A theory of love
Love. The End.
No, really, what is this love you seek? Is it for the heart, the mind, the soul, or is it for the ego, the pockets, or a hole? Whatever love we may want or need, there are all kinds of theories, poems, music, ideas, and thoughts to attempt to define, describe, and dissect that thing we call love. My go-to definition of love has always been from the book Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke.
To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. For this reason, young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about their lonely, timid, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is — solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves. Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate — ?), it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself for another’s sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things. Only in this sense, as the task of working at themselves (“to hearken and to hammer day and night”), might young people use the love that is given them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must save and gather for a long, long time still), is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives as yet scarcely suffice.
Knowing that most of us sometimes seek such love, I asked myself, what is a good, old-fashioned theory of love? That’s when I stumbled upon Robert Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love. At first, I thought I would find it limiting and reductionistic, but once I dove in, I came to like it and even found myself adding to it.1 I probably like the irony of it, too, since he made it a “love triangle.” Who doesn’t want to know more about a love triangle?
Sternberg mapped out intuitive types of love around three interconnected and critical points: passion, intimacy, and commitment.2 These three points make the love triangle. Please refer to my diagram below, in which I took many creative liberties when making.
Intimacy (at the top of the triangle) is connectedness. This is when we can count on our partner to bring us soup when we get sick. We feel contentment when we are with them. We share everything. They are our emotional sounding board, and we are that to them. We have open communication and deep conversations. We value each other’s time. I see this love similar to how Martin Buber describes intimacy:
The relation to the You is unmediated. Nothing conceptual intervenes between I and You, no prior knowledge and no imagination; and memory itself is changed as it plunges from particularity into wholeness. No purpose intervenes between I and You, no greed and no anticipation; and longing itself is changed as it plunges from the dream into appearance.3
For Buber, intimacy is a reciprocal connection between two people where each sees the other as a whole being. Intimacy is where we feel connected in relationships. It is the merging and respecting of the I-Thou relationship.
Passion (bottom left of the triangle) is our desire and emotional engagement with our partner. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir saw desire as fundamental to human existence and should not be separated from our identity and freedom.4 Passion is not just a physical feeling but must also be considered within a cultural context. In the context of Sternberg’s passionate love, he describes passionate love as sexual. Other needs like self-esteem, nurturance, dominance, submission, and self-actualization may also play a part in this type of love. Passion usually draws us to a person, but it does not sustain us without the other two points: intimacy and commitment.
Decision/Commitment (bottom right of the triangle) is a two-step process. Before you commit, you decide to commit. Sternberg makes that distinction because the decision and commitment require a conscious, long-term investment to love someone else, even when intimacy or passion subside, or there are ups and downs. In Existentialist Is a Humanism, Jean-Paul Sartre describes commitment as a conscious choice that defines who we are. We must take responsibility for our decisions, and in one of his more famous quotes, he says, “Commitment is an act, not a word.”5
Within the triangle of love, Sternberg defines eight types of love: non-love, liking, infatuated love, empty love, romantic love, compassionate love, fatuous love, and consummate love, or what I like to call profound love. Canadian psychologist John Alan Lee also proposed a typology of loving that I incorporated.6 Some of Lee’s theories of love are additive, in my opinion, and some are similar to Sternberg’s. Nevertheless, he uses cooler words from Greek, like Eros, the Greek god of love and passion, so you know I am going to weave them in when I can.
Nonlove is just what it says: no love. This is when you are not in love. I might put Lee’s “shopping list” love here or what he calls, pragma, i.e., conscious and logical.7 I picture someone scrolling and swiping through dating apps, trying mindlessly to find “the one” who checks all the boxes. This is not love, but it is still an action taken to try and attain love, so it lands in the same vicinity as nonlove.
Liking is basically being “friend-zoned.” When the love is just intimacy without passion or commitment, you are in the friend zone. Lee refers to this as storge or a companionship love where one’s love slowly develops into affection and friendship. Some of the best romcoms (romantic comedy movies) and dramas that deal with friendship relationships are 500 Days of Summer, When Harry Met Sally, and Past Lives.
Infatuated love is the result of passion without intimacy or commitment. Some may call this a “hook-up,” but these relationships are usually the most unstable.8 Infatuated love can also be "love at first sight." You can literally find a Hollywood romcom for pretty much any type of love I describe here. However, there should be a trigger warning that because Hollywood romcoms are usually fantasy. In some ways, they force us to assume that someone else’s fantasy of love is our fantasy, and when the reality comes up short, we feel tricked. In the real world, infatuated love never ends with a big dance number and a Big Fat Greek wedding. For giggles, below is a recent trailer for a B movie called, Love at First Sight, i.e. infatuated love. See what I mean?
Empty love is commitment without passion or intimacy. These can be the most heartbreaking relationships. Some types of empty love relationships can be one-sided encounters or unrequited love. Believe it or not, research shows that empty love is just as common as infatuated, romantic, and other types of love. Among college students, at least 60% had been in a one-sided relationship.9 An excellent film that captures empty love after intimacy and passion die is Blue Valentine.
Romantic love is intimacy and passion without a decision or commitment. Lee refers to this type of love as eros, characterized by searching for one’s image of love in another.10 Romantic lovers are emotionally and physically intertwined. The Notebook is probably the most famous romantic movie dealing with romantic love of my generation. However, there are thousands and thousands of romantic movies, from Romeo and Juliet to Pride and Prejudice to even those cheesy and cringy movies that make tons of money for Hollywood, which I refer to as “the After movies.”
Sometimes, in romantic love, individuals may break up and get back together multiple times, which is an offshoot of romantic love (see my triangle diagram). On-again-off-again relationships are volatile, but people do it to elevate passion since passion, in some cases, can be short-lived.11 If you keep breaking up, it can be exciting to get back together, and the passion can be reignited. Unfortunately, this cycle causes psychological distress with increased anxiety and depressive symptoms in the partners. These relationships are also more often associated with violence and conflict than other types. Lee might refer to this type of love as mania because there is an obsessive, possessive, and dependent component. Again, these are just as common as other types of love to experience at least once in one’s life.12 Mostly, on-again and off-again relationships usually keep going until one finds another person to commit to. For those that marry, they tend to question their decision. They may likely separate since instability creates more instability.
Another offshoot of romantic love that should be mentioned is the ever-popular situationship. One official definition of the modern situationship is “a relationship with someone in which there is a romantic connection, often involving time spent together, affection, and sexual behaviors, but no clarity or label.”13 In other words, you go out together in public, but you do not post about it on your social media. It is romantic, but it lacks clarity. It’s when you say, “We are just spending time together.” Lee refers to this as the ludus type of love, which is Ovid's term for playful or game-playing love.
Compassionate love is intimacy and commitment but without passion. It is essentially a long-term, committed friendship. It happens in marriages when the physical attraction has subsided after many years, and in some cases, it may lead to feeling unfulfilled and divorce. I think Lee’s agape type falls into this area. It is an all-giving, selfless love but is more like a duty than profound, everlasting love. A fantastic series on Apple+ that takes you through this experience is Scenes of a Marriage based on the also fantastic 1973 series by Ingmar Bergman on the Criterion channel.
Fatuous love is passion and commitment but without intimacy. I like to call this “friends-with-benefits.” As common as these are, they usually end your friendship.14 In the romcom literally called, Friends with Benefits, two friends (Justine Timberlake and Mila Kunis) enter a fatuous relationship. Since it is a Hollywood romcom, they end up in everlasting, committed, true love, which, as we know, in real life, is usually not the case but it works for this particular movie.
Profound Love, or what Sternberg calls “consummate” or “complete love,” is the total combination of the triangle: intimacy, passion, and decision/commitment. It is the kind of love many of us strive for, and what, I think, Rilke describes in Letters to a Young Poet. Profound love is the ultimate test and proof of our existence. It is learned, heart-giving, merging, uniting, unfinished, surrendering, and communion.
From my various readings, I have concluded that healthy relationships that create good physical and psychological health are high quality. To move from theory to the practice of a profound and loving relationship, there are five things Sternberg and others suggest you do: have the conversations about what you want before becoming emotionally and sexually attached, make your decision and commitment known when you feel passionate and intimate, invest your time and energy in high-quality partnerships rather than low-quality ones such as on again, off again romances, do not let a relationship become stagnant or too predictable because it undermines intimacy, and most of all, always keep that passion and fire alive. I know … It is all easier said than done, but if it is love you seek, there will need to be some effort … good work, but work, nonetheless.
The End. Love.
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It should be noted that individuals in same-sex relationships are often more similar than different, according to Sternberg and other theorists of love I discuss. However, some of the research I quote was primarily conducted on heterosexual couples – just FYI. As we all know, more inclusive and all-encompassing research needs to be done in the future.
Sternberg, R. J. (1986). A Triangular Theory of Love, Psychological Review, Vol. 93, No. 2, 119-135.
Buber, M. (1937). I and Thou.
De Beauvoir, S. (1949). The Second Sex.
Sartre, J.P. (1946). Existentialist Is a Humanism.
Lee, J.A. (1977). A Typology of Styles of Loving. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 3, 173-182.4
Lee, J.A. (1977).
Monk, J. K., Ogolsky, B. G., & Maniotes, C. (2022). On-Off Relationship Instability and Distress Over Time in Same- and Different-Sex Relationships. Family Relations, 71(2), 630–643.
Langlais, M. R., Podberesky, A., Toohey, L., & Lee, C. T. (2024). Defining and Describing Situationships: An Exploratory Investigation. Sexuality & Culture : An Interdisciplinary Journal, 28(4), 1831–1857.
Lee, J.A. (1977).
Sternberg, R. J. (1986).
Monk et al, (2022).
Langlais, et al., (2024).
60 % of college students had at least one of these relationships (Langlais, et al., 2024).