The 4 types of love: what different kinds of love exist?

What are the different types of love? In this article we review the types of love and their theories.

The phenomenon of love is undoubtedly the most studied, complex, misunderstood and multidimensional phenomenon that exists. It is a phenomenon that has spawned 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 different types of love. different types of love different types of love that exist.

The idea is that in our culture love does not have a complete definition, but has many different meanings. has many different meaningsIt is a concept that is used in many different contexts and relationships. Love has nuances, and these nuances mean that, if we want to understand this phenomenon well, we must classify it according to a series of criteria. This means that we give up the possibility of understanding love as something unique, very well defined and easy to understand, but in exchange it allows us to better understand its manifestations. better understand its manifestations from a practical from a practical point of view.

• Recommended article: "6 signs that show physical attraction to another person".

Love: a complex feeling

The psychological study has made constant efforts with the objective of delimiting the meaning and implications of the concept of love. the meaning and implications of the concept of love* (why we love, who we love, how we love), although the truth is that this task has always been involved in difficulties due to the fact that there are thousands of conceptions, opinions and ways of approaching this subject. In addition, people's opinions about what love is also influence the way in which they experience it, so it is not possible to make a "pure" analysis of what makes up the different types of love.

Canadian psychologists Beverly Fehr and Beverly Fehr and James A. Russell [1] spent many years of their lives investigating the concept of love. They jointly developed a study in 1991, where they asked a number of participants to write a list of as many different kinds of love as they could think of at the time. This experiment resulted in a large list of 93 different kinds of love.. Subsequently, other participants were asked how typical they thought each of the prototypes of love described in the list was, 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 types of love, such as passionate, sexual or platonic love, were considered to be less prototypical, according to the results of the study.

Elements of love

Fehr and Russell's research is far from the only one to investigate how we perceive different types of love. Psychologists P. Shaver and J. Schwartz [2] conducted a series of studies in 1992 using a similar procedure. They analyzed in detail the judgments of resemblance or similarity between different words related to emotions, They found that love, affection, affection, attraction and care constituted a fairly uniform block of words.. Consequently, Shaver and Schwartz's studies concluded that our conception of love is very complex, and there is no obvious demarcation between love and similar feelings or emotions.

The most important classification that brings together the largest number of experts on what are the types of love is the Sternberg's Triangular Theory [3]. This categorization is built on the basis of 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. Attraction between two bodies and sexual desire are its basic parts. Some researchers, such as Bratslavsky and Baumeisterdefined passion in love as an aggregate of feelings of great intensity focused on the attraction to another person, characterized by biophysical activation of the body.characterized by biophysiological activation and aspiration to be united with her at all levels (sexual, sentimental...).

However, it should be noted that, in case the person is desirable as a sexual partner, passion incorporates two elements: the attraction and the sexual appetite. On the other hand, there can be feelings of passion devoid of these two elements, such as passion for a child. In short, the erotic connotations of passion are not used here as if one thing leads to the other and vice versa.

2. Intimacy

This constitutive element of love is expressed as a feeling of bonding, closeness and affection towards the other personThis element of love is expressed as a feeling of union, closeness and affection towards the other person, as well as the concern to increase his or her well-being, to provide and receive sentimental support and to communicate personal opinions and emotions, as well as to listen and attend to those of the other.

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 so in other types of social relationships.

The researchers reported that this element of love encompasses a conception of mutual empathy, kind and benevolent attitudes toward the other person, and 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 nurture that love. commitment to care for and nurture that love. These two components need not always occur together. Commitment is an element that can manifest itself even when intimacy and passion have disappeared.

Sometimes, the relationship between two people may progress over time, and the passion and intimacy may deteriorate. In this case, only the commitment, understood as the will to continue the relationship, would remain. In the case of cultures where marriages of convenience are arranged between two families, the commitment component is manifested 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 by each of these elements in its genuine form, forming the three vertices of an equilateral triangle. However, the actual love relationships the different types of love intertwine and combine 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 constituted from the combination of intimacy and passion. This type of love arises when lovers have both a physical and emotional attraction, although this feeling of bonding does not go hand in hand 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.

The recurrent example of this type of love can be found in many archetypes that emerge from literature, such as Romeo and Julietby the British author William Shakespeare. The reason why it is so attractive and interesting when it comes to being artistically portrayed is its tragic character, being very intense experiences emotionally but at the same time vulnerable to instability.

2. Companion love

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 live 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 most confusing types of love, as it can be confused with other forms of emotional attachment, such as pity.

3. Fatuous love

It is based on a mixture of commitment and passionIt 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 marry shortly after falling in love, and the intimacy component has not yet emerged. In these cases, therefore, a great deal of effort is still dedicated to the best image of oneself in the eyes of the other person 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 everyone aspires to experience. It is no exaggeration to say that perfect love is difficult to achieve, let alone maintain. But, after all, we do not always seek this kind of love in all the intimate relationships we have throughout our lives; in fact, this particular and unique kind of love is reserved 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 in 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 intimacy develops progressively as the relationship progresses, and may increase over time, but this growth tends to be more abrupt in the early stages of courtship.

With regard to passionpassion is expressed in a very intense way in the beginning, and grows in an accelerated way, but later on it slowly declines 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 equilibrium 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 speak of 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 a product of cultural development that has arisen in the course of history. In this sense it seems to be that love is very much culturalthat is to say that thousands of years ago what we understand today by "love" practically did not exist.

For example, until not so many centuries ago, very young children were loved significantly less than adults, and this feeling of needing to care for and give affection to the little ones 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 a partner was not understood as a feeling that united two equal people, but it 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 mind when we experience love. In addition, we also propose you to read about some curious facts that science has contributed about love and falling in love, which focus on the more psychobiological component of this phenomenon. The links are these:

• "La química del amor: una droga muy potente"
• "Amor y enamoramiento: 7 investigaciones sorprendentes"

Referencias bibliográficas:

• [1] Fehr, B., Russell, J. (1991). The Concept of Love Viewed From a Prototype Perspective. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
• [2] Shaver, P. R., Wu, S., & Schwartz, J. C. (1992). Cross-cultural similarities and differences in emotion and its representation: A prototype approach.
• [3] Sternberg, R. (2004). A Triangular Theory of Love. In Reis, H. T.; Rusbult, C. E. Close Relationships. New York: Psychology Press.