The Anatomy of Love
"Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their
narcissism."
-Sigmund Freud
"How does it feel when it's love?
It's just something you feel together."
-Van Halen
I score that: Psychologists 1, rock stars 0.
In May of 2000 a virus spread around the world. It infected 1200 computers within three hours, and was rattling around machines at the CIA, FBI, and Pentagon within a day. It shut down servers at The British House of Commons while the American Department of State was forced to temporarily disconnect its computers from the internet (BBC, 2000). Did some malevolent genius unravel the inner secrets of network crypto architecture? Was it a terrorist plot? No, actually, just a small virus tossed off by a Fillipino student disgruntled at having being kicked out of his computer science program.
The secret to its success was that upon infecting a machine it emailed itself out using the subject line "ILOVEYOU." This moved people, by the thousand, to open its attachment - even people at the Pentagon 1 - thus apparently confirming The Beatles dictum that "love is all you need." Score one for the rock stars.
They would score more, but they were off by a little. According to a very prominent psychology theory, having a sense of relatedness with others is one of the three most fundamental human motivations, along
with having a sense of
competence and authenticity 2(Deci & Ryan, 2000). Of course, lyrics like "love is maybe 33 percent of all you need" are one reason that psychologists
don't pack stadiums. Suffice it to say that love is important. Very important. It's not a
coincidence that several major world religions are built around it.
Love is one of those things we’ve all had a lot of practice at recognizing - at least, in other people. We all know, for example, that love is the bit in the movie where a sudden outbreak of string music makes two characters stare at each other intently (and you can tell its true love if they’re both pretty). But that’s not all there is to it. The line “I’m marrying my best friend” is to weddings what triple lutzes are to figure skating competitions – pretty much a required element. On top of all that, musicians have been telling us that “love is forever” since the lyre was de rigueur for rocking out.
Psychologists have boiled these observations down, and sliced them up a number of ways, but one of the most enduringly popular, at least with the makers of textbooks, has been Robert Sternberg’s “triangle” theory of love (Sternberg, 1986). Think of a special someone for a moment, and play along with this at home: Love, says the triangle theory, is made of some combination of passion, intimacy, and commitment.
Passion is the heady feeling that all those parts of the planet not immediately connected to the loved one just aren’t very important. Intimacy is a sense that the other person knows you in a deep way, and likes you3. Commitment is the belief that you want to keep seeing this person past, say, breakfast tomorrow. Those aren’t the word-for-word the official definitions, but close enough.
Any given relationship can have any combination of these three components. Passion without the others is infatuation, intimacy on its own is platonic friendship, and commitment on its own is just rather sad. Passion plus commitment is fatuous love (think of sixteen year olds texting “I hart u 4eva” 60 times an hour), while intimacy plus commitment is companionate love (think of your favorite sibling here). Passion plus intimacy is romantic love (like you need any more encouragement to think about that one). Those who find all three in the same person, have consummate love. Lucky lucky them.
Now let’s put our lab coats on and take a more intimate4 look at these various bits in the anatomy of love.
Commitment
“Ever since that night, we’ve been together.
Lovers at first sight, in love forever.
It turned out so right,
For strangers in the night.”
-Frank Sinatra
Commitment comes in levels. Sometimes couples start off with a strong commitment that gets weaker, but usually it increases as people invest more in a relationship (Rusbult & Buunk, 1993). You won’t be surprised to learn, then, that people who are engaged or married report more commitment than do people who are only dating (Stanley & Markman, 1992). But in today’s topsy-turvy world of chaos and upset does commitment really mean so very much? Actually it does; couples who report more commitment have relationships that last longer, on average (Cate & Lloyd, 1992), and are also more willing to forgive the other person, leading to healthier and happier lives (Karremans, Van Lange, Ouwerkerk & Kluwer, 2003). Not bad, eh?
One of the secrets to building commitment in relationships is to convince your partner that you really like them. A lot. People who are confident that their partner likes them seem pretty unshakeable about their relationships, to the point that they will engage in what John Holmes terms “knights move thinking”. If you tell them that their partner is angry at them, that their partner has some horrendous fault, or thinks that THEY have a horrendous fault, they report liking their partner, if anything, more than they did before. Told, for instance, that their partner is painfully quiet ("two hours, three syllables. Honest to heck"), they might make a knights move, acknowledging the fault, but connect it to a greater virtue: “Ah yes, he’s the strong silent type.” People who aren’t so sure about their partner (which, in practical terms, is often people with lower self esteem) behave quite differently. Faced with a challenge, they will often start backing out and proactively distancing themselves, seemingly preparing to reject their partner before they themselves can be humiliatingly rejected (Murray, Holmes & Griffin, 1996).
On the darker side, Caryl Rusbult and John Martz (1995) interviewed battered women at a shelter, and found that feelings of commitment predicted who would return to their partner immediately on leaving the shelter. Where did this misplaced commitment come from you ask? It was higher in women who had few financial alternatives to their partner, were more heavily invested in their relationship (i.e., they were married), and who reported less severe abuse. Forgiveness is a good thing, but when we are financially or emotionally trapped into giving them, good things often do not stay so.
Intimacy
“Seems like you're the only one who knows what it's like to be me.
…
Someone I'll always laugh with, even at my worst, I'm best with you.”
-The Rembrandts
Intimacy, more so than the other parts of love, is hard to put your finger on. One can have an intimate relationship with one’s spouse, one’s friend, one’s sibling, or one’s hair dresser (you’d be amazed). It doesn’t involve the violent pyrotechnics of passionate love, but is rather a more stable and warm sense of emotional closeness. The key active ingredient, as it turns out, seems to be self revelation. As you get to know somebody you tend to start by revealing fairly trivial things about yourself (“I’m Canadian”), and then as the relationship develops you reveal yourself more broadly (“I also like skiing”), and also more deeply, unveiling things you normally hide about yourself (“I’m afraid of my boss”). Eventually, at the higher peaks of intimacy, one shares one’s deepest hopes and fears (“I’m also afraid of maple syrup”).
Indeed, you can run an experiment like so: Take two strangers, place in lab, and start them interviewing each other. Start with mundane topics (“where are you from?”) before gradually blending in more intimate questions. Keep stirring for half an hour or so, and a loose friendship should start to form (Collins & Milller, 1994). Real relationships tend to follow just such a pattern early on, with tit for tat exchanges of information that “broaden and deepen” over time (Altman & Taylor, 1973). Most people don’t feel comfortable spilling their guts to a person who hasn’t even given their name yet. If you reveal something to a stranger (“I wish I wasn’t reading this stupid article”) and they give nothing back, then perhaps you will infer that they don’t want to be any closer than they already are. From then on you’ll either shut down and stick to the weather, or possibly just feel shameless about pressing on. On the other hand, they might realize that you will interpret their silence as indifference, and try to avoid this by coming up with some tidbit in return (“you should have seen his last one. It was worse”). This may all seem a bit convoluted, but it can be unnerving when people get it wrong. The comedian Chris Rock, asked what it was like to be famous, once replied that it can give the impression of being on a second date the first time you met people. You don’t know them, but they feel like they know you, and so are immediately comfortable making deeper revelations than you normally expect from strangers.
Fortunately as intimacy builds, so does confidence, and one can start relaxing about trying to decode all these signals. When your friend of five years tells you that they’ve just stolen the CEO’s toupee, you probably don’t have to worry about revealing anything right back (though you might have other problems at this point). And this seems to be what researchers actually find; people in intimate relationships that are more established seem to make their revelations randomly as they come up, rather than exchanging them tit for tat (Altman, 1973). All this sharing may seem like a lot of work, but partners who disclose more tend to wind up more satisfied with their marriages (Hansen & Schuldt, 1984).
Intimacy can develop some strange dynamics as it deepens. For example, long-standing couples tend to start creating a collective memory bank between them. Without ever actually saying so, it becomes each of their ‘jobs’ to remember certain things. One partner may be in charge of remembering where they went on holiday each year, while the other specializes in remembering what day the trash goes out. The resulting “transactive” memory is often more sophisticated and effective than either partner could have managed alone (Wegner, Giuliano, & Hertel, 1985). When a spouse dies, people can find that they have lost more than a partner, but that they have literally lost a big chunk of their memory too.
Perhaps stranger still is that partners can start to feel their senses of self merging. Think of a person you love closely. Look at the following pairs of circles, and pick the pair that represents the overlap between who you are, and who that person is.
Psychologists have shown that the longer a couple have been together, and the closer they are, the more overlapping the circles they tend to pick (Aron, Aron & Smollan, 1992). They refer to this as “inclusion of self in the other.” As people grow together, the other becomes a part of who we are, like a tree growing to partly swallow a bolt that has been placed through it. This is part of why breakups of long relationships hurt so much - even if all parties agrees that splitting is for the best and that they are better off apart, each is losing a piece of them selves. That’s not something one can cure with a few happy thoughts. It usually takes time to restore oneself back to being completely whole, and there aren’t a whole lot of shortcuts around this. Such is the price that must sometimes be paid. Few great things are completely free.
Passion
Bob: What think you, my lord, of... love?
Edmund: You mean rumpy pumpy?
- Blackadder II
Cast your mind back, oh, 300,000 years to a village of early hominids living on the Steppes of Africa. Zoom in on one roaming band, and still further to one man, Ug. He’s a nice guy, good looking, but just never really hit it off with any of the women he knew. Og is dull, Ig is paranoid, Ag is great as a friend, and he just never really understood Francis5. In short, nobody inspires him in any of the directions that lead to babies being born. Ug is not, by definition, your ancestor.
This sort of thing happens all the time, but if it happened to a whole village at once then the local cave-estate would start getting a lot cheaper, if you follow my meaning. This is the type of situation up with which nature does not put. If people don’t produce kids fast enough, then nature will do as it always does in these situations: It cheats. Outrageously. Either it gives families the itch to start arranging marriages (which is common in much of the world), or, if there is just no sane reason to marry any of the local bachelor(ette)s, it goes the direct route and simply suspends our sanity for a while. We are so used to this happening that we don’t even think it’s weird. In fact, we came up with a name for it: “falling in love.” This is the passion part of Sternberg’s triarchy.
If you think I’m exaggerating, then consider this: evidence indicates that passion (unlike intimacy and commitment) tends to fade after two to five years, at least in non-arranged western love marriages (Gupta & Singh, 1982). Guess what you can do in two to five years?
Still not convinced? How about this: new brain research shows that love deactivates the brain regions associated with negative emotions, with social judgment and with judging other people's intentions and emotions (Bartels & Zeki, 2004). In other words, when nature decides it’s time for you to get with someone, it shuts down the punishment areas of your brain, turns a dimmer switch on the parts responsible for making critical judgments, and gives you a strong sense of longing. Of the various aspects of love’s anatomy, passion is the part most bound up with… well let’s face it, anatomy. Sexual attraction is one of its hallmark features. Just four words in, we already have a pretty shrewd idea what type of love “I want to hold your hand,” is singing about. It’s not exactly a subtle thing.
The good news for couples worried that their passion might fade is that romantic love tends to bounce back after the kids leave home. The bad news is that this can take 20 plus years (Hatfield & Sprecher, 1986).
Please realize that I’m not suggesting that passionate love is ONLY about having children, or that not having children in any way invalidates a person’s passionate love. It’s an intense and dramatic state that anyone can experience, and enjoy. Just because something evolved to select for a certain outcome doesn’t mean we have to always use it for that reason. For example, we probably have the large range of arm motion that we do because it helped us throw rocks and spears, but nobody thinks that a non-spear throwing life is any less a meaningful one.
Viola: “Tell me how you love her, Will.”
Will: “Like a sickness and its cure together.”
-Shakespeare in Love
When certain types of virus (‘retroviruses’ if you must know) get into our body, they wrangle themselves into our cells, split our DNA open, and write copies of themselves into the blueprint of our being, so that our own cells will later make copies of them. The parallel to passionate love is shocking enough that had Shakespeare known some molecular biology you can bet he would have spent many a dreary London evening dreaming up rhymes for “irus.” Though possibly the world is better off that he didn’t – as analogies go it lacks a certain amount of… romance.
If Shakespeare can’t borrow from science, maybe science can borrow from the bard, if only for the odd snappy name. In what is sometimes termed the ‘Romeo & Juliet effect,’ opposition from parents can sometimes increase feelings of passionate love. In fact, pretty much anything that boosts physical arousal can cause people to temporarily think that they’re more in love (Hatfield, 1988), up to, and including, walking across a scary wobbling suspension bridge (Dutton & Aron, 1974), and running in place (White, 1981). Passionate love is a heart pounding rush of emotion, so anything that gets the heart pounding tends to help people feel that emotion more strongly. While this sort of boost doesn’t make relationships actually LAST any longer, it does give them a wonderfully tumultuous quality for a while. If you are writing a play and want maximum drama out of the passion between your characters, it might be best to end it before they have a chance to calm down (for a good example see Shakespeare, 1597).
Conclusion
“Love is a many splendored thing.”
-John Lennon.
And so we can take off our white lab coats as our inspection draws to a close. I hope you loved what you read. Maybe you are worried that your relationship with this article won’t stand the test of time, though? Perhaps this will help: John Gottman has observed many relationships, and has consistently found a single feature which predicts which ones that last; they feature a lot of positive interactions -- smiling, touching, complimenting each other, laughing, and so on. Negative actions happen in them too, of course, but the positive outnumber the negative by a 6 to 1 margin in the couples that stick it out (Gottman, 1994). This ratio seems to be a critical marker. So let me tell you that this article, personally, thinks you are kind, nice, smart, and devastatingly good looking. There. If you can think of two nice things about it then you’ll get along famously. Don’t be shy now; just remember that while “all you need is love” has a nice ring, it becomes even more accurate if you switch the first two words. We all need love.
“Passion is the quickest to develop, and the quickest to fade.
Intimacy develops more slowly, and
commitment more gradually still.”
-Robert Sternberg
“Play the game
Play the game
Play the game
Of love.”
-Queen
Final score: victory psychologists.
(really there are some things that should never be given a score, and love is one of them. But psychologists are my guys, I have to show some love).
Dedicated to Karen, the girl I’m lucky enough to love.
Footnotes
1The wave of ersatz love wasn’t fatal – the computers were all fixed - but it did leave in its wake (as real love can also do) a messy wash of bellyaching.
2Actually they call it “autonomy” rather than “authenticity.” Sadly this often confuses people who think autonomy means “doing any stupid thing I want whenever I want, no matter what anyone says,” while what they ACTUALLY mean is the feeling that you are freely choosing actions that are consistent with your deeper values.
3Of course they do, you’re a lovely person.
4In the strictly PG 13 sense of the word.
5Oh but it was fine to call a caveman ‘Ug’?
References
Altman, L. (1973). Reciprocity of interpersonal exchange. Journal for Theory of Social Behavior, 3, 249-261.
Altman, L., & Taylor, D. A. (1973). Social penetration: The development of interpersonal relationships. New York: Hold, Rinehart and Winston.
Aron, A., Aron, E. N., & Smollan, D. (1992). Inclusion of other in the self scale and the structure of interpersonal closeness.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 596-612.
Bartels, A. & Zeki, S. (2004). The neural correlates of maternal and romantic love. NeuroImage. 21(3), 1155-1166.
BBC (2000). 'Love' virus chaos spreads. Retrieved March 5, 2008.
Dewey, R. A. (2004). APA Style Resources by Russ Dewey Retrieved September 8, 2004.
Cate R. M., & Lloyd, S. A. (1992). Courtship. In S. Duck (Ed.), Handbook of personal relationships: Theory, research, and interventions. (pp. 409-427). New York: Wiley.
Collins, N. L., & Milller, L. C. (1994). Self-disclosure and liking: a meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 119, 51-69.
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior.Psychological Inquiry, 11, 227-268.
Dutton, D. G., & Aron, A. P. (1974). Some evidence for heightened sexual attraction under conditions of high anxiety. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 30, 510-517.
Gottman, J. (1994). Why marriages succeed or fail. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Gupta, U., & Singh, P. (1982). Exploratory study of love and liking and type of marriages. Indian Journal of Applied Psychology, 19, 92-97.
Hansen, J. E., & Schuldt, W. J. (1984). Marital self-disclosure and marital satisfaction. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 46, 923-926.
Hatfield, E. (1988). Passionate and companionate love. In R. J. Sternberg & M. L. Barnes (Ed.), The psychology of love (pp. 191-217). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Hatfield, E., & Sprecher, S. (1986). Mirror, mirror: The importance of looks in everyday life. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press.
Murray, S. L., Holmes, J. G. & Griffin, D. W. (1996). The Benefits of Positive Illusions: Idealization and the Construction of Satisfaction in Close Relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70, 79-98.
Karremans, J. C., Van Lange, P. A., Ouwerkerk J. W. & Kluwer, E. S. (2003). When forgiving enhances psychological well-being: the role of interpersonal commitment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(4), 1011-26.
Rusbult, C. E., & Buunk, B. P. (1993). Commitment process in close relationships: An interdependence analysis. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 10, 175-204.
Rusbult, C. E., & Martz, J. M. (1995). Remaining in an abusive relationship. An investment model analysis of nonvoluntary dependence. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21, 558-571.
Stanley, S. M., & Markman, S. J. (1992). Assessing commitment in personal relationships. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 54, 595-608.
Sternberg, R. J. (1986). A triangular theory of love. Psychological Review, 93, 119-135.
Wegner, D. M., Giuliano, T., & Hertel, P. (1985). Cognitive interdependence in close relationships. In W. J. Ickes (Ed.),Compatible and incompatible relationships (pp. 253-276). New York: Springer-Verlag.
White, G. L. (1981). A model of romantic jealousy. Motivation and Emotion, 5, 295-310.
