Liking vs. Loving
Psychologist Zick Rubin proposed that romantic love is
made up of three elements: attachment, caring and intimacy.
Attachment is the need to receive care, approval, and physical contact with the other person.
Caring involves valuing the other persons needs and happiness as much as your own. Intimacy refers to the sharing of thoughts, desires, and feelings with the other person.
Based upon this definition, Rubin devised a questionnaire to assess attitudes about others and
found that these scales of liking and loving provided support for his conception of love.
Compassionate vs. Passionate Love
According to psychologist Elaine Hatfield and
her colleagues, there are two basic types of love: compassionate love and passionate love.
Compassionate love is characterized by mutual respect, attachment, affection and trust.
Compassionate love usually develops out of feelings of mutual understanding and
shared respect for one another.
Passionate love is characterized by intense emotions, sexual attraction, anxiety, and affection.
When these intense emotions are reciprocated, people feel elated and fulfilled.
Unreciprocated love leads to feelings of despondence and despair.
Hatfield suggests that passionate love is transitory, usually lasting between 6 and 30 months.
Hatfield also suggests that passionate love arises when cultural expectations encourage falling in love, when the person meets your preconceived ideas of an ideal love, and
when you experience heightened physiological arousal in the presence of the other person.
Ideally, passionate love then leads to compassionate love, which is far more enduring. While most people desire relationships that combine the security and stability of compassionate with the intensity of passionate love, Hatfield believes that this is rare.