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Love, Companionate and Passionate

Most people eagerly seek out love and believe that forming a successful love relationship is essential for their personal happiness. Although each individual is likely to experience various types of love and enter into a number of different kinds of love relationship over the course of his or her lifetime, scientists have tended to focus on two varieties of love that commonly occur in long-term romantic relationships. These two important types of love—stable, affectionate, companionate love and exciting, intense, passionate love—are linked with several significant personal, interpersonal, and societal outcomes, including marriage and longterm pair bonding, sex and reproduction, and social support. This entry discusses how compan-ionate and passionate love are commonly defined and measured, reviews existing research about each type of love, and explores current steps scientists are taking to further our understanding of both love varieties.

Companionate Love

Definition and Measurement

Companionate love refers to a variety of love that is durable, fairly slow to develop, and characterized by interdependence and feelings of affection, intimacy, and commitment. Variously described as affectionate love, friendship-based love, attachment, and conjugal love, companionate love reflects the abiding affection, trust, and tenderness we feel for people with whom our lives are deeply interwoven and connected. Because it requires time to develop fully, this kind of love is often seen between close friends or romantic partners who have been together for a long time.

To study any variety of love, scientists must have a way of accurately measuring it. Researchers typically measure companionate love using self-report methods, which involve asking people to respond to questions about their feelings for a specific other person (e.g., a friend, dating partner, or spouse). There are two basic self-report methods available to scientists—single-item measures and multi-item scales. Single-item measures typically ask respondents to report on the amount of com-panionate love they experience for their partner (“How much warm, caring, affectionate love do you feel for your partner?”). These kinds of global single-item measures are easy to use and appear to be relatively valid. However, many researchers choose to use multi-item scales that have been developed specifically to measure the various elements of companionate love. On these scales, people answer a series of questions about how much intimacy, affection, respect, trust, commitment, and so on that they feel for their partner, and the researcher sums up their responses and calculates a total companionate love score.

Research

Research provides evidence that companionate love is an almost uniformly positive experience. For example, when people are asked to think about companionate love and identify its important features, they specify positive feelings like “trust,” “caring,” “respect,” “tolerance,” “loyalty,” “sup-portiveness,” and “friendship.” In addition, most men and women mention “trust,” “mutual respect,” “communication,” “sharing,” “honesty,” “affection,” and other positive emotions and experiences when describing the qualities and characteristics that they believe are important in a companionate love relationship. Similarly, when asked how they can tell the difference between loving (as opposed to being in love with or merely liking) someone, the majority of people point to deeper levels of trust and tolerance as being characteristic of the state of loving another.

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