О1’THE FORMS AND MEASURE OF LOVE ‘

We must admire those researchers who are willing to tackle a difficult subject such as the origins of love or the different forms of love. We all love, and one of the characteristics of love is that we often believe that the intensity of the emotion is unique to us, that no one else has ever loved as we have loved. We also feel many different kinds of love, such as love of a friend, love of a parent, love of a celebrity, or love of a pet. Philosophers, his­torians, social scientists, and other scholars have made attempts to untangle these types of love.

Romantic Versus Companionate Love

Romantic love is the all-encompassing, passionate love of roman­tic songs and poetry, of tearjerker movies and romance novels, and has become the prevailing model of sexual relationships and mar­riage in the Western world. Romantic love is also sometimes called passionate love, infatuation, obsessive love, and even lovesickness, and with it comes a sense of ecstasy and anxiety, physical attrac­tion, and sexual desire. We tend to idealize the partner, ignoring faults in the newfound joy of the attachment. Passionate love blooms in the initial euphoria of a new attachment to a sexual partner, and it often seems as if we’re swept away by it; that is why we say we “fall” in love, or even fall “head over heels” in love.

There are few feelings as joyous or exciting as romantic love.

The explosion of emotion is often so intense that people talk about being unable to contain it; it feels as if it spills out of us onto everything we see, making the flowers a bit more beautiful and birds’ songs a little sweeter. Some people joke that there is noth­ing quite as intolerable as those in love; they are just so annoy­ingly happy all the time! It is not surprising that such a powerful emotion is celebrated in poetry, story, and song. It is also not surprising that such a powerful emotion seems as though it will last forever. After all, isn’t that what we learn when the couples in fairy tales “live happily ever after,” and when the couples in movies ride off into the sunset?

Unfortunately, perhaps, passion of that intensity fades after a time. If the relationship is to continue, romantic love usually develops into companionate love, or conjugal (CONN-jew-gull) love. Companionate love involves feelings of deep affection, attach­ment, intimacy, and ease with the partner as well as the development of trust, loyalty, a lack of criticality, and a willingness to sacrifice for the partner (Critelli et al., 1986; Shaver & Hazan, 1987). Though companionate love does not have the passionate high and low swings of romantic love, passion is certainly present for many companionate lovers. Companionate love may even be a deeper, more intimate love than romantic love.

It can be difficult for couples to switch from passionate love to the deeper, more ma­ture companionate love (Peck, 1978). Because the model of love we see on television and in movies is the highly sexual, swept-off-your-feet passion of romantic love, some may see the mellowing of that passion as a loss of love rather than a development of a different kind of love. Yet the mutual commitment to develop a new, more mature kind of love is, in fact, what we should mean by “true love.”

Question: Why is love so confusing?

Love is confusing because it often evokes a host of other emotions and personal issues, such as self-worth and self-esteem, fears of rejec­tion, passion and sexuality, jealousy and possessiveness, great joy and great sadness. Dealing with those emotions is confusing enough; but in love, we try to communicate and share intimacies with another person who is going through the same kinds of confused feelings that we are. When so many emotions are fighting for attention, it comes as no surprise that the mind doesn’t seem to work that well!

The Colors of Love: John Alan Lee

“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. . .” wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who seemed to agree that there is more than one way to love, that even within one person love can take many forms. Psychologist John Alan Lee (1974, 1988, 1998)

As you read through these descriptions, where do you think your love style fits in? Are you a pragmatic lover, planning all the details of your love affair? Do you feel stir — crazy in a relationship and end up juggling lovers and playing games? Or do you have a romantic and sensitive love style? It is possible that more than one style will fit you, and also that your love style may change throughout your lifetime. What influences in your life do you think contributed to your love style today?

Source: John Alan Lee, "The Styles of Loving," Psychology Today 8(5), 43-51. Reprinted with permission from Psychology Today Copyright © 1974 by Sussex Publishers, Inc.

suggests that in romantic relationships, there are more forms of love than just ro­mantic and companionate love. Lee collected statements about love from hundreds of works of fiction and nonfiction, starting with the Bible and including both ancient and modern authors. He gathered a panel of professionals in literature, philosophy, and the social sciences, and had them sort into categories the thousands of state­ments he found. Lee’s research identified six basic ways to love, which he calls “col­ors” of love, to which he gave Greek and Latin names. Lee’s categories are described in Table 7.1.

Lee’s colors of love have generated a substantial body of research, much of which shows that his love styles are independent from one another and that each can be mea­sured to some degree (Hendrick & Hendrick, 1989). Lee points out that two lovers with compatible styles are probably going to be happier and more content with each other than two with incompatible styles. Couples who approach loving differently often can­not understand why their partners react the way they do or how they can hurt their part­ners unintentionally. Imagine how bored an erotic lover would be with a pragmatic lover, or how much a ludic lover would hurt a manic lover. Each would consider the other callous or even cruel, suggests Lee, when people simply tend to love differently. Higher levels of manic and ludic love styles are associated with poorer psychological health, whereas higher levels of storge and eros love styles are associated with higher lev­els of psychological health (Blair, 2000).

Incidentally, certain types of love styles are more socially desirable for men or women (Davies, 2001). It’s more socially desirable for men to have eros (passionate love) or ludus (game-playing love) and women to have agape (selfless love); and less socially desirable for men to have agape and women to have ludus.

Question: How do I know the difference between love and infatu­ation? How do I know if it’s real love or just sexual attraction?

Each individual must struggle with these questions as he or she ma­tures, particularly in the teenage and early adulthood years, before gaining much experience with romantic love. There is no easy answer, but there are some indications that a relationship may be infatuation rather than love when it involves a compulsion (rather than a desire) to be with the per­son, a feeling of lack of trust (such as a need to check up on the partner), extremes of emotions (ecstatic highs followed by depressing lows), and a willingness to take abuse or behave in destructive ways that one would not have before the relationship. Some ques­tions to ask yourself about your love relationship are: Would I want this person as a friend if he or she were not my partner? Do my friends and family dislike this person or think he or she is not right for me? (Friends and family are often more level-headed judges of character than the infatuated individual.) Do I really know this person, or am I fantasizing about how he or she is with little confirmation by his or her actual behavior? It’s not al­ways easy to tell the difference between infatuation and love—many couples have a hard time differentiating between the two (Aloni & Bernieri, 2004)!