was enough to change his life: he
fell madly m love with her. Instead of concentrating on his work, which he
hated, he would think about Lisa. She was aware of this, but did not much care
for Tom When he tried to start a conversation with her, she moved on as
quickly as possible. . . .
Tom's "love at first sight" is infatuated love or, simply, infatuation. It
results from the experiencing of passionate arousal without the intimacy and
decision/commitrnent components of love. Infatuation is usually obvious, al-
though it tends to be somewhat easier for others to spot than for the person
who is experiencing it. An infatuation can arise almost instantaneously and
dissipate as quickly. Infatuations generally manifest a high degree of psycho-
physiological arousal and bodily symptoms such as increased heartbeat or
even palpitations of the heart, increased hormonal secretions, and erection of
genitals. . . .
Decision/Commitment Alone: Empty Love
John and Mary had been married for twenty years, for fifteen of which
Mary had been thinking about getting a divorce, but could never get herself to
go through with it.. . .
Mary's kind of love emanates from the decision that you love another and
are committed to that love even without having the intimacy or the passion
associated with some loves. It is the love sometimes found in stagnant relation-
ships that have been going on for years but that have lost both their original
mutual emotional involvement and physical attraction. Unless the commit-
ment to the love is very strong, such love can be close to none at all. Although
in our society we see empty love generally as the final or near-final stage of a
long-term relationship, in other societies empty love may be the first stage of a
long-term relationshp. As I have said, in societies where marriages are ar-
ranged, the marital partners start with the commitment to love each other, or to
try to do so, and not much more. Here, empty denotes a relationship that may
come to be filed with passion and intimacy, and thus marks a beginning rather
than an end.
Intimacy + Passion: Romantic Love
Susan and Ralph met in their junior year of college. Their relationship
started off as a good friendship, but rapidly turned into a deeply involved
romantic love affair. They spent as much time together as possible, and enjoyed
practically every minute of it. But Susan and Ralph were not ready to commit
themselves permanently to the relationship: both felt they were too young to
make any long-term decisions, and that until they at least knew where they
would go after college, it was impossible to tell even how much they could be
together. . . .
Ralph and Susan's relationship combines the intimacy and passion com-
ponents of love. In essence, it is liking with an added element: namely, the
arousal brought about by physical attraction. Therefore, in this type of love, the
man and woman are not only drawn physically to each other but are also
bonded emotionally. This is the view of romantic love found in classic works of
literature, such as Romeo and luliet. . . .
Intimacy + Commitment: Companionate Love
In their twenty years of marrige, Sam and Sara had been through some
rough times. They had seen many of their friends through divorces, Sam
through several jobs, and Sara through an illness that at one point had seemed
as though it might be fatal. Both had friends, but there was no doubt in either
of their minds that they were each other's best friend. When the going got
rough, each of them knew he or she could count on the other. Neither Sam nor
Sara felt any great passion in their relationship, but they had never sought out
others.. . .
Sam and Sara's kind of love evolves from a combination of the intimacy
and decision/commitment components of love. It is essentially a long-term,
committed friendship, the kind that frequently occurs in marriages in which
physical attraction (a major source of passion) has waned. . . .
Robert J.
Stemberg
Chapter 9
Love
Passion + Commitment: Fatuous Love
When Tim and Diana met at a resort in the Bahamas, they were each on
the rebound. Tim's fianc6e had abruptly broken off their engagement.. . . Di-
ana was recently divorced, the victim of the "other woman." Each felt desper-
ate for love, and when they met each other, they immediately saw themselves
as a match made in heaven.. . . The manager of the resort, always on the
lookout for vacation romances as good publicity, offered to marry them at the
resort and to throw a lavish reception at no charge, other than cooperation in
promotional materials. After thinking it over, Tim and Diana agreed. . . .
Fatuous love, as in the case of Tim and Diana, results from the combina-
tion of passion and decision/cornmitment without intimacy, which takes time
to develop. It is the kind of love we sometimes associate with Hollywood, or
with a whirlwind courtship, in which a couple meet one day, get engaged two
weeks later, and marry the next month. This love is fatuous in the sense that
the couple commit themselves to one another on the basis of passion without
the stabilizing element of intimate involvement. Since passion can develop
almost instantaneously, and intimacy cannot, relationships based on fatuous
love are not likely to last.
Intimacy + Passion + Commitment: Consummate Love
Harry and Edith seemed to all their friends to be the perfect couple. And
what made them distinctive from many such "perfect couples" is that they
pretty much fulfilled the notion They felt close to each other, they continued to
have great sex after fifteen years, and they could not imagine themselves
happy over the long term with anyone else. . . .
Consummate, or complete, love like Edith and Harry's results from the
combination of the three components in equal measure. It is a love toward
which many of us strive, especially in romantic relationships. Attaining con-
summate love is analogous, in at least one respect, to meeting your goal in a
weight-reduction program: reaching your ideal weight is often easier than
maintaining it. Attaining consummate love is no guarantee that it will last;
indeed, one may become aware of the loss only after it is far gone. Consum-
mate love, like other things of value, must be guarded carefully . . .
The ~bsence of the Components: Non-Love
Jack saw his colleague Myra at work almost every day They interacted well
in their professional relationship, but neither was particularly fond of the other.
Neither felt particularly comfortable talking to the other about personal matters;
and after a few tries, they decided to limit their conversations to business.
Non-love, as in the relationship of Jack and Myra, refers simply to the
absence of all three components of love. Non-love characterizes many personal
relationships, which are simply casual interactions that do not partake of love
or even liking.