- Theories about Love
Our needs for affiliation may come partly from learning as a child that other people can do nice things for us, satisfying a whole range of basic needs and partly from inborn tendencies to become attached to others. Whatever the origins of this need, most of us end up in a more or less permanent relationship with someone of the opposite sex.
Writers and philosophers have been interested in the concept of love for a very long time. In the fourth century B.C., Plato, one of the Greek philosophers who have shaped Western culture, made a distinction between sacred love, which was spiritual, which involved an appreciation of what we would probably call the beloved's personality, and profane love, which was about the physical side of things. He thought that physical love was very much inferior to sacred love. These ideas, and views that he and other pagan philosophers had about the corruptness of the body, influenced Christianity to take a very dim view about passionate love and to conclude that celibacy was the superior human state.
It was not until the late middle ages that the concept of romantic love that we know today had it's beginnings. It all seemed to start with the songs of troubadours, travelling entertainers who tried to make a good impression with the lords or ladies who paid their wages. At first true love was a despairing and tragic emotion about unattainable love, But as the notion spread throughout Europe and moved northwards, sexual intercourse became an integral part of the conception of love. It came to be doubted whether a man, who did not adore a lady and strive for the satisfaction of that adoration, could ever be a true knight.
As romantic love developed, it also bred its own philosophers; among the most important of these was Andreas Capellanus, who wrote The Art of Courtly Love toward the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century. To Capellanus, love was a passion that came from looking at and thinking too much about the body of a person of the opposite sex; it could be satisfied only by embracing and fulfilling love's commands, in other words, by sexual intercourse.
The Western code of etiquette with its rules that women always have precedence is based on the concepts of romantic love, as is the concept of the gentle, courteous male. One of the most important things about romantic love was the break from the Christian tradition which held that all love, or at least any such thing as passionate love, was more or less wicked unless directed to God.
These days Psychologists have become interested in systematically investigating love, and in the process have made some interesting distinctions between liking and loving, and between companionate and passionate love.
We all recognise that love has many forms, and is probably different in relationships between parents and children, between best friends, between lovers, or in dating and marriage relationships. If liking and loving are distinct, some ways that we describe feelings towards a romantic partner should be different from the ways we describe feelings towards a friend. It turns out that people describe romantic relationships in terms of attachment, caring and intimacy, while they tend to describe friendships in terms of perceived similarity, admiration and respect. As you might expect, when liking and loving are measured using questionnaires, the romantic partner scores about as highly as a friend on the liking scale, but much higher on the loving scale.
Even so, there may be different forms of romantic love. Companionate love has been defined as the affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply entwined. It has been described as the comfortable feeling of warmth and caring that can exist between people who have shared experiences over some length of time. It may be different from just liking because of the intensity of feelings and the extent to which the two lives are interdependent. Passionate love is quite different, a wildly emotional state involving a complex and changing mix of tender and sexual feelings, elation and pain, anxiety and relief, altruism and jealousy.
Passionate love is said to be short-lived, and even fragile, while companionate love is described as a more enduring basis for a long term relationship. This does not mean that there is no passion in companionate love since sexual satisfaction may be one of the enduring binding forces in such a relationship. But the turmoil of passionate love has been replaced with the greater certainty of an established relationship.
Theorists have suggested that physiological arousal - heart pounding, stomach fluttering - are crucial to passionate love. Equally important is the interpretation of these feelings as love. So if you have these feelings, and you are with someone attractive, you will probably feel that you are passionately in love. However, it seems that the emotional arousal can be produced by other factors, and still be labelled as love. In fact in his handbook on love, which is a kind of guide to seduction, Ovid, the Roman writer, suggested that a man might more easily arouse passion in a woman by taking her to watch violent gladiatorial combat. It works with men as well. Research has shown that males threatened with strong electric shocks were much more attracted to females participating in the study than males facing only a mild shock. So you see these theories about love might produce some very practical advice for those seeking to establish new relationships.
More readings will be added to my blog from time to time. Have a quick look now to see the first posting on my blog PSYC1PLUS