7 Little Known Secrets For Finding True Love

flickr.com/photos/48092684@N00/323119590/CreativeCommons

7 Little Known Secrets for Finding True Love Jed Diamond, Ph.D. Contact: [email protected] www.MenAlive.com I have been counseling men and women for the last 44 years. There are many concerns people bring, but most of them are related to their desire to have a relationship where they can feel loved and where they can share their love. There are many types of love and learning them can help you expand your opportunities for joy and happiness. According to psychologist Robert Sternberg, there are three distinct components of love: Intimacy, passion, and commitment. Intimacy is the experience of warmth toward another person that arises from feelings of closeness and connectedness. It involves the desire to give and receive emotional support and to share one’s innermost thoughts and experiences. Passion refers to intense romantic feelings and sexual desire for another person. Commitment requires decision making. A short-term decision involves whether or not one actually loves the other person, while the long-term decision involves a willingness to maintain the relationship through thick and thin. Sternberg has identified seven different “love styles” based on the possible combinations of intimacy, passion, and commitment in a relationship. 1. Empty Love When there is commitment, but no passion or intimacy. These are couples who are just hanging together, but have lost the fire of love.

2. Foolish Love Love where there is passion and commitment, but no intimacy is foolish. We see this where people fall instantly in love and have a wild weekend together, but then regret it in the light of morning. 3. Liking Love When there is intimacy without passion or commitment, we have a close friendship. Sometimes hot love becomes liking love when people have been together a long time. Many people mistakenly feel that the “love” their partner, but are not “in love” and decide to leave. It’s often better to recapture the passion and commitment. 4. Romantic Love This is the opposite of “Liking Love,” since there is passion and intimacy, but not commitment. We’ve all felt this kind of love in our youth, just beginning a relationship, or when we’ve been burned and not ready to commit. 5. Infatuation Love Here we have passion, but no intimacy or commitment. We just want to feel the excitement of sex and don’t want to feel tied down. 6. Companionate Love This style has intimacy and commitment, but is short on passion. Again many couples in a long-term relationship begin to feel they are married to a sibling. The key here is to recharge the passion. Try something new. Revitalize yourself. Too many men I know think there is something wrong with their wife, when the real problem is that they have lost passion for their life.

7. Consummate Love Here, we have it all. There is a wonderful blend of intimacy, passion, and commitment. Many couples come to believe that once they achieve this state of being, they will stay in it forever. When they lose one of the key elements, intimacy or passion or commitment, they mistakenly believe something is wrong with their relationship. Remember, for most of human history if we reached 40, we were lucky. That was just enough time to make babies, raise them to childbearing years, have a few months to relax, then die. Now we live a whole second adulthood after 40, perhaps another 40 or 50 years. If we’re in a relationship we have to learn new skills to keep love alive and well over the years. If you’d like more information on my work, counseling, writing, and so on, contact me: [email protected] www.MenAlive.com To learn more about an evolutionary view of sex, love, and relationship, check out David Buss’s work: http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/Group/BussLAB/