Feraco
Myth/Sci-Fi – Period
24 September 2009
Happily Ever After
Robert J. Sternberg, Dean, Tufts University School of Arts & Sciences
Once upon a time, a story you heard, or a book you read, or a
movie you saw taught you what love is. Could it be affecting your
relationships?
When I was 13, there was a girl I liked, but I was rather shy and
didn’t know how to approach her. Then I had a clever idea. I happened
to be doing my seventh-grade science project on intelligence testing,
and as part of it, I was giving some of my classmates the StanfordBinet IQ Test, which I had found in the town library. I thought that
if I gave the test to the object of my affection, I might break the
ice and begin a wonderfully romantic relationship.
Unsurprisingly, my plan failed. I did, however, become friends
with the girl, and 44 years later, we’re still in occasional e-mail
contact. We tell each other about our lives, our challenges, and our
joys and sorrows, preserving the intimacy that began – despite my
bumbling advances – so many years ago.
By 16, I believed I had found the woman of my dreams. She was in
my tenth-grade Biology Honors class, one row in front of me and two
seats to the right. I spent the whole year obsessing over her, trying
not to be obvious when I stared at her. I felt intense passion, even
though I didn’t really know her at all. Eventually a relationship
commenced, but not with me. She got involved with the captain of an
athletic team.
Later, I was in a relationship that was full of both intimacy and
passion – for a while. But then those qualities faded. What was left
was commitment, the sense that I really should stay in the
relationship. So I stayed for awhile, but the relationship ultimately
dissolved anyway.
Scientists arrive at their theories by different routes, and my
own work in psychology has always arisen from my personal experiences.
This was true as far back as that seventh-grade science project: I was
studying IQ tests mainly to figure out why I performed so poorly on
them. In the case of my research on love, the romantic adventures I’ve
just described got me thinking, and in time I’ve come up with a theory
to explain why some relationships flourish and others fizzle.
I won’t keep you in suspense. My theory is that our culture
abounds with different sorts of love stories, and that people
unconsciously absorb those stories, letting them shape their
expectations of relationships. How well two people do in a
relationship depends largely on how compatible their stories are. I
call this the theory of love as a story.
That, as I said, is the theory I developed in time. On the way, I
conceived a more basic theory, one that has less to do with emotional
expectations and more to do with emotions themselves. This I call the
triangular theory of love. It is based on the idea that love consists
of the three components I learned about through those early
relationships: intimacy, passion, and commitment. Different
combinations and strengths of those three ingredients produce
different kinds of love.
Taken together, the triangle theory and the story theory can
account for much of love’s bewildering variety, not just in type but
in quality. Will you recognize your own relationships here? It’s hard
to say. But you might at least begin to think about your relationships
a little differently.
Love Triangles
Let us begin, as I did on my quest to understand love, by looking
at those three key ingredients I identified – intimacy, passion, and
commitment. Intimacy, as I define it, is the feeling of closeness that
gives rise to warmth and caring; it’s what allows people to share
confidences and give and receive emotional support. The young Harry
Potter’s friendships with Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, for
instance, are based purely on intimacy.
Passion is all about intensity. You say you can’t imagine life
without the other person or can’t get him/her off your mind. Passion
often resembles an addiction, and when someone unceremoniously dumps
us, we feel withdrawal symptoms, much as we would after kicking
caffeine or nicotine. Passion, probably descended into obsession, is
the rocket fuel that propelled the astronaut Lisa Nowak halfway across
the country in February 2007 to confront her romantic rival with
pepper spray.
The commitment component of love has to do with our drive to
maintain a relationship over the long term. For short-term
relationships, there is an analogous component that might be called
the decision component, the simple decision to love a certain other
person. Commitment is much of what kept Tevye and Golde together in
Fiddler on the Roof. It is also what kept many top politicians and
their spouses together before it was conceivable that a U.S.
presidential candidate could be someone who has experienced a divorce.
Sometimes one or more of these components are present in our
feelings for a person; sometimes none of them are. Eight different
permutations are possible, each giving rise to a distinct type of
relationship.
Perhaps the easiest to explain is non-love, the absence of all
three components. It is the relationship one has with an acquaintance.
Another kind of relationship, liking, develops when only the intimacy
component is present. We can also feel passion without either of the
other two components of love. Infatuated love – all passion, no
intimacy or commitment – is what Scarlett O’Hara feels for Ashley
Wilkes in Gone With the Wind. And sometimes, in what might be called
empty love, the commitment component of love exists despite a lack of
intimacy or passion. In our culture, empty love often characterizes a
marriage that’s headed for divorce, but in matchmaking cultures,
marriages start out with empty love; the matched couple is expected to
develop intimacy, and possibly passion, later on.
Romantic love, the love between Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and
Juliet, Pyramus and Thisbe, and countless successors, is the
combustion of intimacy and passion in the absence of commitment. It is
common on college campuses, where students fall in love but often feel
too young, or too uncertain about the future, to commit to a long-term
relationship.
Companionate love results when we have only intimacy and
commitment, as in a long-term deep friendship. It is what many
feel after the passion in their relationship has waned. In the
Dr. Zhivago, Yuri is married to Tonya, with whom he shares
companionate love. But then he meets Lara, who sparks romantic
him. His romantic love for Lara wins out over his companionate
for Tonya.
couples
movie
love in
love
Another possibility is passion and commitment without intimacy.
This yields what I call fatuous love, the variety that appears to have
beset J. Marshall Smith, the 89-year-old billionaire who married Anna
Nicole.
Finally, there is what I call consummate love, which includes all
three components – intimacy, passion, and commitment. Every “happily
ever after” story, like “Cinderella,” describes consummate love. In
real life, consummate love, like weight loss, is harder to maintain
than to achieve. From what we can tell, Ronald and Nancy Reagan
achieved it; Jack and Jackie Kennedy did not.
Of course, no relationship is likely to be a pure case of any of
the eight types. This is at least partly because the three components
of love work together. Commitment may lead to greater intimacy or
passion, for example. By the same token, intimacy may lead to greater
passion or commitment. The triangle of love can change its size as you
feel more love, or it can change its shape as the balance among
intimacy, passion, and commitment shifts. And naturally, the
importance of any single component may differ from one relationship to
another, or over time within a given relationship.
If the triangular theory of love is viable, then different types
of relationships should show different average balances among the
three components. While a professor at Yale University, I set out to
test whether that was true. I gave equal numbers of men and women 12
statements, each focusing on one of the three components of love, and
asked them to rate each statement from one to nine, depending on how
well it described their relationship with a particular person. A
statement to gauge intimacy, for instance, would be “I have a warm and
comfortable relationship with ________.” To gauge passion: “I cannot
imagine another person making me as happy as ________ does.” To gauge
commitment: “I view my relationship with __________ as permanent.”
Everyone rated all 12 statements for six different relationships –
mother, father, sibling closest in age, lover/spouse, best friend, and
ideal lover/spouse. The participants were given other scales, too,
among them one that measured overall relationship satisfaction.
I learned that different relationships do indeed imply different
levels of the three components. The passion rather averaged 6.9 for
lover/spouse, but only 5.0 for mother. The mean intimacy rating for
lover/spouse was 7.6, with best friend of the same sex following
closely at 6.8. For commitment, the difference between lover/spouse
and the next highest mean, mother, was only 1.1.
Higher levels of some components of love were linked with higher
levels of others. Intimacy and commitment, for example, were more
closely related to each other than either intimacy and passion or
passion and commitment.
I also found a strong connect between high love-scale ratings and
satisfaction with one’s relationship. Couples tended to be happier
when they had more of the three components of love. And it helped if
their love triangles matched in size and shape – that is, if the
amount and kind of love each partner felt for the other was about the
same.
Love Stories
For years, I was satisfied with my triangular theory of love.
What got me to probe deeper was the nagging question of how the
various triangles of love arise. Just where do they come from? I began
to think about what we bring to our relationships, about what lies in
our hearts and minds before the first kiss, or even the first hello.
That’s how I started developing the theory of love as a story.
All of us are exposed to many different stories about love. They
reach us through our own experience, as well as through literature,
the media, and so forth. Some love stories are self-contained, while
others are embedded in larger stories. Either way, they offer multiple
conceptions of what love can or should be. I myself have been
influenced by the fairy tales I heard when I was young – “Cinderella,”
“Sleeping Beauty,” “Rapunzel,” and the like – and by the books I read
and the movies I saw in my adolescence, such as Gone With the Wind,
Rebecca, Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina, Wuthering Heights, Dr. Zhivago, and
Casablanca.
Under the spell of the stories we absorb, we gradually form our
own personal stories about love – models of how love is “supposed” to
work. How we develop our own stories and what they turn out to be
depends on our personality and our environment, but once we have a
story – or, like many of us, a set of stories – we seek to live it out
in reality.
That’s the theory. And it’s a theory for which I found some
support in psychological literature, including the work of the late
Dorothy Tennov. A psychologist who devoted much of her career to the
study of romantic love, Tennov observed that people differ in their
tendency to fall in love. She showed that people who are more
susceptible to romantic love are more likely to prefer romantic
stories, and vice versa. But I wanted to develop the role of stories
further. I was thinking about how, as we wend our way through life, we
meet potential partners who fit our stories to greater or lesser
degrees. It seemed reasonable to suppose that people are more likely
to succeed in a relationship with a partner whose story closely
matches their own. But I had no evidence, so, while at Yale, I set out
to test my theory.
I started poring through literature, films, and oral histories to
get a clearer sense of what the love stories in our cultures actually
are. It didn’t take long to discover that certain types of stories
tend to dominate Americans’ conceptions of love (see “Stories We Live
By”). There’s love as a cookbook, for example, where lovers build a
relationship by following a “recipe,” or love as a fantasy, complete
with knight in shining armor, or love as a game or sport – 26 stories
in all.
After I identified these basic stories, my colleagues Mahzad
Hojjat and Michael Barnes and I tried to determine how they affect
people’s lives. At first, we asked people to identify the stories that
applied to them. But they generally were unable to – most were not
even aware they had such stories. It was clear we would have to devise
a questionnaire to draw people out.
Accordingly, we had couples rate the extent to which various
statements characterized them and their relationships. Each statement
was keyed to one of the 26 basic love stories, and the idea was that
participants’ rating would tell us something about what their own
personal love stories were. For instance, the statement “If my partner
were to leave me, my life would be completely empty” would be rated
highly by someone with an addiction story (in which couples cling to
one another), while someone with a garden story (in which love is a
thing to be nurtured) would favor the statement “I believe a good
relationship is attainable only if you are willing to spend the time
and energy to care for it, just as you need to care for a garden.” For
someone with a history story (in which couples seek to put their love
in a historical context), the statement “It is very important to me to
keep objects or pictures that remind me of special moments that I have
shared with my partner in the past” would strike a chord, while “I
don’t think there’s anything wrong with having your partner be
slightly scared of you” was designed to tease out people with a horror
story (in which terror is what makes a relationship interesting).
Again, the participants were also given other scales, including the
one for overall relationship satisfaction.
The first thing we noticed was that some stories were a lot more
popular. The most common were travel, gardening, democratic government,
and history, in that order. The least common were horror, collection,
autocratic government, and game. There were sex differences as well:
more men than women gravitated toward art, degradation, sacrifice, and
science fiction, while women favored travel. We also noticed that
certain love stories went hand in hand: people who saw love as a
horror story also tended to see love as a war story.
What you really want to know, of course, is, Which are the magic
stories that lead to happiness? And I wish I could tell you. The fact
is, none of the stories in our study were strongly correlated with
relationship satisfaction. We did, however, identify stories that
don’t work well. Here are some that were strongly tied to a lack of
satisfaction: business, collection, game, government, horror, humor,
mystery, police, recovery, science fiction, and theater.
We also discovered that people’s lack of awareness about their
personal love stories is often fairly profound. Not only did most
participants in our story fail to grasp that they were acting out
stories, but they believed they were carrying around a set of rocksolid facts about what love is or should be. Some deemed themselves or
their partners inadequate for not measuring up to the supposed
standards that the stories establish.
Indeed, we found that abstract standards often had a greater
effect on a relationship than real people did. When it came to
predicting satisfaction in a relationship, for example, how people saw
their partner carried less weight than how much difference they saw
between their partner and their ideal partner. The greater the
difference between the real and the ideal, the less satisfaction they
experienced. Moreover, how Person A really felt about Person B bore no
correlation at all to Person B’s satisfaction in the relationship.
What mattered was Person B’s story about how Person A felt.
Finally, our research did support my key premise: that partners
with similar love stories are more likely to have a satisfying
relationship – just as people with similar love triangles are. The
stories needn’t be identical; complementary stories can work nicely,
too. Travel and garden stories, for example, both involve projects
that people jointly pursue over time. Conversely, the more different a
couple’s stories are, the less satisfied they tend to be with their
relationship.
Perhaps you can see how stories, powerful as they are, can shape
the three components of love in my triangular theory. You might expect,
for example, that the house and home story, where the focus in on the
upkeep of a domicile over time, would be linked to high levels of
commitment – and that is exactly what we found. Likewise, passionfilled stories such as fantasy tend to produce high passion ratings on
the triangular love scale.
What’s Your Story?
By now you might be curious to learn which triangles and love
stories operate in your own life. I have a few suggestions about where
to begin; you can fill out versions of the questionnaires we gave
participants in our stories, for example, at go.tufts.edu/lovequest.
The alternative – which is easier said than done – is to try to
be sensitive to the kinds of things that matter to you and your loved
one. A partner who tells you lots of details about his or her thoughts
and feelings is probably big on intimacy. One who surprises you with
gifts may be into passion. If you partner values commitment, he or she
will always be there for you, regardless of circumstances. Someone who
treats you like a prince or princess may have a fantasy story. If your
partner is inordinately concerned about your finances, you may be in a
business story. If your partner always seems to be keeping score,
there’s a game story going on. And if you are under constant
surveillance, watch out: you may the suspect in a police story.
If you’re not happy with what you find, don’t lose heart. Stories
of love can and do change with life experience. As people spend more
time together, their stories may gradually converge. Couples may even
discover that, whatever their stories were before, they are writing a
new one of their own.