Love And Marriage

LOVE

WOULD YOU MARRY A PERSON IF THEY HAD ALL THE ATTRBUTES YOU WANTED IN A MATE, BUT YOU DID NOT LOVE HIM?

Love is new • Marrying for love, rather than for other more practical reasons (e.g. economic, political, family) is a new concept. • North Americans use romance as a reason to marry to an unprecedented degree.

History of Love • Ancient Greece: passionate attraction was considered a form of madness. Instead, platonic love characterized by nonsexual adoration was considered ideal. • 12th Century: Courtly love – knights sought love as a noble quest. The knight was expected to be unmarried, and the female married to someone else. Marriage was not considered romantic, but instead a matter of politics and property.

Over the next 500 years • Love is desirable, but usually doomed, because lovers have to marry other people. • 17th and 18th Centuries: English began to believe that occasionally love can have a happy ending. Yet, the idea that one must feel love towards spouse was not widespread. • Today: Love and marriage go together.

Types of Love: Triangular Theory (Sternberg) • • • •

Three parts of love – Intimacy Passion Commitment

These 3 components can vary in intensity.

Triangular Theory These three components can combine in different ways to make several different kinds of love. Nonlove: no intimacy, no passion, no comittment. Liking: Intimacy is high, passion and commitment are low. Infatuation: Strong passion, low intimacy, low commitment Empty love: Strong commitment, low intimacy, low passion Romantic love: High intimacy, high passion, commitment may or may not occur Companionate love: High intimacy, high commitment, low passion. Fatuous love: high passion, high commitment, low intimacy. Consummate love: all three are present in high levels.

Triangular Theory • Amounts of components can change over time • Passion is the most variable

Passion • (Hatfield & Berscheid) Passionate love is arousal coupled with belief that another person is cause by arousal. • Misattributions – excitation transfer. – Dutton & Aron Men who walked on the scary bridge used more sexual imagery in TAT and were more likely to call female research assistant. – White, Fishbein, & Rutstein • High arousal intensified feelings • Doesn’t matter what type of arousal it was (a description of a brutal murder, comedy film, but not boring description of a circulatory system of a frog)

Passionate Love and Thought • Rubin’s love and liking scales • If we have passion for someone, we think a lot about them • Also, the more we think about someone, the more passion we start to have • Passion makes us glorify and idealize partners (hence love is blind) – Goodwin, Fiske, Rosen, & Rosenthal

Passionate Love • Men report higher passion in the beginning of relationships • PEA (phenylethylamine) – a naturally occuring chemical related to amphetamines. – Is in chocolate – We become tolerant after 2 years

Passionate Love Does Not Last • Fancy erodes with time and experience • Novelty is exciting (Coolidge effect) • Arousal fades as time goes by (PEA)

Companionate Love • High intimacy, and high commitment • More stable, but also a little more bland • Couples who were asked why their marriages lasted for 15 years didn’t say they would do anything for their partners, or be miserable without them • Of course, all these categories are fuzzy

Styles of Loving (Lee) • • • • • • •

Eros Ludus Storge Mania Agape Pragma Perhaps better to think of these as overlapping themes • Which do you think men score higher in? Women?

Love and Age • Age is confounded by experience or duration of marriage • Older people may hold more romantic attitudes than younger people (Knox, 1970)

Love and Gender • Men and women are more similar than different • Men fall in love faster, more likely to think if you love someone, nothing else matters • Women are more cautious, and more practical, and more selective about who they love (love partners who are more intelligent, have high status, and other desirable traits)