The 7 Faces of Love

What is love?

All of us must have stumbled upon this reflective question at some point in our lives—it could have been on a lonely night, crying on the bathroom floor over a broken heart or just while your earphones were plugged in on a train ride home; with friends on a tipsy night when you had too much to drink or on seeing your childhood pal taking his/her wedding vows; watching your partner softly snore by your side on a sleepless night or simply as a matter of philosophical debate with your parents on a Sunday afternoon.

Although psychology is far from providing a technical definition of love, the work of some researchers has very well illuminated the direction in which to look while trying to understand what comprises of love. To this end, psychologist Robert J. Sternberg, in particular, has proposed the Triangular Theory of Love.  He states that love is not just love but instead is made up of 3 pillars that can metaphorically serve as the three vertices of a triangle, namely: Intimacy, Passion and Commitment.

Intimacy is a purely emotional part of love. We often mistake intimacy for solely meaning physical closeness between two loving souls—something that can’t get out of the bedroom. However, intimacy as a part of Sternberg’s theory refers to a special emotional connect with your partner—it is the bonding, sharing, communication and ‘stand-by-me’ aspect of a romantic relationship. So when you say “We’re friends before lovers”, it is the shared intimacy you’re pointing out. Naturally, intimacy grows slowly at first, picks up pace on the way and ultimately settles down along with your settling relationship. However, when intimacy starts to fade and the feeling of your partner giving you an “emotional cold shoulder” starts increasing, the relationship is set on its way downhill unless handled otherwise in time. In fact, sometimes intimacy is casually taken for granted until the crisis hour strikes (e.g. job loss or death of a parent) making you realize how much care, support and warmth of belongingness is radiated by your special someone.

Passion is the emotional and physiological motivation that drives love. This is in fact the component which largely deals with physical attractiveness and sexual arousal. It is what makes us want to have our partner around all the time. It is what forms the basis of ‘love at first sight’. As expected, passion blooms rapidly but only as quickly does this balloon deflate. The increased intensity of positive emotions like excitement and ‘feeling fireworks when they touch you’ eventually wear you out. This wearing out marks the end of the honeymoon phase after which the very throwing of a wet towel on bed after bathing turns from cute to annoying i.e. the areas that you turned a blind eye to start glaring you in the face like harshly bright sunshine.

Commitment is the cognitive factor of love. It refers to both: confessing of your true feelings and hoping for a mutual ‘yes’ in response to the proposal as well as the readiness to put in efforts that are required for long lasting maintenance of love. Yes, it is what makes you a couple. As expected, commitment increases gradually at first, rapidly later and eventually levels off with time. However, if you hit a rough patch and the topic of break-up starts hovering every fight that you have, then the level of commitment is bound to decline or even diminish completely resulting in parting of ways with your partner.

According to the Triangular Theory of Love, the three elements can be combined in various ways to give rise to different types of love. To begin with, nonlove is a state in which all three i.e. intimacy, passion and commitment are absent. For example, your relationship with a classmate you don’t really chat with can be characterized as one being of nonlove.

The seven types of love specifically prescribed by this theory are:    

          1. Liking:  This face of love essentially emphasizes on the intimacy element and is marked by a complete absence of passion and commitment. What do you call a person with whom you have established a comfort zone so strong and deep that you can tell them everything that is on your mind without showing romantic interest as such? A friend, of course!

        2. Infatuation: That special someone sure gives you “butterflies in your stomach” but isn’t someone who knows your deepest secrets or someone you can imagine yourself with 10 years down the line. When love involves a lot of passion but zero intimacy or commitment then it is called infatuation. Our teenage years are often marked by such love that is gone with the wind.

     3. Empty Love: One look at a traditional arrange marriage in India where the bride and groom hardly know each other before tying the knot and you know that the relationship is singularly sailing

on the boat of commitment (familial, financial or social) without the life guards of intimacy or passion. Sure, the absentees may come along the way as you invest yourself more and more in the marriage but not necessarily.

     4. Romantic Love: This kind is a sum of intimacy and passion minus the sense of commitment. It makes you see your life in rosy hues, la vie en rose. However, the only catch here is that since you are not focused on seeing a future of this relationship, it might not be a long one.

     5.  Fatuous Love: When the high of passion is so overriding that it makes you commit to a person that you hardly know, it is called fatuous love. The surprising wedding invitation of a friend you know is clearly going through a rebound from a bad relationship or seeing Ross and Rachel from F.R.I.E.N.D.S getting married at a chapel in Las Vegas while being intoxicated are good examples of this kind of love. It clearly lacks insight and judgment on the part of the                                                                                            partners.

     6. Companionate Love: When we look up to our middle-aged parents managing several chores and executing endless responsibilities without really showing the young love for wanting to do things exclusively with their spouse and preferring family vacations over private weekends, what do we see? It is companionate love that is a combination of years-long intimacy and commitment with passion that has more or less taken a backseat.

     7. Consummate Love: When “I want to grow old with you” materializes into “I have grown old with you” with a perfectly personalized mix of intimacy, passion and commitment, we have the ideal form of love i.e. consummate love.

Thus, as we see, there are no well defined proportions of Sternberg’s Love Triangle. Love comes wrapped in different colored papers and vivid ribbons for all of us. There is no hard-and-fast rule that your relationship must fit into one of the 7 types. You can have blurring boundaries or even dynamic ones. It is quite possible for you to escalate from liking to romantic love to a satisfyingly consummate relationship or fall from fatuous love to an empty one to simple liking. 

Have you found which of these different faces fit your relationship the best?