Love Theories, 4 Theories Explaining Love

Love is a human and fundamental emotion, but it’s not always easy to understand why and how it happens. For a long time, many have suggested that transcendental science is too mysterious, primitive, and spiritual state to fully understand. What is the reason people fall in love, why are they attracted to certain people and not to others? What makes people fall in love and make them fall in love? Why are some forms of love longer and others more temporary? Poets emphasize the mystery of love with beautiful sonnets, musicians try to capture the subtle essence of love in songs, and others say that love is a divine inspiration. On the other hand, researchers and psychologists have proposed some theories of love to explain how love is formed and what it is based on. Below are the four most popular main theories that attempt to explain love and other emotional relationships. Here are four love theories that explain the differences between liking, love, and emotional bond:

1-Liking and Love

Psychologist Zick Rubin suggested that a romantic love consists of 3 elements.

Commitment: Attachment is the need to take care of another person, gain approval, and establish physical contact.

Caring: Caring, caring, or compassion involves valuing and respecting someone else’s needs and happiness as much as your own.

Sincerity: Intimacy or intimacy means the sharing of thoughts, feelings, and desires with the other person.

Rubin believed that people sometimes feel great admiration and appreciation for others. Spending time with that person is enjoyed and wanted to be with him, but this is not considered a love. Rubin spoke of it as liking or liking instead of love. On the other hand, love is much more intense and deep, the desire for physical contact and intimacy is stronger.

While people who like it enjoy being friends with each other, people in love care about the needs of the other person as much as their own.

2-Compassionate Love and Passionate Love

Elaine Hatfield, professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii, and her colleagues say there are 2 basic types of love:

Compassionate love: Compassionate love is often shaped by mutual understanding and shared respect for one another.

Passionate love: It is characterized by intense, deep emotions, sexual attraction, affection, and anxiety. In mutual love, people feel excited and happy. An unrequited love breeds feelings of helplessness and despair.

Hatfield suggests that passionate love can arise when cultural expectations encourage falling in love, when faced with people’s prejudiced ideas about ideal love, and when one experiences heightened physiological arousal in the presence of another person.

Hatfield also suggests that a passionate love can be temporary and usually lasts 6-30 months. For Hatfield, an ideal love is a relationship that combines the stability and security of compassion with intense passion, but it is rare. In ideal love, the relationship between the couple will last longer and will prevent problems of deception or divorce.

3- Color Circle Theory of Love

Psychologist John Lee described the types of love with the color wheel in 1973 and referred to them as “colors of love”, although they did not correspond to true colors: Lee suggested that there are 3 main types of love, just as the primary colors are 3 types.

The three main styles of love are:

Eros: This term means erotic or passionate in Greek. Lee argued that this kind of love involves both emotional and physical passion. This style of love is characterized by idealizing one’s partner and feeling strong romantic feelings.

Ludus: Ludos or ludus means game in Greek. This type of love is characterized by the need for excitement and seeing love as a game, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be serious. Those who display this love are not ready for attachment and are wary of too much intimacy.

Storge: Its Greek meaning is natural affection. This form of love is typically represented by family love between children and parents, siblings, members of extended families. In this kind of love, people tend to be together, talk on the phone for hours, and miss each other when they break up. Storge-type love can develop from friendship where people with similar interests develop intimacy over time.

Lee argued that just as the primary colors combine to form other complementary colors, the main styles of love can also combine to form secondary styles of love.

Secondary love styles include:

Mania (Eros + Ludus): Obsessive or obsessive love is an unhealthy type of love in which conflicts and dramatic excesses in the relationship are both the aim and the theme of the couple’s love. Obsessed or obsessed lovers live for storms and find peace while getting angry. Lovers of this type are afraid of abandonment, their daily routines often involve extreme ups and downs, including obsession, fighting, making love, and talking pleasantly. These couples may need professional counseling and possibly be better off if they break up.

Pragma (Ludos + Storge): It is practical and realistic love. Pragma type lovers find others attractive due to some traits (eg athletic, tallness, intelligence, wealth) and feel love on a rational level. Men and women often desire to find a partner with similar (homogamic) characteristics (eg the same religion, political inclinations, hobbies, etc.).

Agape (Eros + Storge): Agape is love that is selfless, focused on others and intended to give to others rather than take it from others. Mothers who care for their sick children during the night; Fathers who work 3-4 years in a job they don’t like to support their families, and even firefighters who sacrifice their safety to save the lives of others, are considered altruistic in their actions. When much of what is done in relationships is taken up in the broader equation of justice in a relationship, selfless actions can either be seen as acts that either create a storehouse of goodwill to be repaid later or create some kind of debt.

Love is a multidimensional concept, psychologists and sociologists have defined it in various ways over the years. John Lee is perhaps the most cited researcher on love, with six types of love. Lee assumed that everyone shares the six basic components of love and love, existing love relationship can be evaluated and measured, types of love have various qualities. Lee’s love styles are widely used to help people understand their love styles. Lee claims that six types of love create loving experiences.

4-Love Triangle Theory

According to the Psychologist Robert Sternberg’s Love Triangle Theory (2004), love consists of three components:

Intimacy: Includes feelings such as attachment and emotional intimacy.

Passion: It covers the relationship between romantic love and sexual attraction.

Commitment: It is the decision to stay friends for a long time.

The three mentioned components can come together to create different styles of love. For example, the combination of intimacy and devotion results in tender love, and the combination of passion and intimacy results in romantic, passionate love.

Sternberg argues that relations based on two or more elements will be more permanent than those based on a single component. The ideal form of love for a romantic couple (perfect love) includes all three, but it’s not easy to sustain as the passionate spark tends to fade over time. Sternberg suggests that this type of love is rare.

In today’s modern love practices, various components of love have been found: devotion, passion, friendship, trust, loyalty, affection, sincerity, acceptance, affirmation, caring, caring, devotion, infatuation, and romance. There is a type of love that many people are aware of, called unconditional love. Unconditional love is sincere love that does not change regardless of the actions of the loved one.