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The three components of love, according to Sternberg, are separate, rather independent centers of it that interact with each other. So, for example, greater intimacy causes a greater intensity of passion and responsibility in the relationship of partners.
Various combinations of these components of love make it possible to classify love into seven types. In the case of only one component, we have either sympathy, or blind passionate love, or formal (empty) love. The presence of the two ingredients creates romantic, companionate, or fatuous love. Perfect (consummate or complete), in other words, high love is characterized by the presence of all three components.
Such a model of love clearly enough reflects how balanced love is and allows you to measure the amount (intensity) of really flowing love. For this, Sternberg developed questionnaires to assess the degree of each of the three components of love: intimacy, passion and devotion. If you want to measure the temperature of your love, then try to honestly answer the questions given in the Practices of Love appendix.
Using this concept, a number of questions can be explored, the answers to which explain certain problems arising in a love relationship. For example, how do real and ideal love triangles coincide? What are the combinations of the components of love that each partner brings to love? Who would be the perfect match for someone with the ability to experience love based on a specific set of ingredients? In some crisis situations, it is also useful to compare the patterns of love that we feel, and which are manifested in real actions towards our partner.
Having defined what perfect love is, Sternberg immediately notes that it is much easier to achieve it than to keep it. If so, then surprisingly the instability of perfect love is similar to the fleetingness of the period of falling in love, in other words, high love is somewhat akin to little love. Therefore, it is possible that to hold mature love means periodically to plunge into the magical source of being in love.
It should also be noted that a person’s ability to consciously control and regulate drives and motivational processes (a component of passion) is considered practically unrealizable, in contrast to the feelings associated with intimacy and duty towards a partner. The great William Shakespeare seems to have written about this:
My love is as a fever longing still,
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
Th’ uncertain sickly appetite to please:
My reason the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve,
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest,
My thoughts and my discourse as mad men’s are,
At random from the truth vainly expressed.
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
Sternberg’s three-component theory of love is perhaps the main achievement of psychology in the dissection of love. However, in order to connect it with the multifaceted practice of relations between a man and a woman, Sternberg had to supplement it with the concept of love as a story.
R. Sternberg’s triangular theory of love
Components of the feeling of love: Intimacy, Passion, Duty. Degree of feelings: Warm, Hot, Cold. Mental processes: Emotional, Motivational, Cognitive.
Theory of Love as a Story
Understanding love as a story provides an answer to the question of how love triangles are formed in each of the partners entering into long-term close relationships. In this concept, the origin of love and its design are separated. It should be noted that the essence of the concept is related to the formation of an individual channel of love, therefore, one should not attach great importance to the simplified schemes of its origin mentioned here.
The shaping of love stories is as follows: the emergence of love occurs due to genetically transmitted instincts and impulses, and the image (matrix) of love is formed as a result of social learning and following role examples that are beginning to be associated with love. Love is organized mainly by a prototype. We learn about it from books, movies, mass media, parents, and friends, and we begin to accumulate our own experience according to typical schemes for realizing love. On the basis of typical schemes and personal experience, individual implicit stories of love are formed in the minds of each, and when two meet, each has its own plot of love.
The concept of love as a story has another practical meaning. It allows you to link social, historical, cultural, and ethnic contexts with individual experiences. According to Sternberg, the conditions prevailing by the beginning of the 21st century in the United States of America are characterized by the presence of 26 typical love stories. For example, love can resemble in every respect a close or long journey, or develop as a play according to a pre-written script with well-known role-playing tasks, or be like a humor joke, a cookbook, an investment business, gardening, etc.
“Love and, for example, collecting. How do you want to understand it?” – a reasonable question from a romantic-minded reader is heard. Perhaps, in the most impartial way: if you collect a lot of images of love sitting in the minds of American ordinary people, then you don’t need Sherlock Holmes’s deduction to take the dry residue from them and decompose it into piles, and attach an advertising label “Love Collectors” to one of them.
However, even Sternberg’s improved duplex theory of love leaves out of psychological models the key questions of love relationships about its driving force and ultimate goal. These questions became the focus of parallel studies on the psychology of love motivation, and their results were not slow to take shape in a separate theory of love.
R. Sternberg’s duplex theory of love
The formation of love triangles in partners as a result of social learning and perception of love prototypes, embodied in typical love stories.
Love as Self-Expansion
In the same 1986, along with the three-component theory of love by Sternberg, American psychologists Arthur Aron and Elaine Aron proposed the no less famous model of love as the self-expansion model (SEM). The idea arose at the junction of scientific research on the basic motives of human behavior in romantic relationships and classical ideas about love in Western (Plato) and Eastern philosophy (Upanishads), as the ultimate highest goal of human aspirations.
The SEM model was based on two psychological processes: the basic motivation of the individual to expand his own Self and the effect achieved in close relationships of including the other in the Self. Accordingly, in this model, love was defined as the desire to expand the Self by including the desired other in one’s own personality.
The motivation to expand the Self is associated with the universal need of a person to have great opportunities to achieve certain life goals (self-efficacy). The individual, according to the SEM concept, seeks to deepen his own understanding of himself through a new experience, expanding his worldview, acquiring new qualities, and thereby developing the Self as a given identity