Psychology of love: introduction to mystery of love
There is love; experience which the human being is known to have; one that is so strong as to change everything in their thoughts, behavior, and interactions. Still, somehow, it manages to elude definition, existing for everybody yet still shrouded in a mystery too hard to pinpoint. This can also be explored from many multidimensional psychological points of view uniquely acknowledged from the diverse angles of the lenses through which we could better understand its complexities. In order to make this essay easier, I would be discussing some of the known psychological theories describing love, types of love, factors that influence love, and lastly, the role love plays in human development and well-being.
The Nature of Love
Purely, love embodies that intricate emotional play of deep hearty feelings of affection and bonding, concern, and wanting. It can be in any form and all forms of relationships on its spectrum of scale, from romance to that between mates or platonic love between friends and familial love between parent and child. This simply means that psychological theories of love happen to be a description of how the whole process comes into being, affects those who go through it, and why so much importance has been attached to it in human life.
The most relevant part of the themes within psychology of love is emotional attachment and need for intimacy and attachment. Actually, love is not really an emotion but an act-the act that unites both the emotional and cognitive ability. Researchers characterize kinds of love, which actually exist in a multitude of contexts and relationships.
1. What is love? What is emotion?
Most of the times, love is described in several ways as a general complex and multi-dimensional phenomenon for most, best described as deep affection, attachment, or bond to another human being. Generally speaking, definitions may vary, but all psychological theories have always tried to seize the nature of love by studying its elements, its beginnings, or its influence on humans. Perhaps the oldest and most well-known of all psychological models of love is that found in the book Triangular Theory of Love, by Robert Sternberg, which suggests that there are three main aspects of love: intimacy, passion, and commitment.
- Intimacy has been defined as an emotional closeness or connection that people have toward one another.
- Passion would connote sexual attraction and arousal that would develop throughout the relationship.
- Commitment involves the decision to remain in a relationship when things are changing and unpleasant through the virtue of a choice made.
This is because there are different forms of love. There's passion, intimacy, and then commitment. With this, Sternberg's model explains why. There was the infatuated love, wherein there is passion but no intimacy and commitment. The companionate love accounted for intimacy and commitment but not passion. Consummate love is the one wherein all three components had a balanced harmony with time. This meant that love cannot be that one thing but the developing emotion, which did change with time.
2. Styles of Love: A Continuum of Feelings
While romantic love is so very the focus of much psychological research, love can take many other forms, each with a variety of psychological characteristics. Psychologist John Lee propounded a color wheel theory of love suggesting six different "love styles" as an expression of the variety of ways in which people experience love. These are:
Eros: erotic or romantic love characterized by strong physiologic attraction and emotional arousal. This is the style most closely related to Sternberg's "passion" dimension.
Ludus: playful, game-like: it's always about dating and fun with less invested serious emotional investment. Often even a game or entertainment.
Storge: It is based on the deeper sense of friendship, the bond of emotions, and generally it grows slowly on its base. Stability, trust, and respect are the blocks of storge love. It often manifests itself in long-lasting relationships.
Pragmatics: This love provides a foundation for compatibility, values, as well as common goals; it is sensible and practical. It can often be found in an arranged marriage or relationship partnership whereby each person evaluates the other with pragmatic consideration.
Mania: This is obsessive love, which becomes emotionally dependent, and then feels strongly in desire. A characteristic of persons inflicted with mania includes jealousy, possessiveness or insecurity, and such relationships can be turbulent.
Agape: Unselfish, unconditional, and profound love, care, and compassion for others. Not necessarily romantic love but could be held in parent-to-child love, charity, or other acts of kindness.
Hence, different styles of love tell us that love is much more than a romantic attachment; it can fill in any bond of love that defines any kind of friendship, family relations, or even self-love.
3. Biology of Love: Hormones and Brain Activity
Love is such an abstract feeling; yet, in the body lies a small hard biological power. Neurochemistry and hormones both build as well as maintain love bonds. Once loving will stimulate brain activity by letting loose compounds of chemicals that activate our moods, behavior, and attitudes towards the object of our love.
Dopamine: is the "feel-good" neurotransmitter part of the reward system in the brain. It's released in response to something pleasant going on and contributes to feelings of joyfulness and elation at the prospect of being with the person loved. Often, it renders a person a rush of euphoria, which could be very exciting and almost addictive.
Oxytocin: This hormone has long been known as the "bonding hormone," and it's very crucial to emotional bonding. It is released within the body for any form of physical contact that can include hugging, kissing, or sexual intimacy and heightens an intense instinctive urge to be close and bonded to someone. Oxytocin has been known to create love and trust between a couple, hence its importance to the long-term solidity of the relation.
Vasopressin: The hormone has also been linked to some of the human social behaviors, aside from the bonding long-term that follows. It is considered a commitmentinducing agent of the partner, especially in monogamous relations.
Serotonin: In the initial stage, mostly in love loves, serotonin level often changes sometimes. Then most people become looked obsessed or even obsessed by their lovers. It is also for this reason that people are said to mostly go through the 'infatuated' status in the initial stages of romantic attraction.
These chemicals, in themselves, elicit but also make people feel the sense of extremely intense attraction and empower them to keep on relationships over time, hence making it biologically rewarding.
4. Cognitive and Emotional Characteristics of Love
Love is a phenomenon that is not only psychological but also possesses cognitive features as well as emotional features. It may condition the experience and expression of it because of our thought, beliefs, and expectations on love. Cognitive theories of love center on the intellectual process wherein mental functions shape romantic relations.
Attachment Theory: Attachment theory was discovered by John Bowlby. Hence, what attachment style a person would have in adulthood would depend on the kind of experiences one had with his caregivers during his childhood. These attachment styles then in adulthood are said to influence the way one acts with their partner. Historically, there are only three such attachment styles: secure, anxious, and avoidant.
- Attachment style thus hinges on one's acceptance of intimacy and trusting their partner or on one's relating being unhealthy-balanced relationships.
- Attachment style may also be anxious, based on insecurity or a fear of abandonment and the compulsion to seek constant reassurance.
- An avoidant attachment style has a hard time getting intimate; it is an aversion for emotional closeness over independence.
- This is because attachment styles usually determine how people react to love, manage conflicts in their relationships, or even how they coped with the stress in their relationships.
Cognitive Dissonance: Sometimes, a person finds him/herself in cognitive dissonance-psychological state in which beliefs are in a position of tension with behavior. For example, a person thinks that he loves somebody but then experiences hostile or incongruent feelings. The tension from the psychological dissonance would be either relieved by a change in feelings or rationalization of behavior to avoid the tension.
Idealization: In the very early falling-in-love stage idealize both their partners and stare at them like they are perfect. Idealization may be fantastic but can't last as the weakness of human beings develops unfortunately concerning relations. With time, most learn how to develop a much more balanced and realistic perception of the partner that makes the relationship stronger, if the commitment to growth and adaptation is reciprocated.
5. Phases of Love: From Infatuation to Permanent Relationship
Overlapping feelings, behaviors, and expectations generally characterize romantic relationships that are in the stages of change. Such a change indicates how love may evolve over time.
Stage 1: Attraction: That is, in the first stages of love, one finds high physiological attraction and something that closely resembles infatuation. This occurs during the period of deep impact from biological and chemical response-for example, dopamine and adrenaline-and brings a thrilling, obsessive experience.
Stage 2 of Relationship Building: When attraction becomes an emotional bond, lovers feel a need to discuss and share all of their personal information and experiences with each other. Gradually due to such intimacy and increasing confidence between two individuals, a relation stabilizes, and the couples would feel comfortable and safe with each other.
Stage 3: Crisis and Conflict: Since no marriage is exception to crises caused by outer reasons such as, work, family or health reasons or an inner reason of misunderstanding or jealousy/communication, it's during such times that some of the couples get an opportunity to learn how to control and manage the situation so they can continue their relationship well, while for others it becomes a discourager. Skills in communication and emotional control, even conflict management or resolution skills, have much more to do with the survival of a relationship.
Stage 4: Long-term commitment: Matures that have reached the advanced stages of a relationship described most couples who reached an advanced stage of relationship with a more intense or a longer-lasting love. Passion is usually abolished, but emotional closeness, friendship, and commitment can run deep. They will understand each other's wishes and be there to support each other in a stable and fulfilling relationship.
Conclusion
Or in the simplest words, the psychology of love encompasses an enormous role of its features in biology, cognition, emotion, and social dynamics. It is very much found at the onset of the infatuation stage right to the deep emotional relationship eventually of long-term commitment. Individual differences among people-including attachment styles, past experiences, and other biochemical processes regulating human behavior-also play roles in defining love.
Psychology brings quite illuminating and awareness and insight to the depth of understanding love in the romantic relationship from a very different angle. Neurochemistry, attachment theory, and cognitive processes can easily show just how love goes far beyond something as fleeting as the next feeling but rather something that's overly complex, nuanced, and can even strengthen control over lives.
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