The Triangular Theory of Love

Love is a difficult emotion to describe, but that hasn’t stopped people from trying. Ray Bradbury wrote that “love is the answer to everything”; William Shakespeare wrote, “love is smoke”; Maya Angelou wrote, “Love is like a virus”; and Rabindranath Tagore wrote “Love is an endless mystery”. Poets, artists, and musicians aren’t the only people who have tried to define love — scientists have tried too. Yale Professor of Physiology, Robert Sternberg, attempted to define love be establishing a theory called the “Triangular Theory of Love”. According to Sternberg’s theory love has three components: commitment, passion, and intimacy. Sternberg goes on to describe how different stages and types of love are a result of particular combinations of these three components of love. This blog post will look at the Triangular Theory of Love and asses the flaws in methodology of Sternberg’s work. 

The Triangular Theory of Love breaks love down into commitment, passion, and intimacy which when isolated or combined reflect eight different types of love. These types of love include non-love, liking, infatuated love, empty love, romantic love, companion love, fatuous love, and consummate love. 

Sternberg developed the “Triangular Love Scale” to determine which type of love a person is experiencing. Sternberg created a questionnaire with 72 questions that related either to commitment, passion, or intimacy and asked respondents to rate themselves on a 9-point Likert scale from “Not at all,” to “Moderately,” to “Extremely.” Sternberg conducted several studies to validate this scale, but the vast majority were conducted using similar methods. An advertisement was put in the news paper to gather participants, who would be given $10 for the time they spent testing. Participants were required to be involved in a close relationship, “primarily heterosexual”,  and between the ages of 18 to 71. Participants were then instructed to rate all of the 72 questions for six different relationships (mother, father, sibling closest in age, lover/spouse, best friend of the same sex, and ideal lover/spouse). Half rated them based off of the importance of each statement to the particular relationship, and the other half were told to rate them based on how characteristic each statement was.

Although Sternberg’s theory about love offers intriguing incites on interpersonal relationships, it illustrates the difficulties that arise from trying to define and measure love in standardized scientific terms. Self-reporting requires a significant amount of personal judgement calls, finding an appropriate and representative sample size is difficult, and because the Love Scale was structured as a questionnaire there were limited outcomes. there are a few issues with the methodology used in the Triangular Love Scale. The main issue with the scale is that Sternberg’s sample size was of a limited variety. Each of the participant were from the same geographical area. People who live in the same places are likely to experience similar cultural expectations regarding relationships. People in other areas around the world may rate the intimacy of a mother, father, or sibling in a different way then people who respond to a newspaper add in New Haven. In the first version of the study, the only participants were undergraduate students. This is a problem because undergraduate students are likely to experience things like romantic love in different ways than those of an older age demographic. Another issue is that each of the participants was required to be in a committed relationship for roughly the same duration of time. Sternberg believes that relationships change over time, but that isn’t reflected by the participants of the study. The Love Scale is also inherently heteronormative and polyphobic. This is reflected by the questions and demographic make-up of the participants of the study. I believe that the validity of the study could be enhanced if queer and polyamorous couples were included. 

The Love Scale was subjected to personal judgment calls, limited sample size, and close ended questions. These are common issues with quantitative research. In many ways Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love illustrates the difficulties that arise from trying to define and measure love in standardized scientific terms. We may never know exactly how to best measure love, but approaches like Sternberg’s can bring us closer to demystifying the emotion. 

Sources:

CBC. “Sci-Fi Writer Ray Bradbury Talks about Love, 1968: CBC Archives | CBC.” YouTube, YouTube, 6 June 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=If9hMwaGfdk.

“Quotes from Romeo and Juliet with Examples and Analysis.” Literary Devices, Literary Devices, 31 Oct. 2018, literarydevices.net/romeo-and-juliet-quotes/.

“Maya Angelou Quote.” A-Z Quotes, www.azquotes.com/quote/8513.

“A Quote by Rabindranath Tagore.” Goodreads, Goodreads, www.goodreads.com/quotes/154918-love-is-an-endless-mystery-because-there-is-no-reasonable.

Sternberg, Robert J. “A triangular theory of love.” Psychological review 93.2 (1986): 119.

Grohol, John M. “Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love Scales.” Psych Central, Psych Central.com, 8 Oct. 2018, psychcentral.com/lib/sternbergs-triangular-theory-of-love-scales/.

Sternberg, Robert J. “Construct validation of a triangular love scale.” European Journal of Social Psychology 27.3 (1997): 313-335.