Love may be one of the most complex human emotions, but also possibly the most central too. There are many different theories regarding love and while psychologists agree that love is central human emotion, they are still unsure exactly why it happens, or how. At present, there are four primary theories that attempt to explain love, emotional attachment, and liking.
RUBIN'S SCALES OF LIKING AND LOVING
Psychologist Zick Rubin was one of the first people to create a method of empirically measuring love. Rubin believed that romantic love was composed of three elements: attachment, caring, and intimacy.
- Attachment: The need to be with another person and be cared for. Important components of attachment include approval and physical contact.
- Caring: Valuing the happiness and needs of the other person just as much as you value your own.
- Intimacy: Communicating your private desires, feelings, and beliefs.
Rubin then created two questionnaires that would be able to measure these elements. According to Rubin, the difference between liking someone and loving someone can be seen in how we evaluate the other person. Rubin's questions were then created to measure feelings of liking another person and feelings of loving another person, and then these results were compared. When Rubin gave the questionnaire to a group of participants, he told them to base their answers on how they felt about a good friend and how they felt about their significant other. He found that, while the scores regarding significant others rated high on the loving scale. Thus, Rubin was able to successfully measure feelings of love.
ELAINE HATFIELD'S PASSIONATE AND COMPASSIONATE LOVE
Psychologist Elaine Hatfield claimed that there was only two forms of love: passionate and compassionate love,
- Passionate love: Feelings of intense sexual arousal, attraction, affection, emotion, and a strong urge to be with one another. Passionate love tends to be short-lived, lasting from six to thirty months, but can lead to compassionate love.
- Compassionate love: Feelings of attachment, respect, trust, affection, and commitment. Compassionate love lasts longer than passionate love.
Hatfield also differentiated between reciprocated love, which leads to feelings of elation and fulfillment, and unreciprocated love, which leads to feelings of desperation and despair. She believed there were certain key factors that had to exist for compassionate and passionate love to occur. These include:
- Timing: When an individual is ready to fall and be in love.
- Similarity: A person has the tendency to fall passionately in love with an individual that is similar to him or herself.
- Early attachment styles: Long-term and deeper relationships are often the results of people who are strongly attached to one another, while people who fall in and out of love often generally do not have a strong attachment or connection.
"Studying psychology is fun because you're always looking for the same things.."
~Bella
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