The 4 types of love: what different kinds of love are there?

The phenomenon of love it is, without a doubt, the most studied, complex, misunderstood and multidimensional that exists. It is a phenomenon that has generated 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 they talk about the types of love different that exist.

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

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Love: a complex feeling

The psychological study has made constant efforts in order to limit the meaning and implications of the concept love* (why we love, who we love, how we love), although the truth is that this task has always been seen involved in difficulties because there are thousands of conceptions, opinions and ways of approaching this thematic. In addition, the opinions that people have about what love is also influence the way you are experience it, so a "pure" analysis cannot be made of what the different types of love.

Canadian psychologists Beverly Fehr and James A. Russell [1] they spent many years of their lives investigating the concept of love. They jointly developed a study in 1991, where they asked a series of participants to compose a list of as many different kinds of love as they could think of at the time. This experiment served to create a large list of 93 different kinds of love.. Subsequently, other participants were asked how typical each of the prototypes of love described in the list, that is, to what degree they thought it best represented the essence of love.

The results of this survey revealed that the love considered the most prototypical was maternal love. Correlatively, the next most prototypical and well-known types of love were parental love, friendship, sisterly love, romantic love, and brotherly love. Other types of love, such as passionate, sexual or platonic love, were reasoned as less prototypical loves according to the results of the study.

Elements of love

Fehr and Russell's research is by no means the only ones that inquire about how we perceive different types of love. Psychologists P. Shaver and J. Schwartz [2] carried out a series of studies in 1992 using a similar procedure. They carefully analyzed the judgments of resemblance or similarity between different words related to emotions, discovering that love, affection, affection, attraction, and care made up a fairly uniform block. Consequently, the Shaver and Schwartz studies concluded that our conception of love It is very complex, and there is no clear delimitation between love and feelings or emotions similar.

The most important classification and that brings together a greater number of experts about what the types of love are 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. The attraction between two bodies and sexual desire are its basic parts. Some researchers, such as Bratslavsky and Baumeister, defined passion in love as an aggregate of intense feelings focused on attraction to another person, characterized by biophysiological activation and the aspiration to join it at all levels (sexual, sentimental…).

However, it should be noted that, if the person is desirable as a sexual partner, passion incorporates two elements: attraction and the sexual appetite. Instead, there may be feelings of passion lacking in 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 another and vice versa.

2. Privacy

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

If we think about it carefully, it makes perfect 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 it in other types of relationships social.

The researchers reported that this element of love encompasses a conception of mutual empathy, kind and benevolent attitudes towards the other person, and the permanent communication of affection shared.

3. Commitment

The 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 and nurture that love. These two components do not have to always go together. Commitment is an element that can manifest itself even though intimacy and passion have disappeared.

Sometimes the relationship between two people can progress over time, and passion and intimacy can deteriorate. In this case, only the commitment would remain, understood as the will to continue in the relationship. In the case of cultures in which marriages of convenience agreed between two families are carried out, the component of commitment manifests itself at the beginning of the relationship, and time will tell if passion and intimacy as well will appear.

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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, in real 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 between intimacy and passion. This type of love arises when lovers have both physical and emotional attraction, despite the fact that this feeling of attachment does not come 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 their risk of triggering conflictive or problematic experiences relatively high.

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

2. Mate 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 a cluster of needs such as social support, emotional support, mutual understanding and communication.

People who live this type of love feel intimately united and share both their emotions, their knowledge or their possessions. On the other hand, it is one of the types of love that cause more confusion, since it can be confused with other forms of emotional bond, such as pity.

3. Fatuous love

It is based on the mixture of commitment and passion, without the time necessary 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. Therefore, in these cases considerable effort continues to be devoted to offer the best image of yourself In the eyes of the other person, something that can keep the idealization alive.

Is there "perfect love" according to Sternberg's theory?

This combination of intimacy, passion and commitment unleashes what Sternberg defined as complete love or perfect love. According to the author, it is the kind of love that almost all people aspire to live. It is no exaggeration to say that perfect love is hard to come by, and much more difficult to maintain. But, after all, we don't always look for this kind of love in every intimate relationship we have throughout life; in fact, we reserve this very particular and unique kind of love for a few relationships that fulfill 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, leave an indelible mark on 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 well known that privacy It develops progressively as the relationship progresses, and it may increase over time, but this growth is usually more abrupt in the early stages of the courtship.

Regarding the passion, this is expressed in a very intense way at the beginning, and grows rapidly, but later slowly decays as the relationship goes through more advanced stages in time, until stabilize. On the other hand, commitment increases slowly at first (even slower than intimacy), to reach 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 talk about types of love, it is worth asking if the core of all of them, what we consider the abstract phenomenon of love, is a universal psychological phenomenon or, on the contrary, it is a product of the cultural development that has arisen over the course of history. In this sense it seems that love has a lot of culture; that is to say, thousands of years ago what we understand today by "loving" practically did not exist.

For example, until not so many centuries ago, very young children were loved significantly less than girls. adults, and that feeling of need to care for and give affection to the little ones did not make as much sense as today in day; among other things, because infant mortality was very high. In the same way, love for the couple was not understood as a feeling that united two equal people, rather, it had to do with the need to maintain a bond that made it possible to have offspring in a stable.

Our brain and love

A few weeks ago we published an interesting article about what happens in our minds when we experience love. In addition, we also propose a reading about some curious facts that science has contributed about love and falling in love, that focus on the most psychobiological component of this phenomenon. The links are these:

• "The chemistry of love: a very powerful drug"
• "Love and infatuation: 7 surprising investigations"

Bibliographic references:

• [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. AND. Close Relationships. New York: Psychology Press.