The Nature Of Love Research Paper

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There are few topics that intrigue people as much as love. Almost everybody has experienced it in his or her life, and many view it as one of the most important things in their life. Take a look at novels in a bookstore, at the movies that are being screened at the movie theaters, or at the songs that radio stations broadcast every day. Many of them deal with love. Love seems to be almost everywhere, in one form or another.

Love is very powerful, and has the power to make people very happy. At the same time, however, love has the potential to make people very unhappy. A look in the newspaper confirms that love sometimes leads to violence, going as far as the murder of loved ones. Still, whereas there has been much contemplation over the years about love in philosophy, there was relatively little research on love in psychology until a bit more than 30 years ago (e.g., Berscheid & Walster, 1974). Only then did a broader scientific interest in the empirical study of love arise.

There are many questions that can be asked about love, such as “What is love, exactly?” “When is it that people love someone?” “Do people in all cultures experience love the same way?” “What is the difference between the love of parents for their children, and the romantic love enamored college students may feel for each other?” Researchers have proposed several theories to address questions such as these. This chapter will introduce you to the major research areas of psychological research on love and the theories that the researchers and theorists have developed.

At first, we will have a closer look at the different kinds of taxonomies of love that exist. This part of the chapter tries to shed light on questions such as “How many kinds of love are there, and what are they?” To make this look at different kinds of love complete, we will consider not only the ideas of researchers but also the theories and ideas that laypeople have about love. Then, we will explore the question of whether love has any biological foundations. Here, we will consider biological theories of love that explain love from the viewpoint of evolution and attachment.

In explaining these theories, we will first have a closer look at what the theories propose and what their content is, consider empirical studies the researchers conducted in order to come to their conclusions, and then compare the theories. At the end of the chapter, we will consider applications of the findings described in this research-paper, and conclude with a short summary.

Theories

Taxonomies

Taxonomies are used to try to shed light on the different styles and kinds of love that may exist. For example, there is the love of parents for their children, the love of a high school student for the girl sitting in front of him in class, or the love of two people who have been married for 30 years. Obviously, there are some differences in these kinds of love. But then, how many different kinds of love exist, and what distinguishes them? These are some of the questions that taxonomies try to answer.

Romantic Love Styles

Whenever you want to conduct research on any topic, one of the most important things is that you have a good way of measuring the constructs in question. Often, this is done in psychology by means of questionnaires. John Alan Lee believed that romantic love was way too complex an emotion to be assessed just by means of a simple questionnaire. To do justice to the concept of love, he developed a method called the Love Story Card Sort (Lee, 1977). This method consisted of almost 200 cards that contained half phrases like “The night after I met X….” The participants in his study were asked to respond to these phrases by choosing a matching answer from cards that were offered to them (sometimes with more than 10 responses such as “I could hardly get to sleep”). The result of his studies led him to propose what he referred to as a “color wheel” of love.

In his theory, there are three primary styles of love— eros, ludus, and storge—and three secondary styles of love that result from mixtures of the three primary styles—pragma, mania, and agape. Eros is an erotic kind of love that comes with strong passionate emotions and physical attraction. Ludus is a game-playing love that is uncommitted and tends to realize itself with a variety of partners. Storge is a friendship kind of love, relatively calm and unobtrusive, without eros’s strong emotions. Pragma is a calculating secondary love style that sees the partner in terms of attributes that are desired (or not desired) in a relationship. Mania is a highly emotional secondary style of love that alternates between euphoria and desperation or even agony. The third secondary love style is agape, which is a kind of communal and altruistic love that is very giving and compassionate but that usually does not appear in a pure form in romantic relationships.

Susan and Clyde Hendrick used these six love styles as the basis for their research program and suggested that they can be depicted in a six-dimensional matrix in which every person gets assigned a certain point on all of the six love styles to describe the “amount” of each love style. These styles are largely independent of one another (C. Hendrick & S. S. Hendrick, 2006). People can be especially high on one style or moderately high on several of them. Also, it is possible to experience different love styles with different partners. The love styles, therefore, are dependent not only on the individual but also on the partner, as well as on demographic factors like age, life stage, and so forth. They are correlated with personality traits like extraversion or neuroticism. Extraversion, for example, is positively correlated with eros and storge, whereas neuroticism is negatively related to eros and storge but positively related to mania and ludus. There are also some sex differences, with men endorsing ludus more than women, and women acknowledging more pragma and storge than men.

The love styles are differentially related to relationship satisfaction. Eros and storge, for example, are positive predictors of relationship satisfaction, whereas ludus is a negative predictor of satisfaction. Usually, people engage in relationships with partners who share at least some of the love styles with them. Interestingly, however, studies did not find relationships between the love styles of students and those of their parents (Inman-Amos, S. S. Hendrick, & C. Hendrick, 1994).

This approach can be used not only in scientific psychology but also in therapy. People may come to understand their needs and emotions better by knowing their love styles while also recognizing patterns in their partner’s behavior and feelings.

The Duplex Theory of Love

The duplex theory of love (Sternberg, 2006) has two parts. One part specifies the structure of love, and the other part, how this structure comes to be. The two parts are called the triangular subtheory and the subtheory of love as a story.

The triangular subtheory of love (Sternberg, 2006) holds that love can be understood in terms of three components that together can be viewed as forming the vertices of a triangle. The triangle is used as a metaphor, rather than as a strict geometric model. These three components are intimacy (top vertex of the triangle), passion (left-hand vertex of the triangle), and decision/commitment (right-hand vertex of the triangle). (The assignment of components to vertices is arbitrary.) These three components have appeared in various other theories of love; moreover, they appear to correspond rather well to people’s implicit theories of love (Aron & Westbay, 1996). Each of these three terms can be used in many different ways, so it is important to clarify their meanings in the context of the present theory.

Intimacy refers to feelings of closeness, connectedness, and bondedness in loving relationships. It thus includes within its purview those feelings that give rise, essentially, to the experience of warmth in a loving relationship.

Passion refers to the drives that lead to romance, physical attraction, sexual consummation, and related phenomena in loving relationships, and it includes within its purview those sources of motivational and other forms of arousal that lead to the experience of passion. It also includes what Hatfield and Walster (1981) refer to as “a state of intense longing for union with the other” (p. 9). In a loving relationship, sexual needs may well predominate in this experience. However, other needs, such as those for self-esteem, succorance, nurturance, affiliation, dominance, submission, and self-actualization may also contribute to the experiencing of passion.

Decision/commitment refers, in the short term, to the decision that one loves a certain other and, in the long term, to one’s commitment to maintain that love. These two aspects of the decision/commitment component do not necessarily go together, in that one can decide to love someone without being committed to the love for the long term, or one can be committed to a relationship without acknowledging that one loves the other person in the relationship.

These three components of love generate eight possible limiting cases when considered in combination. Each of these cases gives rise to a different kind of love. It is important to realize that these kinds of love are, in fact, limiting cases: No relationship is likely to be a pure case of any of them.

Nonlove refers simply to the absence of all three components of love. Liking results when one experiences only the intimacy component of love in the absence of the passion and decision/commitment components. Infatuated love results from the experiencing of the passion component in the absence of the other components of love. Empty love emanates from the decision that one loves another and is committed to that love in the absence of both the intimacy and passion components of love. Romantic love derives from a combination of the intimacy and passion components. Companionate love derives from a combination of the intimacy and decision/commitment components of love. Fatuous love results from the combination of the passion and decision/commitment components in the absence of the intimacy component. Consummate, or complete, love results from the full combination of all three components.

In sum, the possible subsets of the three components of love generate as limiting cases different kinds of love. Most loves are “impure” examples of these various kinds: They partake of all three vertices of the triangle, but in different amounts.

The geometry of the “love triangle” depends upon two factors: amount of love and balance of love. Differences in amounts of love are represented by differing areas of the love triangle: the greater the amount of love, the greater the area of the triangle. Differences in balances of the three kinds of love are represented by differing shapes of triangles. For example, balanced love (roughly equal amounts of each component) is represented by an equilateral triangle.

Empirical data reveal several interesting findings emanating from the theory (Sternberg, 1997). A first finding is that couples tend to be happier when they have more of each of the three components of intimacy, passion, and commitment. A second finding is that couples are happier when they have more nearly matching triangles—that is, when their patterns of intimacy, passion, and commitment are more similar. A third finding is that intimacy seems to be especially important to successful relationships.

The subtheory of love as a story holds that love triangles emanate from stories. Almost all of us are exposed to large numbers of diverse stories that convey different conceptions of how love can be understood. Some of these stories may be explicitly intended as love stories; others may have love stories embedded in the context of larger stories. Either way, we are provided with varied opportunities to observe multiple conceptions of what love can be. These stories may be observed by watching people in relationships, by watching television or movies, or by reading fiction. It seems plausible that, as a result of our exposure over time to such stories, we form our own stories of what love is or should be.

Sternberg has proposed and tested a theory of love as a story whereby the interaction of our personal attributes with the environment—the latter of which we in part create—leads to the development of stories about love that we then seek to fulfill, to the extent possible, in our lives. Various potential partners fit these stories to greater or lesser degrees, and we are more likely to succeed in close relationships with people whose stories match our own more closely rather than less. Although, fundamentally, the stories we create are our own, they draw on our experience of living in the world—from fairy stories we may have heard when we were young, from the models of love relationships we observe around us in parents and relatives, from television and movies, from conversations with other people about their relationships, and so forth.

Although the number of possible stories is probably infinite, certain genres of stories keep emerging again and again in pilot analyses we have done of literature, film, and people’s oral descriptions of relationships. Because the stories we have analyzed were from participants in the United States, our listing is likely to show some degree of cultural bias.

The stories contain some overlap, so that people with certain stories that are higher in their hierarchies might be expected to have other, similar stories higher in their hierarchies as well. For example, an autocratic government story and a police story have overlapping elements— one partner maintaining authority and surveillance over another—so that people with a strong preference for one of these stories might also have a rather strong preference for the other. Some examples of these stories include the following:

Addiction—strong anxious attachment; clinging behavior; anxiety at thought of losing partner.
Art—love of partner for physical attractiveness; importance to person of partner’s always looking good.
Business—relationships as business propositions; money is power; partners in close relationships as business partners.
Collection—partner viewed as “fitting in” to some overall scheme; partner viewed in a detached way.
Cookbook—doing things a certain way (recipe) results in relationship being more likely to work out; departure from recipe for success leads to increased likelihood of failure.
Fantasy—often expects to be saved by a knight in shining armor or to marry a princess and live happily ever after.
Gardening—relationships need to be continually nurtured and tended to.
Horror—relationships become interesting when you terrorize or are terrorized by your partner.
Mystery—love is a mystery, and you shouldn’t let too much of yourself be known.
Police—you’ve got to keep close tabs on your partner to make sure he or she toes the line, or you need to be under surveillance to make sure you behave.
Pornography—love is dirty, and to love is to degrade or be degraded.
Theater—love is scripted, with predictable acts, scenes, and lines.
Travel—love is a journey.
War—love is a series of battles in a devastating but continuing war.

Several aspects of the stories are worth noting; keep them in mind because they apply to all the kinds of stories.

First, the current list of 26 kinds of stories represents a wide range of conceptions of what love can be. Some of the conceptions are more common (e.g., love as a garden) than are others (e.g., love as pornography). The most common conception is of love as a travel story, or a journey that two people take together, trying to stay on the same path.

Second, each story has a characteristic mode of thought and behavior. For example, someone with a mystery-based story of love will behave very differently toward a loved one than will someone with a horror-based love story.

Third, we may not even be aware that we have these views, or that they are idiosyncratic to the particular story we hold about love. Rather, we often will view them as more or less “correct” characterizations of what love is or should be, and we will view partners who fail to measure up as being somehow inadequate. Alternatively, we may view ourselves as inadequate if we cannot conform to the view we have of relationships. Thus, if someone views love as a business but can’t form a business-type of relationship after several tries, he or she may view him or herself as inadequate.

Fourth, love stories have within them complementary roles, which may or may not be symmetrical. We look for someone who shares our story or who at least has a compatible story that more or less can fit with ours, but we may not always look for someone who is just like ourselves. Rather, we may look for someone who is like us in sharing a particular story (or who has a similar story) but who is complementary to us in the role within that story. Thus, people look for others who are, at one level, similar but, at another level, different.

Fifth, certain stories seem simply to have more potential for success than do others. Some stories, for example, may run themselves out quickly and thus lack durability over the long term, whereas others may have the potential to last a lifetime.

Sixth, stories are both causes and effects: They interact with the rest of our lives. The stories we bring to relationships may cause us to behave in certain ways, and even to elicit certain behavior from others. At the same time, our own development and our interactions with others may shape and modify the stories we have and thus bring to our relationships. Our stories are so intertwined with the rest of our lives that it would be hopeless to try to ease out cause and effect.

We may have multiple stories represented hierarchically, so that the stories are likely to vary in salience for us. In other words, we will prefer some stories over others, so that we may find partners differentially satisfying as a function of the extent to which they match our more (rather than less) salient stories. A Likert-type scale presenting items representing multiple stories allows participants to show preferences for multiple stories.

Prototype Theory

We have learned something about what scientists believe love to be. How do these insights compare to what laypeople think about, and how they experience, love? There has been some research about their conceptions of love.

Prototype theory was developed in the 1970s by Eleanor Rosch (1973) and others. Before Rosch, theories had proposed that there were necessary and sufficient attributes that objects needed to have to belong to a certain category. For example, a bachelor is an unmarried adult male. Each attribute is necessary for a person to be a bachelor, and jointly, the attributes are sufficient. Rosch suggested, however, that there are many concepts in everyday life that can be better described by means of prototypes. Prototypes are members of a category that represent the essence and typical features of the category members in a particularly good way. Other members of a category may differ in that some of their features are more or less prototypical of the category than others. This also means that suddenly there was no longer a clear definition as to which objects belong to a category and which do not. Rather, the boundaries of a given category are rather blurry. For example, whereas a sparrow is a rather prototypical example of a bird, a penguin is also a bird but does not incorporate as many (proto-)typical bird features as a sparrow does.

Now, can the same principle be applied to love? Let’s do a small experiment. When you think of different relationships and their characteristics—the behaviors that people show and their emotions—what are the defining features of love? Does cuddling necessarily need to be a prominent feature of loving relationships, or do all love types come with support of the other? It seems difficult to find a defining set of features that tells us exactly what love is and is not, and it gets even more difficult when we think of all the different kinds of love, like romantic love or platonic love.

Beverley Fehr (1988; Fehr & Russell, 1991) used the prototype approach to examine people’s conceptions of love. She had participants in her study list words that described the concept of love, and then let other participants rate the words she had retrieved in the first study according to how prototypical they thought the words were

of the concept of love. She found that people regarded characteristics of companionate love, such as caring and respect, as more prototypical of love than characteristics of passionate love, which would include features like passion and sexual desire.

Fehr also did research concerning kinds of love: Would romantic love best capture the essence of love, or would it be another kind of love? As when participants described the prototypical features of love, they regarded friendship as more prototypical of love than passionate love. Other studies confirmed that people’s view of love is consistent at least across all levels of society in North America. Whereas, in the United States, love was mainly associated with positive emotions, in other parts of the world, like Indonesia (Shaver, Schwartz, Kirson, & O’Connor, 1987; Shaver, Wu, & Schwartz, 1992), love was more associated with negative emotions.

So what are some of the implications of the prototypes people have about love? Fehr and Broughton (2001) found that couples who had a rather prototypical view of love also felt more love for their partner. The prototypical features can even be used to make people feel more love for each other, at least in the short term. Boris (2002, as cited in Fehr, 2006) induced intimacy, one of the prototypical features of love, in his couple participants. Boris discovered that, as opposed to couples in a neutral condition, the couples who had participated in the intimacy-stimulating treatment felt more satisfied with their relationship.

Biological Theories

Biological theories focus on biological and physiological processes as well as knowledge of evolution to explain psychological phenomena. In this part of the chapter, we will have a closer look at these theories.

Love as a Decision Bias

Douglas Kenrick (2001; Kenrick, Sadalla, & Keefe, 1998) view love as a system of decision biases that evolved over time. What, exactly, is a decision bias? Human beings, just like other species, have to make many decisions over the course of their day. Often, these decisions concern problems of basic survival. People in earlier times were confronted with questions such as “Where do I look for food?” “Which animal poses a danger to me?” and “How do I react when I am being attacked?” In the domain of love, similar questions have to be answered. “How do I attract potential mates?” “Who is the best person to mate with?” and “How do I retain a mate over a longer period of time?” Now, people often do not make decisions on an objective basis but rather have an (often unconscious) inclination toward one or the another action alternative. Kenrick suggests that their decisions are biased because there are some inborn decision biases that have evolved over the course of human history and development. The decision biases take the form of if-then rules, where “if” refers to a certain condition in the environment and “then” constitutes a response that is designed to adapt to the environment. These biases are different for men and for women because they have different starting points. Whereas men can easily impregnate many women in a short time to pass on their genes, for example, women have to invest much more in each of their offspring because they are pregnant with the offspring for nine months. Furthermore, one set of decision biases in the domain of love would not be enough. There are a lot of different situations in which people need to find ways to navigate, from finding a mate to keeping the mate to maintaining good relations with other family members or friends. Therefore, different social situations necessitate different decision biases, which interact in dynamic ways with one another. These decision biases are the basis of all human behavior, so that although there may be cultural variations due to ecological differences, human behavior cannot be seen as a completely blank slate because the decision biases provide a certain framework. They are not just a simple program that reacts inflexibly to a stimulus; rather, they encompass complex sequences over time. Love fits in several of these domains, as all kinds of love basically involve the formation of social bonds. People have to form coalitions with others, for example, to gain access to necessary resources. One decision bias in this domain is that people who are interested in forming coalitions pay more attention to their commonalities with the others in whom they are interested than they do to their differences. When people are looking for potential partners, a man tends to pay relatively more attention to physical features like beauty and young age, which indicates fertility, whereas a woman tends to pay more attention to a man’s status as an indicator of whether he would be able to sustain her and her offspring. When it comes to retaining a mate, people tend to assume the worst when others seem to be potentially interested in their partner.

Other domains are familial care and self-protection. Although not all of the decision biases have yet been empirically proved, most of them are at least somewhat supported. For example, Ackerman and his colleagues (2003) had two persons each play a game, and then asked them how much of their success they attributed to themselves and how much to their coplayer. It turned out that when participants had played with a stranger, they attributed most responsibility for success to themselves, whereas when they had played with a close relative, they split the responsibility rather evenly or gave even more credit to their relative than to themselves.

Love as a Means to Commitment

Another theorist whose theory is derived from a consideration of evolution is David Buss. He suggests that love is primarily a device to achieve commitment—a means that helps bind people together through better or worse. How does he come to that conclusion?

He starts by describing the changes that occurred when humans started diverging from their primate ancestors: Women’s ovulation was concealed, so that men could not recognize when would be the best time to have intercourse with and impregnate them. Men and women started to have sexual intercourse over the entire month, and even engaged in long-term bonding that endured for years. Females began to mate with just one male instead of mating with whoever happened to be the leader of their group; men started watching their female partners and guarding them against others who were potentially interested in them, while also investing more heavily in their offspring. But now that humans were more restricted because they mated with just one partner, what could help them to ensure that this partner would still be there when they got sick or some other more attractive potential mate crossed their way? How could people stay committed even in such situations? Buss (1988) has suggested that love evolved as a means to help people stay committed to each other. Because, according to Buss, even when somebody else came along who looked beautiful, or one’s mate got sick, if someone loved his or her partner, the individual would stay with him or her against all rationality. To investigate whether commitment is truly a signal of love, Buss conducted a study in which he asked participants to list behaviors that indicate that a person is in love. He found that behaviors signaling commitment, like remaining sexually faithful, making a sacrifice for the other, or providing goods, were the most diagnostic ones.

Just as love can be a good thing that keeps people together, it can also have detrimental and even deadly consequences, in that it evokes jealousy. In 2004, of all murders committed in the United States, about 21 percent of the victims were murdered by their husbands/wives or boyfriends/ girlfriends, with a good part of the victims being females (FBI, 2005). How is it possible that people kill the ones they love? Generally, one would assume that killing a mate would be detrimental because (at least in the past) one could have expected that relatives of the killed person would take revenge for the deed. Also, the murderer will have deprived him- or herself of reproductive possibilities. In the light of evolutionary theory, however, the killing of a mate can make sense. The victim may not have revengeful relatives. Most crucially, when people sense they no longer have their mate’s affection, they feel they have suffered a loss; rivals who then seek to mate with the former partner can thus gain from that loss. The killing of the unfaithful partner therefore prevents rivals from attaining gains. The younger and more attractive the woman is, the greater one’s loss and the rival’s gain. Therefore, the younger, healthier, and more fertile a woman is, the more a man tends to be motivated to kill her once he feels he has permanently lost her.

There are a few other things that follow from Buss’s evolutionary theory of love. One of them is that, because love evolved over the course of human development, it should be a universal emotion that is felt by people all over the world, though the experience itself may differ, of course. Support for this assumption comes from a study that Susan Sprecher and her colleagues conducted in 1994 in which they interviewed people from different countries and asked them whether they were in love at the time. It turned out that of the Americans, 63 percent of the women and 53 percent of the men were in love; in Japan, 63 percent of the women and 41 percent of the men were in love; and in Russia, 73 percent of the women and 61 percent of the men were in love.

Love From an Attachment Point of View

Another theory of love uses knowledge about evolution to explain love. This theory is based on the attachment theory of Bowlby (1969, 1980). Let us first have a look at attachment theory before proceeding further.

Attachment theory initially was viewed as applying only to infants and their tendencies to build and keep up contact with the figures to whom they attach. According to Bowlby, an infant’s development of emotional ties to it’s the caregiver depends on the propensity of the infant to seek and maintain contact with its caregiver, the reaction of the caregiver to the infant’s efforts, and the ability of the caregiver to provide the security and protection that the infant is seeking.

Shaver, Hazan, and Bradshaw (1988) applied the conceptual framework of attachment theory to adults. They argued that the formation of emotional bonds in adults is actually quite similar to the formation of bonds in early childhood. They went further and said that, for every behavior that is exhibited in attachment relationships of young children to their caregivers, there is also a parallel behavior in adult relationships. For example, both relationships between parents and their young children and romantic relationships between adults encompass behaviors like kissing and cuddling. The newly developing relationship between two adults is shaped by the responsiveness of the desired partner, as is the case in infant-caregiver relationships. Furthermore, if the desired partner does not behave in the way hoped for or is not responsive to the person who is expressing a need, both adults and young children can become nervous and anxious. Repeated rejection will lead to the adjustment of their behavior to the situation. There are three different attachment styles that Shaver and colleagues assume to be existent in adults, just as in children.

A secure attachment style leads to people being comfortable with their close others, without any great fear of being abandoned or of others getting too close to them. An anxious-ambivalent attachment style leads people to cling to their loved ones and to be afraid of losing them. An avoidant attachment style leads people to avoid closeness with others, and to become anxious once those others seek proximity. To find out whether those attachment styles really could also be applied in adulthood, Shaver and Hazan developed a questionnaire that comprised three descriptions (including behaviors and emotions) of those three attachment styles, and asked people to decide in which category they fell. They found that the incidence of

the three attachment styles was about the same as in early childhood, and that the way people described their relationship matched the attachment style that they had chosen for themselves in the questionnaire.

In addition to the attachment system, there are two other behavioral systems that may play a role in romantic love— the caregiving system and the sexual system. They both have different functions (Shaver & Mikulincer, 2006). The attachment system is activated when the partner/support person is out of reach and the person feels threatened. The goal that is being pursued with the activation of the attachment system is to provide protection from threats that are either real or symbolic. Once the attachment system is activated, the person engages in behaviors that are designed to alleviate the stresses from the needs felt. In this case, the primary strategy is to seek the proximity of the caregiver. If people feel that their strategy is not successful, however, they try to reach their goals in other ways. They can do so through either a hyperactivating or a deactivating strategy. A person who engages in a hyperactivating strategy seeks very intensely the proximity of the partner or caregiver and tends to be rather intrusive. Also, he or she is very sensitive to signs that may indicate rejection. The deactivating strategy involves not engaging in any attachment behaviors at all and denying the need to be close to the partner.

The caregiving system is triggered by others’ expressions of needs and attachment. Its goal is to help others in need and to reduce their misery. Once people receive such signals from others, the primary strategy they engage in is to feel empathy for the other person and to start engaging in helping behaviors. However, when people feel they do not succeed with this strategy, they again switch to other strategies, using either a hyperactivating or a deactivating strategy. The hyperactivating strategy means they force their help and care onto others without the others’ needing or wanting the help. The deactivation strategy is to not recognize others’ signs of need, and to deny the need to help them.

The sexual system is activated by the presence of a potential attractive and fertile partner. Its goal is to engage in sexual intercourse and, ultimately, to pass on one’s genes to the next generation. The primary strategy of this system is to approach the potential partner and convince him or her to engage in sexual intercourse. If this strategy is not successful, again people will rely on either hyper-or deactivating strategies. The hyperactivating strategy is to force sexual acts on other people, behave coercively, and be very sensitive to any signs of sexual rejection. Deactivating strategies, on the other hand, entail one’s denying all interest in sexual acts and seeking distance rather than proximity to the partner.

These three behavioral systems have implications for romantic love. When one or more of the systems do not function well and people resort to hyper- or deactivating strategies, it has consequences on the relations of people to each other. For example, if one person is engaging in hyperactivating strategies, the partner will likely be frustrated because of the coercive attempts with which the other person tries to establish proximity. These behavioral systems have implications not only for one’s own feelings but also for those of the partner.

Comparison

Stories are probably best understood in terms of prototypical conceptions of meaning, which have been applied to notions of love and shown to yield viable models of how people conceive of love. For example, a prototypical feature of love would be intimacy. In the prototypical view, conceptions of love do not have defining features, but rather characteristic features that, although not necessary and sufficient, are more or less suggestive of a construct. For example, if someone has a “mystery story,” there may be no defining features that uniquely identify that story as a mystery story, but rather prototypical features that are characteristic of mysteries (e.g., a mystery to be solved, a sleuth trying to solve the mystery, a shadowy figure draped in mystery whom the sleuth is trying to understand, information that is nonobvious and possibly deliberately hidden, etc.).

There is a substantial overlap between the view of love as a story and other views of love. As noted, the story of love as a game seems compatible with Lee’s (1977) Ludus love style; a religious story seems likely to lead to an anxious-ambivalent attachment style (Shaver et al., 1988); the fantasy story sounds similar to typical conceptions of romantic love (e.g., Hatfield & Walster, 1981; Sternberg, 2006); and so on. The difference is that the love-story point of view tries to capture the richness of the story that may lead to different structural love relations, as characterized by the variety of theories now extant. Whereas these theories propose various structures by which to view loving relationships, the emphasis in this theory is upon the content of the story. The structure is seen as the structure of stories, as discussed.

Applications

A feature of research on love is that it has applications to people’s everyday lives. For example, people can assess their own love triangles (Sternberg, 1998b), love stories (Sternberg, 1998a), or attachment styles (Shaver & Mikulincer, 2006). Assessing such patterns can help people better understand how they love and also what they are looking for in a partner. Partners can also assess the extent to which they are looking for the same things in a relationship.

Individuals and partners can also use theories of love to enhance their relationships. For example, people who have an anxious-ambivalent style of loving may have difficulties in their relationships, and may wish to work on this style if it is causing them problems in their life, either on their own or, preferably, in the context of psychotherapy.

People first need to understand what their issues are in relationships. Theories of love can help them find out what these issues are. Then they can decide whether they want to resolve them, and how.

Summary

Theories of love address questions such as what love is, how it develops, how it can be assessed, and how it can be enhanced. In this research-paper, we have considered several approaches, including taxonomic, prototypic, and biological ones. These theories differ in both the assumptions and assertions they make; however, they have in common that they attempt to provide plausible and empirically supported accounts of the nature of love.

One might wonder how researchers would determine which theory is correct. In all probability, no one theory is correct; rather, aspects of different theories are correct. Moreover, because the theories deal with somewhat different aspects of the phenomenon of love, they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. There may be elements of many theories that, in combination, help us understand the mysterious nature of love.

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