Love

Had a lecture on love on Monday (Valentine's coming. How apt! ha.). Pretty interesting. But somehow the romance disappears when psychologists start to define and label love. Nevertheless, here are some notes that I made with reference to my textbook:

(1) Love is a combination of emotions, cognitions and behaviour that can be involved in intimate relationships.

(2) "Liking" is different from "love" (Rubin, 1973).

(3) And "love" is different from "being in love" (Regan and Berscheid, 1999), the former not containing the sexual desire and excitement that is an essential part of the latter.

(4) In a cluster analysis of love prototypes such as romantic love, parental love and infatuation, Fehr (1994) confirmed previous findings by Hatfield and Walster (1981), who distinguished between:

(a) Passionate love (or romantic love):
(i) State of intense absorption in another person involving physiological arousal.
(ii) Confusion of feelings: tenderness, sexuality, elation and pain, anxiety and relief, altruism and jealousy.

(b) Companionate love:
(i) The caring and affection for another person that usually arises from sharing time together.
(ii) Less intense emotion, combining feelings of friendly affection and deep attachment.
(iii) Characterised by friendship, understanding and a concern for the welfare of other (Hatfield, 1987)

(5) Other styles of love have been proposed. E.g. drawing on philosophy and literature, Lee (1988) offered a fine-grained taxonomy of six love styles. These were used by Hendrick and Hendrick (1995) to develop a scale to measure gender differences in the “colours of love”. They found that men scored higher than women on ludus, mania and pragma. The six love styles are:

(a) Eros (passionate love)
(i) Love is an all-consuming emotional experience.
(ii) Love at first sight is typical, and physical love is essential.

(b) Storge (friendship or companionate love)
(i) Love is a comfortable intimacy that slowly grows out of companionship, mutual sharing and self-disclosure.
(ii) A best-friend lover is thoughtful, warm and companionate.

(c) Ludus (game-playing love)
(i) This person plays at love as others play tennis or chess: to enjoy the “love game” and to win it.
(ii) No relationship lasts for long, usually ending when the partner becomes boring or too serious.

(d) Mania (possessive love)
(i) The possessive lover is emotionally intense, jealous, obsessed with the beloved.
(ii) The possessive lover is highly dependent on the beloved and therefore fears rejection.

(e) Pragma (logical love)
(i) This is “love shopping for a suitable mate”, and all it asks is that the relationship works well, that the two partners be compatible and that they satisfy each other’s basic needs.
(ii) The pragmatic lover seeks contentment rather than excitement.

(f) Agape (selfless, altruistic love)
(i) This style of love is unconditionally caring, giving and forgiving.
(ii) Love means a duty to give to the loved one with no strings attached.

What kind of lover are you? I think I am (or will be) mania and a bit of agape.

Must-dos
(1) Call SIA confirm flight.
(2) Expt at 1pm Room 227 Pearson Building.
(3) Rehearse presentation to be given at seminar on Thurs.

Should-dos
(1) Start writing lab report.
(2) Hoover room.
(3) Read Social Psych.