An Overview of the Triangular Theory of Love
The triangular theory of love is a structural theory of love proposed by Robert Sternberg in 1986, offering a framework that understands love as a combination of three basic components. The first is intimacy, the sense of warmth, connection, and bondedness within a relationship, which takes in mutual understanding, emotional support, and self-disclosure. The second is passion, meaning physical attraction, sexual desire, and romantic excitement, which is associated with activation of the dopamine system. The third is commitment, which in the short term is the decision that one loves the other person and in the long term is the will to maintain the relationship. Sternberg placed these three components at the vertices of a triangle, so that the shape of the triangle changes with the strength of each component, and two relationships can be compared by the figures they trace. The ideal, consummate love, is the state in which all three components are high, but in reality the balance among them shifts over time rather than holding still.
The Eight Kinds of Love
From the combinations in which the three components are present or absent, Sternberg defined eight kinds of love. Non-love is the absence of all three, the condition of most of the people one passes in a day. Liking is intimacy alone, which comes close to friendship. Infatuated love is passion alone, as in love at first sight. Empty love is commitment alone, a relationship held together by nothing but a sense of obligation. Romantic love is intimacy plus passion, without commitment. Companionate love is intimacy plus commitment, without passion. Fatuous love is passion plus commitment, without intimacy, and is typical of relationships that have advanced very quickly. Consummate love is the state in which all three components are high. Many couples move over time from romantic love to companionate love. This shift is due to the decay of passion through hedonic adaptation, but because intimacy and commitment deepen in the meantime, the quality of the relationship is maintained.
Applying the Triangular Theory to Compatibility Assessment
The triangular theory of love gives you several things to look at in your own relationship. First, the degree to which the shapes of the two partners' love triangles match predicts relationship satisfaction. Where one partner places weight on passion while the other places weight on intimacy, the two end up at cross purposes in how they express love. Second, the theory allows one to anticipate how the balance of the three components changes with the stage of the relationship and to present the measures each stage calls for. Passion runs high in early romance, whereas in a long relationship the strengthening of intimacy and commitment becomes the important thing. Third, in terms of the Big Five, extraversion and openness have been reported to go together with passion, agreeableness with intimacy, and conscientiousness with commitment, though the correspondence is not a one-to-one mapping. The easiest thing to get wrong with this theory is reading the size of the triangle as a total score for love. What is worth looking at is not the area but the mix of the three sides, and that mix changes shape as a relationship moves through its phases; the triangle you have now is one snapshot along the way, not a verdict on who is loving correctly. Differences in the mix show up as differences in what actually lands: a partner who weighs passion is reached by novel shared experiences, while a partner who weighs intimacy is reached by time spent confiding in each other.