Love

Happy Easter everyone,

Spring has sprung, the rabbits are at it like, well, rabbits. And it got me thinking about love.

Transcript

Love 0:00

Happy Easter everyone. Spring has sprung and the rabbits are at it like, um, well like rabbits, which is exactly what Eostre, the ancient pagan goddess of fertility, love, and carnal pleasure would want. So celebrate some passionate love if you like. It's the right time of the year for it. But studies into love and relationships do consistently show that those early highs are not sustainable. We can't live there throughout the entire relationship. What starts as passionate love moves slowly towards what we call companionate love, and although it's not the same and may actually be something that we feel a bit of grief for, it's completely normal. For some, the passionate love stage lasts maybe a month for others it might last a year or so. But long-term romantic relationships absolutely do not live in that space. But I totally get why people want it to,'cause it's a great distraction from everything else. And if someone has mental health problems, they're going to desperately try to hold onto that stage because the next stage of companionate love, even though it's a deeper relationship, maybe even more trusting, more affectionate, it's only an afterglow rather than a nuclear bomb. So it's not so distracting. But I totally get why people might feel that desperate need to get that early passionate stage back, especially if they're insecure. Because the meaning behind the transition isn't, this is normal, this means we are getting closer. To an insecure person, it becomes evidence that the other person must be pulling away and getting ready to abandon them when it's literally the opposite. One theory by psychologist Robert Sternberg is that love is made up of three parts, passion, intimacy, and commitment. And he called it triangular theory because of it. And like a recipe, if you have flour, water, and eggs, you can alter the amounts and make pasta, pancakes, or flatbread. Different quantities of passion, intimacy, and commitment will make different types of love. With high passion, high intimacy, but low levels of commitment. You create that infatuation period of passionate love, and eventually that changes. The intimacy is still high, but there's less passion in the recipe, and it's been replaced with more commitment, and that turns it into companionate love. And this goes to explain the lustful stage of a relationship rather than love, where it's only passion, no intimacy, no commitment, and that's lust, not love. Sternberg called it infatuated love. And if there's no passion and no commitment and only intimacy, then you are just friends. And if all there is is only commitment, no passion, no intimacy, just a commitment to the other person. Sternberg called that empty love. And if everything's at zero, then he called that non love. That's when the cupboard is bare and you've literally got nothing to cook with at all. But the thing is, each one in this triangle influences the other. Greater intimacy can lead to greater passion or higher commitment, for example. But to build that intimacy, it might mean being vulnerable, feeling scared.'cause it means creating a feeling of closeness with another person where you are emotionally connected and supported. That needs trust. And trust needs secure attachment, or at least an understanding of our insecure attachment if we have one, so that we can compensate for it. That all then leads us to the popular stage in a relationship, the companionate love, where we have a good mix of all three. Sternberg calls it consummate or complete love, and lots of other theories exist, but they all have the same thing in common, that it's the passion that fades out over time. But problems occur when someone equates passion with love. So it feels that the love must be dying out rather than it simply being one stage of love transitioning to another. Now, if you wanna hear me waffling on about this in greater detail, head on over to patreon.com and look me up. There's a link in the show notes, there always is. I talked about this topic on the week of Valentine's Day, so you won't have to scroll back too far. There is a seven day free trial as well, of course. And if you're able to support the podcast by pledging on Patreon, it's gonna help keep this show on the road. So have a lovely week, everybody. Enjoy your Easter and I'll speak to you again soon. Take care everyone.