Across all the world, what is this thing called love, that it can bind two people together through life and death itself? Love is a life goal that most people today pursue. Those who are single hope to leave the dating pool soon and find their one true match; couples in a relationship hope to grow old together and remain forever of one heart. Before we long to be loved, or imagine how love will arrive, perhaps we could all take a step back and consider a more fundamental question: what is love? You might think that love has no definition at all — that the way we express love should never be confined to a single correct answer.
And yet, it is only with a clear understanding and concept of love that a person can adjust their own mindset and actions. Psychology cannot offer love an ultimate answer, but at the very least it can bring us a little insight, providing a framework that prompts us to reflect on how we understand love — and through that, to become someone who is better at loving.
The Duplex Theory of Love
In 1984, the psychologist Robert Sternberg put forward the Triangular Theory of Love, which soon became widely familiar. Later, in 1994, Sternberg proposed the Theory of Love as Stories, and in 2006 he combined the two into the Duplex Theory of Love, using it to describe the different patterns that love can take.
The Triangular Theory of Love (Triangular Theory of Love)
According to Sternberg's Triangular Theory of Love, love is made up of intimacy (Intimacy), passion (Passion) and commitment (Commitment). Intimacy refers to lovers feeling that the two of them are closely bonded together; they wish to share their joys with one another, feel supported by their partner, and cherish and respect each other within the relationship. Passion refers to a lover's intense longing for their partner — a longing not limited to sexual desire, but also encompassing the pursuit of self-esteem, connection and self-fulfilment. Commitment can be divided into two types according to its time frame: short-term commitment refers to a lover's willingness to make the decision to love someone, while long-term commitment refers to a lover's willingness to promise to keep loving that person into the future. The interplay of these three elements forms different patterns of love. Love in which intimacy, passion and commitment all coexist is what Sternberg's theory calls consummate love (Consummate Love).
While the Triangular Theory of Love can certainly help us better understand what love is made of, and examine the relationship between ourselves and the one we love, a single love triangle alone is not enough to fully understand a person's situation in love. Sternberg holds that, like the self-concept, the love triangle can be divided into an "actual triangle" (Actual Triangle) and an "ideal triangle" (Ideal Triangle). Our past experiences in love give rise to corresponding expectations of love in the future, but ideal love is one thing, and the love we actually have may well be another. At the same time, Sternberg stresses that the love triangle can be split into a "triangle of feelings" (Triangle of Feelings) and a "triangle of action" (Triangle of Action). It is worth remembering that love is a relationship between two people. Simply having feelings of intimacy and passion towards a partner is not enough; it is only through concrete actions that a partner can feel the love within the relationship. Taking the initiative to share daily matters big and small with a partner — even a single caring glance — can all be actions that express love. Although the Triangular Theory of Love may sound as if it merely describes three elements of love, in practice it allows us to approach from multiple angles and understand how we ourselves view love and how we put love into practice.
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The Theory of Love as Stories (Theory of Love as Stories)
The second part of the Duplex Theory of Love — the Theory of Love as Stories — places the focus on a person's subjective interpretation of love. After establishing the Triangular Theory of Love, Sternberg found that although the theory could systematically describe the elements of love, it could not account for the various phenomena of being in love: why a person falls in love with a particular individual rather than someone else, and why, after the passion has faded, couples sometimes stop loving each other. To study love a step further, Sternberg shifted the focus of the theory onto the individual's subjective thinking, beginning to understand how a person's interpretations and imaginings of love influence their relationship with a partner.
Everyone holds different views about love. Even among those who agree that love is made up of intimacy, passion and commitment, people's views differ when it comes to the details — the meaning of love, how one ought to love, and so on. Sternberg called these different thoughts and beliefs about love "stories". Family experiences, television dramas, fairy tales … our thoughts and expectations about love are built up from our long-standing observation of our surroundings, developing into a set of understandings of love that are uniquely our own — the love story we hold in our hearts.
The love stories we believe in shape how we understand relationships, as well as how we behave in pursuing and sustaining love. Sternberg found that people's love stories can be divided into 26 types, the most common of which include viewing love as a "journey", a "garden", a "democratic government" and a "history". The conceptions of love represented by these stories are as follows:
- Travel (Travel) — the future of the relationship is challenging and exciting. Lovers plan future destinations together with their partner, seeing the relationship as an opportunity to grow together and discover themselves.
- Gardening (Gardening) — sustaining love is just like tending a potted plant, and what matters most is the care and attention invested in it. Lovers who hold this belief emphasise mutual nurturing within the relationship.
- Democratic Government (Democratic Government) — the success of love is determined by how power is distributed in the relationship. Neither partner should be controlled by the other; ideal love lies in an equal sharing of power.
- History (History) — lovers place great value on the past of the relationship. These lovers cherish photographs and gifts that record bygone times, emphasising the place of memory within the relationship.
The application of the Theory of Love as Stories goes beyond describing an individual's narrative of love; research data further reveals the link between love stories and relationship satisfaction. First, some love stories distort a person's understanding of relationships and are unfavourable to building a lasting relationship. While the four common love stories above all seem able to foster the development of a relationship, the following love stories may instead hinder it:
- Business (Business) — lovers see their partner as a business associate, emphasising the responsibilities and division of labour on both sides, and hoping to jointly improve their finances and way of life.
- Police (Police) — one party in the relationship plays the role of the police, continually monitoring the other's behaviour and trying to impose their own ideas onto the relationship.
- Autocratic Government (Autocratic Government) — similar to the police story, the lovers respectively play the ruler and the ruled; power is concentrated in one party of the relationship, who holds all the decision-making power within it.
- Recovery (Recovery) — lovers expect their partner to rescue them from past trauma, viewing the other as their saviour.
These love stories all distort the relationship of love, neglect the emotional component that love should have, or are unable to balance the contributions of both sides within the relationship. A mistaken understanding of love makes it difficult for a person to build a lasting relationship. Our differing views of love are not merely a matter of perspective and angle; the fact is that certain views really are unfavourable to love.
Interestingly, although some love stories hinder the development of a relationship, the research data has not shown any one type of story to be particularly beneficial to love. Among the 26 love stories, there are only stories that damage relationships, but no single perfect, standard answer that can improve them (Sternberg, 1986).
Beyond this, the data shows that couples who maintain an intimate relationship over a long period hold similar views and stories about love (Sternberg, 1986), which suggests that a relationship does not call for the most ideal love story, but rather for a good partner whose story is compatible with yours.
Take a journey story as an example: at first, lovers are drawn to each other because they can curiously explore the future together. After the honeymoon period, if one of them, weighing up reality, can no longer invest as much time and chooses to continue with the other on a journey full of challenges, hoping instead only to live a settled, stable life, then they can no longer meet their partner's longing for love, and the once-compatible love stories are no longer compatible.
In such a situation, the lovers' satisfaction with the relationship may consequently decline; intimacy, passion and commitment may diminish accordingly, until at last, because reality can no longer match their expectations, the relationship deteriorates — even ending in a break-up. A clash of personalities and no longer having feelings may be two of the most commonly heard reasons for breaking up, and this is exactly as the Theory of Love as Stories proposes: the change in a relationship comes down, in the end, to the fact that at least one of the two can no longer satisfy the other's love story.
Fromm, E. (1957). The art of loving. HarperCollins Publishers.
Gottman, J. M., Cole, C., & Cole, D. L. (2019). Four horseman in couple and family therapy. In Lebow, J. L., Chambers, A. L., & Breunlin, D. C. (Eds.), Encyclopedia of couple and family therapy (pp. 1212-1216). Springer.
Sternberg, R. J. (2001). Empirical tests of aspects of a theory of love as a story. European Journal of Personality, 15, 199-218.
Sternberg, R. J. (2006). The duplex theory of love. In R. J. Sternberg & K. Weis (Eds.), The new psychology of love (pp. 184-199). Yale University Press.
This article is excerpted from Fear and Hope: Psychology Written in Turbulent Times — available at major bookshops across Hong Kong
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