How Does Love Work?
What is this mysterious force, and where does it arise?
Note: by love, I do not exclusively mean romantic love.
I think this is a cool question. I’ve long wondered about it, and for the past few months, I’ve settled on a theory of randomness - why we like or dislike people is purely random - perhaps affected by a few major factors, such as similarity, how well they treat you, reputation - but for every rule, there are hundreds of exceptions, it seemed to me.
Seriously, though - a theory of randomness is not much of a theory.
So as part of the PPP Project, I’m taking Yale’s Introduction to Psychology course, available at Yale OWC. Dr. Peter Salovey, now Yale University’s President, delivered a guest lecture wherein he spoke about one theory of love, by Sternberg. It was terribly enjoyable, even if I ultimately didn’t agree with it much.
I’ll be discussing both the theory and my own opinions, so this is something between an Opinion and a Neview.
What is love made up of? According to Sternberg’s theory, intimacy - a feeling of closeness, “telling them stuff you wouldn’t tell others”; passion - physical attraction; and commitment - explicit acceptance of the presence of a relationship -are the three parts of love.
My first reaction was: this fella’s speaking about romantic love alone. However, no. According to this guy, if all three are present, it is the ideal romantic love, what he calls consummate love. When there are none, you either don’t know or don’t like this person (non-love - it’s nice, isn’t it?). When it’s something in between, however, we get really interesting results.
Let’s cover only one element of the three first. When you have only intimacy, it’s plain liking - this is where most friendships are. When you have only passion, this is infatuation - "love at first sight". If it’s only commitment: empty love - the unhappy end stage of long-term relationships.
Now, two elements: if it’s intimacy and passion, this is romantic love; if it’s intimacy and commitment, it’s companionate love - your best friend(s); and if there is only passion and commitment, this is fatuous love.
Nice, hey? Who’d have thought you could bundle all types of love into one theory of three parts? There’s not much I disagree with here - I thought it to be very astute.
Even harder question. What factors lead to attraction? (Which develops into love, hopefully).
The Professor says there are seven factors. The Big Three: proximity, similarity, and familiarity. All other things being equal, being physically close to someone makes you love them. That was rather insightful: it indicates that love is a deeply human, natural, impulse. Rather unbelievably, you’re attracted more to people who live closer to you. Then, similarity - both mental and even physical, interestingly. It turns out opposites don't really attract, but birds of a feather do flock together (isn’t it funny how we have wise proverbs for every possible result so that our proverbs will always be right?). Lastly, the longer and deeper you know a person, the more you’ll love them.
These are fairly obvious ones. The other four ones are pretty interesting.
Competency - this is a slippery slope, as super-competent people make us feel bad, and incompetent folks are annoying. The perfect match is a competent individual who makes the occasional blunder. This can be very subtle: in a brilliant study, people are listening to an audio recording, and a guy who dropped his mug of coffee, if competent, is rated higher in liking. If the person was rather mediocre, they were rated lower. This is the Pratfall effect.
You might deny it - heck, I deny it myself, as do most people I know - but physical attraction is undeniably important (except we just denied it). Comfort yourself, though - the effects are seen mostly on second dates - people are far more willing to go on them if the partner was rated as more attractive. Along the same lines is the frizzy wig effect - when attractive people compliment, we’re delighted, when they criticize, we’re really upset. When people rated as less attractive gave feedback, it didn't matter either way. Gosh.
The last two are a little arcane - gain/loss - when people change their attitude to you, that is far more valued. This is (obviously) something that is a broader psychological thing. If a person hated you last year and now values you, that’ll pull you towards them more than a person who was fairly nice to you last year and remains so this year. The people who really hurt us are the people who were once good to us.
Finally, you might mistake arousal due to something else for love - in a hypothetical case, a person who had caffeine unknowingly might think it's sexual arousal. The Rickety Bridge Experiment demonstrated if you cross a dangerous bridge, you're more likely to connect with the female confederate and write sexy stories.
Now, the second theory of the seven factors of attraction is quite attractive. Still, does it explain everything? What about exceptions? Surely the adage of opposites attracting isn’t baseless.
More blandly, it feels too bland. Yeah, I seem to be in the mood for awful puns tonight, but to say that all of our attractions and friendships and likings boils down to how physically close we are with a person, how similar and familiar they are to us, and how competent (impressive) they are seems wrong to me. I could probably quote hundreds of exceptions, friendships where none of these seven factors are evidently present.
So back to randomness, I guess? All the same, it was a very interesting lecture, and these were fascinating questions. What do you think?