General Theories of Love

Throughout history, scholars from a variety of disciplines have speculated on the nature of love. For example, as early as 1886, the German physician and pioneering sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1886/1945) identified five types of love: true love, sentimental love, platonic love, friendship, and sensual love. Several decades later, psychotherapist Albert Ellis (1954) proposed additional love varieties: [Page 120]“Love itself … includes many different types and degrees of affection, such as conjugal love, parental love, familial love, religious love, love of humanity, love of animals, love of things, self-love, sexual love, obsessive-compulsive love, etc.” (p. 101).

One of Ellis's contemporaries, religious theoretician C. S. Lewis (1960/1988), devoted an entire book to a discussion of types of love. Drawing on earlier distinctions made by Greek philosophers, he proposed four main varieties. Affection (or Storge, pronounced “stor-gay”) is based on familiarity and repeated contact and resembles the strong attachment often seen between parents and children. This type of love is experienced for and by a wide variety of social objects, including family members, pets, acquaintances, and lovers. According to Lewis, affectionate love has a “comfortable, quiet nature” (p. 34) and consists of feelings of warmth, interpersonal comfort, and satisfaction in being together. The second variety of love depicted by Lewis is Friendship (or Philias). Common interests, insights, or tastes, coupled with cooperation, mutual respect, and understanding, form the core of this love type. Lewis argued that Friendship, more than mere companionship, “must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice” (p. 66). Eros, or “that state which we call ‘being in love’” (p. 91), is the third variety of love. Unlike the other love types, Eros contains a mixture of “sweetness” and “terror” as well as a sexual component that Lewis referred to as Venus. Erotic love also is characterized by affection, idealization of and preoccupation with the beloved, and a very short life span. The final love type is Charity, a selfless and “Divine Gift-love” that has no expectation of reward and desires only what is “simply best for the beloved” (p. 128).

Contemporary social and behavioral scientists also have proposed taxonomies that specify types or varieties of love (for reviews, see Hendrick & Hendrick, 1992; Sternberg & Barnes, 1988). Two of the more common classification schemes were developed by psychologist Robert Sternberg (e.g., 1986, 1998) and sociologist John Lee (e.g., 1973, 1988).

The Triangular Theory of Love

Sternberg (e.g., 1986, 1998, 2006) conceptualized love in terms of three basic components that form the vertices of a triangle: intimacy, passion, and decision/commitment (see Figure 7.1).

The intimacy component is primarily emotional or affective in nature and involves feelings of warmth, closeness, connection, and [Page 121]bondedness in the love relationship. The passion component is motivational and consists of the drives that are involved in romantic and physical attraction, sexual consummation, and related phenomena. The decision/commitment component is largely cognitive and represents both the short-term decision that one individual loves another and the longer-term commitment to maintain that love.

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