Intimacy, passion, and commitment are the warm, hot, and cold vertices of Sternberg’s love triangle. Alone and in combination they give rise to eight possible kinds of love relationships. The first is nonlove—absence of all three components. This describes the large majority of our personal relationships, which are simply causal interactions.
The second kind of love is liking. “If you just have intimacy”, Sternberg explains, “that’s liking. You can talk to the person, tell about your life. And if that’s all there’s to it, that’s what we mean by liking.” It refers to the feelings experienced in true friendships. Liking includes such feelings as closeness and warmth but not the intense feelings of passion or commitment.
If you just have passion, it’s called infatuated love—“love at first sight” that can arise almost instantaneously and dissipate just as quickly. It involves a high degree pf physiological arousal but not intimacy or commitment. It’s the 10th-grader who falls madly in love with the beautiful girl in his biology class but never gets up the courage to talk to her or get to know her.
Empty love is commitment without intimacy or passion, the kind of love sometimes seen in a 30-year-old marriage that has become stagnant. The couple used to be intimated, but they don’t talk to each other any more. They used to be passionate, but that’s died out. All that remains is the commitment to stay with the other person. In societies in which marriage are arranged, Sternberg points out, empty love may precede the other kind of love.
2021-09-24 14:32:35
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