Friendship, Love and Commitment
The Importance of Love
Love and American Families
Friendship, Love and Commitment
The Development of Love
Approaches to the Study of Love
Unrequited Love
Jealousy
The Transformation of Love
The Importance of Love
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Love is essential to our lives.
Love is both a feeling and an activity.
Love encompasses opposites.
Understanding how love works.
Love and American Families
• Love is the basis for family formation in the
United States.
• Love becomes the foundation upon which manage
is built and the criterion for spousal selection.
• There are two distinct but related cultural beliefs
about the character of love.
• Americans tend to marry people much like
themselves, a pattern known as homogamy.
Friendship, Love and Commitment
• 1. Friendship is the foundation for love and
commitment.
• 2. Love reflects the positive factors, such as caring
and attraction, that draw people together and
sustain them in a relationship.
• 3. Commitment reflects the stable factors (love,
obligations, social pressure) that help maintain the
relationship for better or worse.
• ~Although love and commitment are related, they
are not necessarily connected; one can exist
without the other.
• ~Secure adults average length of a relationship is
10 years.
• ~Our commitments seem to be affected by several
factors that can strengthen or weaken the
relationship.
• 1. We have a tendency to look at romantic and
marital relationships from a cost-benefit
perspective.
• 2. Normative inputs for relationships are the
values that you and your partner hold about love,
relationships, marriage, and family: These values
can either sustain or detract from a commitment.
• 3. The structural constraints of a relationship will
add to or detract from commitment.
• 4. Commitments are more likely to endure in
marriage than in cohabiting or dating
relationships, which tend to be shorter.
• 5. Commitments are more likely to last in
heterosexual relationships than in gay or lesbian
relationships.
• 6. Ethnicity may be the greatest predictor of
satisfaction and commitment to a friendship.
• 7. An enduring marriage is not necessarily a happy
marriage.
• ~Friendship and love bind us together, provide
emotional sustenance, buffer us against stress, and
help to preserve our physical and mental wellbeing.
The Wheel Theory
• ~Reiss's wheel theory of love suggests that love
develops and is maintained through four
processes: (1) rapport, (2) self-revelation, (3)
mutual dependency, and (4) fulfillment of the need
for intimacy.
• ~The wheel theory emphasizes interdependence,
bi-directionality, and role conceptions.
How Do I Love Thee?
• John Lee described six basic styles of love: eros,
mania, ludus, storge, agape, and pragma.
• Eros- Erotic lovers delight in the tactile, the
sensual, the immediate; they are attracted to
beauty. Their love burns brightly but soon flickers
and dies.
• Ludus- For ludic lovers, love is a game,
something to play at rather than to become deeply
involved in. Love is for fun, casual, carefree and
often careless.
• Storage- Is the love between companions. It
begins gradually as a friendship and then
gradually deepens into love.
• Mania- The slightest sign of affection brings
ecstasy for a short while, only to have it disappear.
Manic love is a roller-coaster.
• Agape- Is patient, selfless, and undemanding; it
does not need to be reciprocated. It is the love of
missionaries, and saints more than that of worldly
couples.
• Pragma- Logical in their approach. They look for
partners that are compatible with their own and
can meet their needs. Such as the person who
meets their criteria, erotic or manic feeling
develop.
• 1. Lee believes that to have a mutually satisfying
love affair, a person has to find a partner who
shares the same style and definition of love.
• 2. The more different two people are in their styles
of loving, the less likely it is that they will
understand each other's love.
• ~The triangular theory of love emphasizes the
dynamic quality of love relationships and sees
love as composed of intimacy, passion, and
decision/commitment.
• 1. Intimacy refers to warm, close feelings of
bonding in a relationship.
• 2. Passion refers to the elements of romance,
attraction, and sexuality in a relationship.
• 3. The short-term decision/commitment refers to
deciding you love someone; the long-term
decision/commitment involves the maintenance of
love.
• 4. Eight ways of classifying love include: liking,
romantic love, infatuation, fatuous love, empty
love, companionate love, consummate love, and
nonlove.
• ~Attachment theory maintains that the degree and
quality of attachments we experience in early life
influence our later relationships.
Unrequited Love
• ~Unrequited love, love that is not returned, is a
common experience.
• ~According to Arthur Aron and his colleagues,
there are three different attachment styles
underlying the experience of unrequited love.
• 1. The Cyrano style involves the desire to have a
romantic relationship with a person regardless of
how hopeless the love is.
• 2. The Giselle style misperceives the relationship
to be more than it really is.
• 3. The Don Quixote style involves the general
desire to be in love, regardless of whom one loves.
The Green-Eyed Monster
• ~Rather than a sign of love, provoking jealousy
proves nothing except that the other person can be
made jealous.
• 1. Jealousy may be a more accurate measure of
insecurity and possessiveness than love.
• ~Jealousy is an aversive response that occurs due
to a partner's real, imagined, or likely involvement
with a third person.
• ~Jealousy is a painful experience during which we
feel less attractive and acceptable to our partner.
• ~Jealousy acts as a boundary marker by
determining how, to what extent, and in what
manner others can interact with members of the
relationship and vice versa.
• ~Men experience jealousy when they feel their
partner is sexually involved with another man:
Women experience jealousy over intimate issues.
• ~Managing jealousy requires the ability to
communicate, the recognition by each partner of
the feelings and motivations of the other, and a
willingness to reciprocate and compromise.
From Passion to Intimacy
• Passionate love is unstable; romantic love is
usually transformed or replaced by a quieter, more
enduring love based on intimacy.
• 1. Initially, intimacy increases rapidly.
• 2. Passion is subject to habituation.
• 3. In becoming habituated, we also become
dependent.
• 4. Commitment grows more slowly than intimacy
or passion.
• 5. Intimacy- The disappearance or transformation
of passionate love is often experienced as a crisis.
• 6. Romantic love may be highest during the early
part of marriage.
• 7. In later life, romantic love may play an
important role in alleviating the stressors.
• ~Intimate love is enduring; it is based on
commitment, caring, and self-disclosure.
• 1. Commitment is the determination to continue a
relationship or marriage; it is based on conscious
choice rather than on feelings.
• 2. Caring is placing another's needs before your
own; it entails an I-Thou relationship as opposed
to an I-it relationship.
• 3. Self-disclosure (revealing our hopes, fears, and
everyday thoughts) deepens our understanding of
each other.
• 4. Together, commitment, caring, and selfdisclosure help transform love, but the most
important means of sustaining love is our words
and actions.