332. The triangular theory of love

We all want to know the secret to true, lasting love so that we can perhaps have a shot at finding it. So in today's episode, we're breaking down perhaps the most famous theory on this very topic, Robert Sternbery's Triangular Theory of Love. In this episode, we talk about: The 3 core ingredients of love: intimacy, passion, commitment How different combinations form different kinds of relationships Why “consummate love” is so rare, and hard to maintain What the theory leaves out: culture, trust, respect, asexuality, polyamory A look at the newer “quadruple theory” of love Listen now! ORDER MY BOOK: https://www.psychologyofyour20s.com/general-clean Follow Jemma on Instagram: @jemmasbeg https://www.instagram.com/jemmasbeg/?hl=en# Follow the podcast on Instagram: @thatpsychologypodcast https://www.instagram.com/thatpsychologypodcast/?hl=en# For business: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] The Psychology of your 20s is not a substitute for professional mental health help. If you are struggling, distressed or require personalised advice, please reach out to your doctor or a licensed psychologist. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jemma Sbeg?

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• 2:46Jemma Sbeg?

  Hello everybody and welcome back to the Psychology of Your 20s. The podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology.

• 3:05Jemma Sbeg?

  Hello everybody, welcome back to the show, welcome back to the podcast, new listeners, old listeners, wherever you are in the world. It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we of course break down the psychology of our twenties. Today, I am introducing a new kind of episode to the show, a shorter episode than what you are probably used to, where we are going to cover some core psychology principles, theories, concepts or studies that I think are interesting, that I think will help us understand our twenties better, but which don't necessarily have enough to say about them to be made into a full 45 minute to an hour long episode.

• 3:50Jemma Sbeg?

  And you guys know I love to yap, I can talk. I can talk until the sun goes down, but these episodes are just gonna be a little bit more bite-sized, a little bit smaller for your 15-minute commute, for your 15-minute, I don't know, arm workout, for whatever you're doing. This is just gonna be like a more bite-sized taste of our longer episodes, talking about concepts that I still think deserve to be in the psychology of your twenties universe, but which just don't have enough research to them quite yet. For our inaugural Psychology Bites bonus episode, I wanted to talk about one of my favorite, favorite theories that I've been trying to make into a full-length episode for years.

• 4:34Jemma Sbeg?

  Finally, she is having her time to shine. We are talking about the triangular theory of love. Let's start with some very basic factual information. This theory was developed by the psychologist Robert Sternberg, and it's not just about romantic love. This theory is about how love forms, how it lasts, how it changes. And it's about platonic intimacy, it's about familial intimacy, it's about commitment, and the foundational reasons why we feel drawn or connected to certain people, and what makes a relationship consummate love, what makes a relationship a kind of love that lasts.

• 5:17Jemma Sbeg?

  It is one theory in a long line of theories, trying to synthesize, explain, simplify, categorize, the thing that fascinates us more than anything else. It's just one of many theories, trying to get to the bottom of what does love really mean? What is this thing that we all experience? Or hope to experience. Some other theories of note which you are maybe familiar with include things like attachment theory. Basically, that theory states that how we love and are loved is based on The love we received as children and how we are, how we were raised. There's also the reward theory of attraction, which basically states that

• 5:59Jemma Sbeg?

  we are drawn to people who make us feel good about ourselves and that reward inherent drivers within us or inherent desires or needs within us. Another particularly famous theory around love is John Allen Lee's color wheel theory of love, which defines three primary, three secondary and nine tertiary types of love based on different combinations of feelings. For example, ludus love, which is primarily driven by desire to have fun and to tease. Pragma love, which is a convenient kind of love.

• 6:36Jemma Sbeg?

  Kinship love, friendship love, there's a whole list that you can look up. We're not talking about that today. It's just another one of many theories in this kind of space, but the real one that kind of shines through and that a lot of people talk about is the triangular theory. This is probably my favorite of all, which is of course why we are doing an episode on it. So this theory is almost forty years old now. I think it's over forty years old, sorry to say. And it suggests that we can describe nearly all types and forms of love based on three ingredients and their combination. The three ingredients for any type of relationship are intimacy, passion and commitment.

• 7:22Jemma Sbeg?

  Let's break these down. Intimacy involves feelings of familiarity, closeness, connectedness, a sense of similarity, shared hobbies, shared values, that kind of thing. Passion involves deep desire, attraction, romance, feelings of being swept off our feet. And commitment, commitment means staying, it means trust. It represents shared goals and unity even in hard times. I like to explain this theory as a theory that likes us to think of love like a recipe for a cake, depending on how much of each. Of these ingredients you put into the cake, you're going to get a different flavor. A different flavor of cake that represents something different.

• 8:05Jemma Sbeg?

  It's still a cake, you're just influencing the recipe so that something different comes out. Basically, this theory, it describes love as a recipe, and you can make dozens of different things with just a few variations of ingredients. This is my, my own kind of metaphor for this theory, but the way Sternberg represents this is as a triangle. Obviously, it's called the triangulate theory of love. And intimacy, passion and commitment are all points on the triangle. Each point represents one type of love, but so do the lines connecting those points and the center point of the triangle as well. I know it's quite visual, but I think giving you some combinations might help you understand this a little bit easier.

• 8:50Jemma Sbeg?

  On one side of the triangle, at one point, we have passion, and if a relationship only has passion, it's a very simple kind of cake. It's infatuation, it's limerence, it's one-sided, perhaps it's purely sexual in nature. It's driven by feeling, longing, and you know, the thing that we want the most in the present, which is this other person. But it doesn't have intimacy, it doesn't have commitment. It's the simple cake, it's the passionate cake. If you only have commitment, on the other side of the triangle, you have empty love. Yes, you are loyal to one another, but romance and passion and intimacy have faded. Um, you don't have that organic closeness. Think, you know, people who have stayed married for the kids, even when all else has faded.

• 9:34Jemma Sbeg?

  You know, there is still a kind of love there, but it's not the same as what they had. We also have purely intimacy. So intimacy is the other kind of part of the triangle, and that is like friendship. If you're just intimate with someone and you just have closeness or familiarity, but you don't have romance or commitment, you guys are just friends. So three different kinds of love. Now for our combos. You guys ready? If you have intimacy and passion, you have romantic love, you're dating, it's like the early months or the early maybe years. You don't know if you're gonna go the distance, but you're having a really great time and you feel really close and comfortable and like in love with this person. If you have intimacy and commitment, you have companion love.

• 10:18Jemma Sbeg?

  And this can also be platonic. Think those like lifelong friends who like live with each other in their sixties. Think people who are older and they no longer have the same sexual feelings for each other, but they're still all in on their relationship. Their love, these kinds of lovers, they're just as real as any other kind of love. It just doesn't have that other ingredient to the relationship that Sternberg says creates consummate love. It doesn't mean it's any less meaningful. Fatuous love is when we have passion and commitment. It's incredibly rare because it doesn't have intimacy, which you think would be needed to connect those two things. Think like whirlwind courtships, people who get married after a few weeks.

• 11:03Jemma Sbeg?

  They have passion, sorry, and they have commitment. They don't have intimacy. There's no real bond there yet. But we would hope it would develop over time. Again, super rare. Probably the most rare version or combination. And finally, the one we've been talking about this whole time, consummate love. This is described by this theory as the complete form of love, representing the ideal romantic relationship that we are all striving for. We have intimacy, passion and commitment combined. This is the center of the triangle. Now, some things to dispel about consummate love. It's wonderful. It's beautiful. It's what we all strive for. It might not always last.

• 11:46Jemma Sbeg?

  This theory is not saying that once you have this thing, you have the perfect relationship. Having it for a certain period doesn't mean you're entitled to it forever. In fact, there's actually this urban myth going around that the reason Sternberg was so obsessed with theorizing about love was because he kept getting divorced and he wanted to know why the triangle kept collapsing in for him. But yes, it is a little bit of an urban myth, but you know, based on his own personal experience, he does caution in his papers on the subject that maintaining consummate love may be harder than just achieving it. You know, he really does stress that these are just, all these components are important.

• 12:30Jemma Sbeg?

  Having intimacy, having passion, having commitment are important, but they are just the beginning. You have to translate those components of love into action. Without expression, even the greatest of loves can die. And I think that's a really important message, not just for people in their twenties, but of any age. If you have a love that you want to last, you have to understand that love, especially the triangular theory of love, makes it so that this is also a verb. This is something that we act on. I think there's this idea that like, when you meet the right person, you just know and it should feel easy. And this theory says that yes, you may have everything you need to experience consummate love in the beginning,

• 13:14Jemma Sbeg?

  but it is not just the sum of its parts. Um, you have to work for it. And the reason I really love this theory is because it doesn't think of love as stationary. It actually allows us to explain how love goes through many stages. We're gonna take a short break, but when we return, I want to discuss what these stages actually are.

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• 16:46Jemma Sbeg?

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• 17:02Jemma Sbeg?

  So like I said before, the triangular theory of love likes to explain how love goes through stages. It likes to kind of suggest that we begin with either passion or intimacy. Then we gain the other and then finally we have commitment. So at any given stage in a relationship, you can kind of place where someone is in the timeline of love by looking at where they sit on this triangle. If they're in the beginning stages, they might just have passion. If they're in the middle stage of their relationship, they might have passion and intimacy. If they're in the consummate stage, they have passion, intimacy and commitment. But then as you maybe go further along in your relationship,

• 17:46Jemma Sbeg?

  you might lose the passion and just have commitment and intimacy. And then you might lose the intimacy and just have commitment. And then you might lose the commitment and have nothing. It also describes some of the relationships that happen in between, like situationships, like affairs. It describes friendships. It describes people who stay for the kids. It describes, you know, the people that you meet in those brief moments, maybe only for a couple of hours or for a week and you never see them again. But you have this brilliant, beautiful moment. Basically, I like that it doesn't show love as this static thing, or as this, you know, singular kind of thing.

• 18:30Jemma Sbeg?

  I also like that for a theory, and a rather dated one at that, it actually has a lot of real world application and modern day evidence. For example, a 2020 study looked at the application of this theory in 25 countries from all inhabited continents. It had over 11,000 respondents and it found that, yes, this theory actually does hold up under many different contexts and in many different cultures. This theory of love does represent many of the kinds of relationships that people will experience and go through. Another reason I like this theory is because it can kind of act as a litmus test for whether the relationship you're in is fulfilling all that you want it to fulfill.

• 19:12Jemma Sbeg?

  I think in our twenties, we encounter a lot of half-baked relationships and we go back and forth on, is this person right? Is this relationship right or not? Should we stay? Should we go? And this is a great way of kind of analyzing our relationship and saying, okay, but do we have intimacy? Do we have passion? Do we have commitment? If I seriously look at my relationship and it's missing one of these things, well, I actually don't have consummate love as much as I might feel like I have some kind of love. The thing is, you probably do have some kind of love, but is it the kind of love that you expect and that you want that will fulfill all three of these needs for you? Now, something you may have noticed is that

• 19:55Jemma Sbeg?

  whilst the triangular theory of love is definitely a good start, it is kind of missing some things. It's definitely got the foundations down pat. It's definitely stripped love to its very bare scientific stumps. But some researchers have remarked that it doesn't talk about culture. It doesn't really talk about the context in which a relationship is taking place. It treats the love between two people as if it's occurring in a vacuum. It doesn't include things like family expectations. It doesn't include things like values, religion, money, um, other circumstances that are keeping people apart.

• 20:36Jemma Sbeg?

  All these things do impact whether love lasts and where we sit on the triangle. I think favorable or unfavorable circumstances or The practicality of one's love should also be a factor as to whether a consummate love will be achieved or will last. But again, I think this theory doesn't claim to have predictive powers over whether a love will last. You know, so we can't ask from it more than it wants to give. It kind of just gives the ingredients which will cause it to form. So again, maybe I'm asking a little bit too much from a scientific theory.

• 21:13Jemma Sbeg?

  But it's still something to think about. Another criticism is that it doesn't specify whether multiple consummate loves can occur at the same time, you know. People in polyamorous relationships, for example, would claim that that can occur.

• 21:31Jemma Sbeg?

  But this is an old model and it doesn't kind of include or represent some of the newer forms of love that we are experiencing or seeing in the modern day, especially since it was first created, founded in the eighties, when there was definitely a lot of love that wasn't socially acceptable or talked about, but was still valid.

• 21:57Jemma Sbeg?

  Finally, and this is the biggest issue I find with this theory. It doesn't cover whether one person can be in consummate love and another person just be in passionate love or fatuous love or empty love at the same time. It doesn't explain or provide an explanation as to whether two people in the same relationship can actually be at different spots on the triangle. What kind of love is occurring then? Do both people have to be experiencing the same combination for the love to be that thing? Or could you have consummate love on one end, fatuous love on the other? And does that still count as a kind of love? You know, this theory is very one dimensional, right?

• 22:40Jemma Sbeg?

  It is literally a two D triangle. Look it up, you'll see what I'm talking about. But the feelings we feel towards someone at any given moment are multi-directional and they are four D, five D, six D, and they are complex. You can have all three ingredients and still not be able to be together because you know it won't work or because distance keeps, distance keeps you apart or because there is another factor here that isn't being explained by this model. And you know, what about people with relationship anxiety? Where do everyday doubts about our relationship fit into this? Does having doubts mean you can never be in consummate love? I don't think so. I think it's a very natural part of a relationship.

• 23:23Jemma Sbeg?

  And this is just another reminder that a theory is not a full, it's not going to provide the full picture. It's not going to explain everything. It's just a theory. This is where the quadruple theory of love comes in, which has expanded on the triangular theory of love to kind of give it some more texture. The quadruple theory was first introduced in 2020, so a long time after the triangular theory. It's much newer and it proposes that love is built on attraction, connection slash resonance, trust and respect. This model, I think, describes how love develops over time much better.

• 24:04Jemma Sbeg?

  It also allows for more types of love to be analyzed since it has that fourth factor. Um, I think it allows for parental love, love between friends, polyamorous love, to fit into this model. And I like that it also includes resonance and trust rather than just commitment, because you can be committed in a very basic way and still not trust the person you're with or have respect for them. So I think that this does go deeper into like the complex factors and the human emotion of it all. It also describes the love cycle in a more, um, I think, a less stagnant way. If you want to look up the quadruple theory of love,

• 24:48Jemma Sbeg?

  it actually has a model and a visual representation for the love cycle. It describes, which I think is a lot more comprehensive and beautiful. I think it's less of a black and white model as well, which I love. But yes, this is a very new theory. It doesn't have as much evidence. But I do think a combination of the triangular and the quadruple theory would give us a much more complete. Version of what love looks like as humans. But I wanna know, do you think that with all this conversation about theories, love could ever actually ever be fully explained by a model or by a theory like these ones?

• 25:33Jemma Sbeg?

  Are researchers and psychologists just trying too hard to categorize something that can't be categorized? That's the big question I keep coming back to at least. If we know every and any theory will be an oversimplification in some way, or exclude some kind of love in another way, why do we keep attempting to create these models? And is love something that really needs to be studied or graphed? Or can it only ever just be experienced? And that unique experience is as comprehensive as we may ever make of it. I don't know, I go back and forth. I really love looking into these theories, but sometimes I'm like, you're just never gonna, it's never gonna be the full picture, so why even try?

• 26:18Jemma Sbeg?

  But I guess they they would say that trying is what gets us as close as we can be. I also know that when I was in my previous relationships, this model did help me understand what was missing. So it does really help in those ways and it does give words to a feeling. But I wanna know what you think. Drop a comment below. Tell me how you feel. Tell me whether you think this is a good theory, a bad theory. And also give me some suggestions for some other theories you think I should cover. I really wanna do an episode, another Psychology Bites bonus episode on personality tests, whether they're a myth or not. I really wanna talk about narcissism, sociopathy, all of those things, concepts that I think are talked about a lot, but which.

• 27:02Jemma Sbeg?

  You know, we may not have the depth of knowledge on them that we should have. So I would love to hear your ideas and I want to thank you for listening to this smaller episode. Tell me what you think. Tell me if you like it. Make sure to share it with a friend. If you think they would enjoy it as well. And yeah, follow us along wherever you are listening. So you get more content like this in your feed. Give us a five star review, only if you feel called to do so. And I always forget to say this, but follow me on Instagram at thatpsychologypodcast. If you want to see some behind the scenes stuff, some like simplified breakdowns of these topics, if you want to be able to chat more with me about these episodes, I'd love to hear from you. Until next time, thanks for tuning in. Stay safe, be kind, be gentle with yourself.

• 27:47Jemma Sbeg?

  We will talk very, very soon.

• 27:54Jemma Sbeg?

  I've been really trying to prioritize my health in a realistic way this year and something that has kept me really motivated is my Whoop. I am such a data person, which is why I love Whoop, because I can genuinely see why my body feels differently depending on the day, why I'm running differently, why I'm maybe less focused. Whoop effortlessly tracks my sleep, it tracks my strain, my recovery, my stress, and most importantly, my overall health. And it just gives me all that data and all those patterns so I can make better decisions, which includes knowing when to go easy and knowing when to go hard. New members can try Whoop with a 30 day free trial before committing to a membership. That's join dot whoop dot com slash psychology for your free month of Whoop.

• 28:38Jemma Sbeg?

  This episode is sponsored by Gymshark. Gymshark has spent over 14 years obsessing over gym clothing and the people who wear it. And let me just say, I think we all know they are very, very good at what they do. No, seriously, their stuff is so good. Their everyday seamless collection is light, it's soft, it's stretchy. All of their stuff just looks good on and it's made for people who love to exercise, whatever exercise that is, lifting, cardio, Pilates, running around campus, maybe just doing errands. Discover Gymshark and find your new favorite gym clothing at gymshark.com.

• 29:16Jemma Sbeg?

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