Intimate
Relationships
Rowland S.Miller
习读专用,不作商用,如侵联删。
C H A P T E R 8
Love
A Brief History of Love ◆ Types of Love
◆ Individual and Cultural Differences in Love
◆ Does Love Last? ◆ For Your Consideration ◆ Chapter Summary
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Here’s an interesting question: If someone had all the other qualities you desired in a spouse, would you marry that person if you were not in love with him or her? Most of us reading this book would say no. At the end of the twentieth century, huge majorities of American men and women consid- ered romantic love to be necessary for marriage (Simpson et al., 1986). Along with all the other characteristics people want in a spouse—such as warmth, good looks, and dependability—young adults in Western cultures insist on romance and passion as a condition for marriage. What makes this remarkable is that it’s such a new thing. Throughout history, the choice of a spouse has usually had little to do with romantic love (Ackerman, 1994); people married each other for political, economic, practical, and family reasons, but they did not marry because they were in love with each other. Even in North America, people began to consider love to be a requirement for marriage only a few decades ago. In 1967, 76 percent of women and 35 percent of men would have married an otherwise perfect partner whom they did not love (Kephart, 1967). These days, most people would refuse such a marriage.
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In a sense, then, we have embarked on a bold experiment. Never before have people considered love to be an essential reason to marry (Coontz, 2005). People experience romantic passion all over the world, but there are still many places where it has little to do with their choice of a spouse. North Ame- ricans use romance as a reason to marry to an unprecedented degree (Hatfield & Rapson, 2008). Is this a good idea? If there are various overlapping types of “love” and different types of lovers—and worse, if passion and romance decline over time—marriages based on love may often be prone to confusion and, perhaps, disappointment.
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Consideration of these possibilities lies ahead. I’ll start with a brief history of love and then ponder different varieties of love and different types of lovers. Then, I’ll finish with a key question: Does love last? (What do you think the answer is?)
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8.1 A BRIEF HISTORY OF LOVE
Our modern belief that spouses should love one another is just one of many perspectives with which different cultures have viewed the experience of love (Hunt, 1959). Over the ages, attitudes toward love have varied on at least four dimensions:
• Cultural value. Is love a desirable or undesirable state?
• Sexuality. Should love be sexual or nonsexual?
• Sexual orientation. Should love involve heterosexual or same-sex partners?
• Marital status. Should we love our spouses, or is love reserved for others?
Different societies have drawn upon these dimensions to create some strikingly different patterns of what love is, or should be.
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In ancient Greece, for instance, passionate attraction to another person was considered a form of madness that had nothing to do with marriage or family life. Instead, the Greeks admired platonic love, the nonsexual adoration of a beloved person that was epitomized by love between two men.
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In ancient Egypt, people of royal blood often married their siblings, and in ancient Rome, “the purpose of marriage was to produce children, make favor- able alliances, and establish a bloodline . . . it was hoped that husband and wife would be friends and get on amiably. Happiness was not part of the deal, nor was pleasure. Sex was for creating babies” (Ackerman, 1994, p. 37).
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Heterosexual love took on more positive connotations in the concept of “courtly love” in the twelfth century. Courtly love required knights to seek love as a noble quest, diligently devoting themselves to a lady of high social standing. It was very idealistic, very elegant, and—at least in theory—nonsexual. It was also explicitly adulterous. In courtly love, the male partner was expected to be unmarried and the female partner married to someone else! In the Middle Ages, marriage continued to have nothing to do with romance; in contrast, it was a deadly serious matter of politics and property. Indeed, passionate, erotic desire for someone was thought to be “dangerous, a trapdoor leading to hell, which was not even to be condoned between husband and wife” (Ackerman, 1994, p. 46).
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Over the next 500 years, people came to believe that passionate love could be desirable and ennobling but that it was usually doomed. Either the lovers would be prevented from being with each other (often because they were mar- ried to other people), or death would overtake one or the other (or both) before their love could be fulfilled. It was not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that Europeans, especially the English, began to believe that romantic passion could occasionally result in a happy ending. Still, the notion that one ought to feel passion and romance for one’s husband or wife was not a widespread idea; indeed, in the late 1700s, defenders of “traditional marriage” were generally horrified by the emergence of love as a reason for marriage (Coontz, 2013).
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Even now, the assumption that romantic love should be linked to mar- riage is held only in some regions of the world (Merali, 2012). Nevertheless, you probably do think love and marriage go together. Why should your beliefs be different from those of most people throughout history? Why has the acceptance of and enthusiasm for marrying for love been most complete in North America (Hatfield & Rapson, 2008)? Probably because of America’s individualism and economic prosperity (which allow most young adults to live away from home and choose their own marital partners) and its lack of a caste system or ruling class. The notion that individuals (instead of families) should choose marriage partners because of emotional attachments (not economic concerns) makes more sense to Americans than it does to many other peoples of the world. In most regions of the world, the idea that a young adult should leave home, fall in love, decide to marry, and then bring the beloved home to meet the family seems com- pletely absurd (Buunk et al., 2010). This is slowly changing, as technology and socioeconomic development spread around the world (Allendorf, 2013), but for now, the marital practices of North Americans strike most folks as odd.
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In any case, let’s consider all the different views of love we just encountered:
• Love is doomed.
• Love is madness.
• Love is a noble quest.
• Love need not involve sex.
• Love and marriage go together.
• Love can be happy and fulfilling.
• Love has little to do with marriage.
• The best love occurs among people of the same sex.
Some of these distinctions simply reflect ordinary cultural and historical varia- tions (Eastwick, 2013). However, these different views may also reflect an important fact: There may be diverse forms of love. Let’s ponder that possibility.
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8.2 TYPES OF LOVE
Advice columnist Ann Landers was once contacted by a woman who was perplexed because her consuming passion for her lover fizzled soon after they were married. Ms. Landers suggested that what the woman had called “the love affair of the century” was “not love at all. It was one set of glands calling to another” (Landers, 1982, p. 2). There was a big distinction, Ms. Landers asserted, between horny infatuation and real love, which was deeper and richer than mere passion. Love was based in tolerance, care, and communication, Landers argued; it was “friendship that has caught fire” (p. 12).
Does that phrase characterize your experiences with romantic love? Is there a difference between romantic love and infatuation? According to a lead- ing theory of love experiences, the answer to both questions is probably “yes.”
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The Triangular Theory of Love
Robert Sternberg (1987, 2006) proposed that three different building blocks combine to form different types of love. The first component of love is intimacy, which includes the feelings of warmth, understanding, trust, support, and sharing that often characterize loving relationships. The second component is passion, which is characterized by physical arousal and desire, excitement, and need. Passion often takes the form of sexual longing, but any strong emotional need that is satisfied by one’s partner fits this category. The final ingredient of love is commitment, which includes feelings of permanence, stability, and the decisions to devote oneself to a relationship and to work to maintain it. Com- mitment is mainly cognitive in nature, whereas intimacy is emotional and pas- sion is a motive, or drive. The “heat” in loving relationships is assumed to come from passion, and the warmth from intimacy; in contrast, commitment can be a cool-headed decision that is not emotional or temperamental at all.
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In Sternberg’s theory, each of these three components is said to be one side of a triangle that describes the love two people share. Each component can vary in intensity from low to high, so triangles of various sizes and shapes are possible. In fact, countless numbers of shapes can occur, so to keep things simple, we’ll consider the relatively pure categories of love that result when one or more of the three ingredients is plentiful but the others are very low. As we proceed, you should remember that pure experiences that are this clearly defined may not be routine in real life.
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Nonlove. If intimacy, passion, and commitment are all absent, love does not exist. Instead, you have a casual, superficial, uncommitted relationship between people who are probably just acquaintances, not friends.
Liking. Liking occurs when intimacy is high but passion and commitment are very low. Liking occurs in friendships with real closeness and warmth that do not arouse passion or the expectation that you will spend the rest of your life with that person. If a friend does arouse passion or is missed ter- ribly when he or she is gone, the relationship has gone beyond liking and has become something else.
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Infatuation. Strong passion in the absence of intimacy or commitment is infatuation, which is what people experience when they are aroused by others they barely know. Sternberg (1987) admits that he pined away for a girl in his 10th-grade biology class whom he never got up the courage to get to know. This, he now acknowledges, was nothing but passion. He was infatuated with her.