Sternberg’s Theory of Love, Essay Example

Robert Sternberg, a psychologist, came up with a theory of love that was made up of three components: passion, intimacy and commitment. According to him, passion is the motivation drive of love, which includes sexual attraction while intimacy is the strong emotional connection that is built through mutual acceptance as a result of shared personal information and feelings. For Sternberg, commitment is the thoughtful part of love that requires a decisive action. Because of these three components, Sternberg referred to the theory as the Triangular theory of love (Sternberg, 1986).

The color wheel model of love is another theoretical conception of love. It was proposed by John Lee in his 1973 book titled The Colors of Love. In this book, Lee compares different love styles to a color wheel. Lee wrote about the existence of three primary love styles namely Eros, Ludos and Storge. He analogically argued that just as different primary colors can be combined to create complementary colors; the three styles of love can be put into different combinations in order to generate nine other secondary love styles. One of the examples given in this theory is whereby Eros and Ludos are combined to create Mania or obsession love. This theory of love differs from Sternberg’s theory in that the latter theory is devoid of any categorizations of love.

According to Zick Rubin, the best theoretical approach to use to define love is “liking vs. loving”.  He devises a comprehensive questionnaire that respondents used to describe their feelings towards different people. His assessment of the attitudes of respondents towards different people made it possible for him to come up with a scale that clearly showed the distinction between loving and liking. This theory has some slight similarities with the triangular theory of love since it also lists three related elements of love, namely attachment, caring and intimacy. Of all these theories, it is Sternberg’s theory that has been researched on in greatest depth.

References

Sternberg, R. (1986). A Triangular Theory of Love. Psychological Review 93 (2) p. 119–135.