What is love? Everybody has his/her own understanding and definition of love. In order to better understand all the complexity of such a phenomenon, it is worth analyzing specific scenarios. Therefore, this paper concentrates on one of such scenarios, which, in fact, is one from my personal experience. I had been in a long-distance relationship that had lasted a little over a year. We had been in love. It was his smile that gave me the warmth that the child spoke of. In the beginning, everything was great. We had plans. He even planned to move here with his teenage son, but after 4 months his son changed his mind and didn’t want to move. After his son’s decision, his visits seemed different, less frequent. The phone calls became less and less, …show more content…
I was unable to move where he lived, and although he had initially wanted to move near me, his son was his priority and he didn’t want to cause turmoil in his relationship with him by forcing a move here. So, we decided to end it once and for all. Keeping in mind the information given in the readings for this course, it seems possible to explain the above-presented situation. According to research, companionate love is harder to find or keep than passionate love. Ironically enough, passionate love may be the most effective way of starting a companionate one. A companionate love is what makes it a stable, lasting relationship and trustworthy. As Baumeister and Bushman (2017) explain, “companionate love (sometimes called affectionate love) is a less strongly emotional; it tends to be calmer and more serene” (p. 406). On the contrary, passionate love is a vividly more emotional form of love. “Passionate love (also called romantic love) makes people want to spend as much time as =====================3/8====================== FALLING IN AND OUT OF LOVE 3 possible together, to touch each other and engage in other physical intimacies (often including sex), to think about each other and feel joy merely upon seeing each other, and …show more content…
Based on Sternberg’s triangle, the nature of love is composed of three different ingredients. At this very point, one should consider the necessity of analyzing the Sternberg’s triangle. It may be explained by the presumption that correct apprehension of this model can help to better understand the nature of love. In fact, it is an alternative approach to the abovementioned proposal to differentiate two kinds of love (Baumeister & Bushman, 2017, p. 408). So, Sternberg’s triangle includes three ingredients of love – intimacy, passion, and commitment. The first one is intimacy. This kind of love is where you are attracted to someone’s fondness with you. This refers to the close, connected, and bonded feeling that comes naturally in loving relationships. This includes within its purview those feelings that give rise, essentially, to the experience of warmth in a loving relationship.[0] [2] ... It’s like the first stage of love where a person is attracted to someone’s perfection and even flaws. Everybody who I asked about love started with intimacy, how they met and became friends first before being