Robert Sternberg (1998, 1999) suggests that different strategies of loving are really different ways of combining the basic building blocks of love. He has proposed that love is made up of three elements—passion, intimacy, and commitment—that can be combined in different ways. Sternberg refers to a total absence of all three components as nonlove.
Passion is sparked by physical attraction and sexual desire and drives a person to pursue a romantic relationship. Passion instills a deep desire for union, and, though it is often expressed sexually, self-esteem, nurturing, domination, submission, and self-actualization may also contribute to the experience. Passion is the element that identities romantic forms of love; it is absent in the love of a parent for a child. Passion fires up quickly in a romantic relationship but is also the first to fade.
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Source: Robert J. Sternberg, "A Triangle Theory of Love,” Psychological Review, 93(2): 119-135. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Intimacy involves feelings of closeness, connectedness, and bondedness in a loving relationship. It is the emotional investment one has in the relationship and includes such things as the desire to support and help the other, happiness, mutual understanding, emotional support, and communication. The intimacy component of love is experienced in many loving relationships, such as parent-child, sibling, friendship, and the like.
Commitment, in the short term, is the decision to love someone; in the long term, it is the determination to maintain that love. This element can sustain a relationship that is temporarily (or even permanently) going through a period without passion or intimacy. The marriage ceremony, for example, is a public display of a couple’s commitment to each other.
Sternberg combines these elements into seven forms of love, which are described in Table 7.2. A person may experience different forms of love at different times; romantic love may give way to companionate love, or the infatuated lover may find a person to
whom he or she is willing to commit and settle down. In the emotionally healthy person, as we shall see, love evolves and changes as we mature (Sternberg, 1998).
Can We Measure Love?
Based on these types of theories, theorists have tried to come up with scales that measure love. However, you can’t just ask people, “How deeply do you love [your partner]?” Each participant will interpret love in his or her own way. One strategy is to create a scale that measures love by measuring something strongly associated with love. Zick Rubin (1970, 1973) was one of the first to try to scientifically measure love. Rubin thought of love as a form of attachment to another person, and created a “love scale” that measured what he believed to be the three components of attachment: degrees of
needing (“If I could never be with__________ , I would feel miserable”); caring (“I would do
almost anything for __________ ”); and trusting (“I feel very possessive about _______________ ”).
Rubin’s scale proved to be an extraordinarily powerful tool to measure love. For example, how a couple scores on the “love scale” is correlated not only with their rating of the probability that they will get married, but their score even predicts how often they will gaze at each other!
Others have since tried to create their own scales. Keith Davis and his colleagues (Davis & Latty-Mann, 1987; Davis & Todd, 1982) created the Relationship Rating Scale (RRS), which measures various aspects of relationships, such as intimacy, passion, and conflict. Hatfield and Sprecher (1986) created the Passionate Love Scale (PLS), which tries to measure the degree of intense passion or “longing for union.”
Will measures of love eventually tell us what love is made of? Well, as you can imagine, many problems are inherent in trying to measure love. Most love scales really focus on romantic love and are not as good at trying to measure the degree of companionate love (Sternberg, 1987). Also, measuring degrees of love, or types of love, is different from saying what love actually is. Finally, when you ask people questions about love, they can answer only with their conscious attitudes toward love. Many theorists suggest that we don’t consciously know why we love, how we love, or even how much we love. Other theorists argue that people do not realize to what degree love is physiological (see the section on physiological arousal theories later in this chapter). So we may be measuring only how people think they love.