The 4 Types Of Love: What Different Kinds Of Love Exist?
The phenomenon of love is, without a doubt, the most studied, complex, misunderstood and multidimensional that exists. It is a phenomenon that has generated countless artistic works: painting, sculpture, literature, poetry… But it is also something very complex. So much so that many times instead of talking about the concept of love itself, we talk about the types of love different ones that exist.
The idea is that in our culture love does not have a complete definition, but rather has many different meanings, and it is a concept that is used in very variable contexts and relationships. Love has nuances, and these mean that, if we want to understand this phenomenon well, we must classify it according to a series of criteria. This makes us give up the possibility of understanding love as something unique, very well defined and easy to understand, but in exchange it allows us better understand its manifestations from a practical point of view.
The psychological study has made constant efforts with the aim of limiting the meaning and implications of the concept love * (why we love, who we love, how we love), although the truth is that this task has always been involved in difficulties because there are thousands of conceptions, opinions and ways of approaching this topic. Furthermore, the opinions that people have about what love is also influence the way in which they experience it, so a “pure” analysis cannot be carried out on what makes up the different types of love.
Canadian psychologists Beverly Fehr and James A. Russell (1) they dedicated many years of their lives to investigating the concept of love. They jointly carried out a study in 1991, where they asked a series of participants to write a list of as many different types of love as they could think of at that moment. This experiment served to create a large list with 93 different types of love Subsequently, other participants were asked how typical each of the love prototypes described in the list seemed to them, that is, to what degree they thought it best represented the essence of love.
The results of this survey revealed that the love considered most prototypical was maternal love Correlatively, the next most prototypical and well-known types of love were paternal love, friendship, sisterly love, romantic love, and brotherly love. Other typologies of love, such as passionate, sexual or platonic love, were reasoned as less prototypical loves according to the results of the study.
elements of love
Fehr and Russell’s research is by no means the only one that asks about how we perceive different types of love. The psychologists P. Shaver and J. Schwartz (2) carried out a series of studies in 1992 using a similar procedure. They carefully analyzed the judgments of similarity or similarity between different words linked to emotions, discovering that love, affection, affection, attraction and care constituted a fairly uniform block Consequently, the studies by Shaver and Schwartz concluded that our conception of love is very complex, and there is no clear delimitation between love and similar feelings or emotions.
The most important classification that brings together the largest number of experts about what the types of love are is the Sternberg Triangular Theory (3). This categorization is built based on three dimensions or essential elements in love, which are these:
1. Passion
Passion is the state of physical and mental excitement described for centuries by writers, poets and philosophers, but also by scientists. The attraction between two bodies and sexual desire are its basic parts. Some researchers, such as Bratslavsky and Baumeister they defined passion in love as an aggregate of highly intense feelings focused on attraction to another person characterized by biophysiological activation and the aspiration to join her at all levels (sexual, sentimental…).
However, it should be noted that, if the person is desirable as a sexual partner, passion incorporates two elements: attraction and the sexual appetite On the other hand, there may be feelings of passion lacking these two elements, such as passion towards a child. In short, the erotic connotations of passion are not used here as if one thing led to another and vice versa.
2. Privacy
This constituent element of love is expressed as a feeling of union, closeness and affection towards the other person as well as the concern to increase their well-being, to provide and receive sentimental support and communicate personal opinions and emotions, as well as listen to and attend to those of others.
If we think about it carefully, it makes a lot of sense that this is one of the fundamental ingredients of love. This emotional bond is characterized, among other things, by allowing us to create a context in which we can expose our vulnerabilities to another person, share concerns and manage insecurities in a shared way, something that can have a much higher cost or risk if we do it in another person. type of social relations.
The researchers reported that this element of love encompasses a conception of mutual empathy, kind and benevolent attitudes toward the other person, and the ongoing communication of shared affection.
3. Commitment
Commitment can be expressed in the short term as the explicit decision to want to share time and space, or in the long term as the commitment to care for and feed that love These two components do not always have to occur together. Commitment is an element that can manifest even though intimacy and passion have disappeared.
Sometimes, the relationship between two people can progress over time, and passion and intimacy deteriorate. In this case, only the commitment would remain, understood as the willingness to continue in the relationship. In the case of cultures in which marriages of convenience agreed between two families take place, the commitment component manifests itself at the beginning of the relationship, and time will tell if passion and intimacy will also appear.
Types of love
In Sternberg’s Triangular Theory, love is represented with each of these elements in its genuine form, forming the three vertices of an equilateral triangle However, in real love relationships, different types of love are intertwined and combined with each other, giving rise to different kinds of love (or ways of loving). These types of love would be the following:
1. Romantic love
It is formed from the combination between intimacy and passion This type of love arises when lovers have both a physical and emotional attraction, even though this feeling of bonding does not come with commitment. That is, it is one of the most emotional types of love, but it is not based on a relational dynamic that gives it stability, which makes its risk of triggering conflictive or problematic experiences relatively high.
We can find a recurring example of this type of love in many archetypes that emerge from literature, such as Romeo and Juliet, by British author William Shakespeare. The reason why it is so attractive and interesting when it comes to being artistically portrayed is its tragic nature, as they are very emotionally intense experiences but at the same time vulnerable to instability.
2. Love companion
It is based on the combination of the elements of intimacy and commitment In this case, it is a love whose ambition is concern for the happiness and well-being of the other. It is an accumulation of needs such as social support, emotional support, mutual understanding and communication.
People who experience this type of love feel intimately united and share their emotions, their knowledge or their possessions. On the other hand, it is one of the types of love that causes the most confusion, since it can be confused with other forms of emotional bond, such as pity.
3. Fatuous love
It is based on the mixture of commitment and passion, without the necessary time having elapsed for intimacy to emerge. This type of love is expressed when, for example, two people get married shortly after falling in love, and the component of intimacy has not yet emerged. Therefore, in these cases a lot of effort continues to be devoted to offer the best image of oneself in the eyes of the other person, something that can keep the idealization alive.
Does “perfect love” exist, according to Sternberg’s theory?
This combination of intimacy, passion and commitment triggers what Sternberg defined as complete love or perfect love According to the author, it is the kind of love that almost all people aspire to experience. It is no exaggeration to say that perfect love is difficult to achieve, and much more difficult to maintain. But, after all, we do not always look for this type of love in all the intimate relationships we have throughout life; In fact, we reserve this very particular and unique kind of love for a few relationships that meet our expectations on an emotional and sexual level, and we try to prioritize them**. They are those relationships that, whether they end well or not so well, leave an indelible mark on our memory**.
Each of the three axial elements of love that we have described usually has a different progression over the time of the relationship. It is notorious that the privacy It develops progressively as the relationship progresses, and can increase over time, but this growth is usually more abrupt in the early stages of courtship.
In regards to the passion, this is expressed in a very intense way at the beginning, and grows rapidly, but later declines slowly as the relationship goes through more advanced stages in time, until it stabilizes. For its part, commitment increases slowly at first (even more slowly than intimacy), reaching a point of balance and stability at the precise moment when the rewards and costs of the relationship are clearly perceptible.
Is this psychological phenomenon a product of culture?
If we talk about types of love, it is worth asking whether the core of all of them, what we consider the abstract phenomenon of love, is a universal psychological phenomenon or, on the contrary, is a product of cultural development that has emerged over the course of History. In this sense It seems that love has a lot of culture ; That is to say, thousands of years ago what we understand today as “love” practically did not exist.
For example, until not so many centuries ago, very young children were loved significantly less than adults, and that feeling of needing to care for and give affection to children did not make as much sense as it does today. ; among other things, because infant mortality was very high. In the same way, love for one’s partner was not understood as a feeling that united two equal people, but rather had to do with the need to maintain a bond that made it possible to have offspring in a stable way.
Our brain and love
A few weeks ago we published an interesting article about what happens in our minds when we experience love. In addition, we also propose a reading on some curious facts that science has provided about love and falling in love, that focus on the most psychobiological component of this phenomenon. The links are these:
