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Summary CHAPTER 12: Close Relationships: Passion, Intimacy and Sexuality
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CHAPTER 12: Close Relationships: Passion, Intimacy and SexualityWhat is love?
No simple answer can be given.
There is more than one kind of love.
The same person might feel different kinds of love toward several different people, even at
the same point in his/her life.
“what is love?” has produced one common feature that most people endorse.
It is investment in the well-being of the other for his/her own sake.
These kind of relationships included romantic-love, paternal-love, non-sexual love between
two adult-female friends, and the caring love of someone who takes care of a chronically ill
man.
Caring for the other person regardless of one’s personal gain may thus be a defining aspect
of love in general.
Two main kinds of love:
1. Passionate love
Having strong feelings on longing, desire and excitement toward a special person.
Passionate love (romantic love) makes people want to spend as much time as
possible together, to touch each other and engage in other physical intimacies
(often including sex), to think about each other, and to exhibit other patterns that
suggests strong emotions.
2. Companionate love (affectionate love)
Less strongly emotional
Tends to be calmer and more serene
Perceiving the other person as your soulmate or special partner.
High level of mutual understanding and caring and commitment to make the
relationship succeed.
The love what makes people want to remain each other’s good companions.
“my wife is my best friend”
Kind of love that is essential to a successful long-term marriage.
People who feel passionately in love have high levels of phenylethylamine(PEA), a
neurotransmitter that enables information to travel from one brain cell to another.
This chemical produces strong emotional feelings, including those ‘tingling’
sensations of excitement and euphoria.
Love and Culture
PEA response suggests that passionate love involves something more basic than cultural
learning, although culture can definitely work with or against the biochemical responses to
love objects.
Forms and expressions of romantic passion vary significantly, as does the culture’s attitude
toward passionate love.
Passionate love may therefore be found among humans everywhere, but how they
experience it and how they regard it may depend on their culture.
People are connected to cultural system, and this system can influence on how they love
, Love across time
Companionate love is what makes a good marriage or a stable, trustworthy, lasting
relationship, but it takes sustained foundations of companionate love.
Passionate love may be the most effective emotion for starting a relationship; companionate
love may be the most effective emotion for making it succeed and survive in the long run.
One reason that people are sceptical about passionate love as the basis for marriage is that
it tends to be temporary.
A successful long-term relationship thus depends on making an effective transition from one
kind of love to the other.
A behavioural sign of the decrease in passion can be found in data about frequency of sexual
intercourse.
Research shows that the frequency of sexual intercourse declines by about half after the first
year of marriage, from about 18 times per month during the first year to about nine times
per month in the second year. It continues to decrease more slowly after that.
Sternberg’s Triangle
Intimacy
Commitment Passion
Robert Sternberg proposed a more elaborate theory of the nature of love.
Proposed that love is composed of 3 different ingredients.
(1) Passion: feelings of romantic attraction, physical attraction to the other person and
sexual interest.
(2) Intimacy: common core of all love relationships, feeling close to the other person.
Empathy is important in intimacy; and intimacy includes a sense of understanding the
partner and being understood by him/her.
(3) Commitment: based on decisions remain constant unless they deliberately withdrawn.
Passion, intimacy and commitment are not 3 different ‘kinds’ of love. Instead, Sternberg
proposed that any given love relationship can mix those 3 ingredients in any combination.
An ideal love might contain substantial measures of three ingredients. If none of the three is
present, then, there is no love.
Benefits of commitment
Many people have a deep fear of ending up alone in life. These fears motivate people to
settle for less: they lower their standards for relationship partners. They are more willing to
pair up and stay with lower-quality partners, as compared to people with less dear of being
single.
If dissatisfied with a relationship, they are less likely to initiate a breakup, because they are
afraid of being alone.
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