12.3 — The Forms of Love, and Which One Lasts

English has one word doing an enormous amount of work. Greek had several, and the distinctions are useful.

Eros — desire, the pull towards. Philia — friendship, affection between equals. Storge — familial affection, the love of long familiarity. Agape — care for someone regardless of what you get back. Ludus — playful, light, the enjoyment of the game. Pragma — the practical, worked-at love of a long partnership.

A durable relationship usually contains several of these, and the mix changes across decades. Trouble frequently comes from expecting one form to persist at the intensity of another.

The three-component model

Robert Sternberg's version is the most-used framework and it is a useful map, if not a precise instrument.

Intimacy — closeness, being known, comfort. Passion — desire and intensity. Commitment — the decision to stay and to build.

Combinations produce recognisable states.

Intimacy alone is friendship. Passion alone is infatuation. Commitment alone is an empty relationship held together by decision. Intimacy plus passion is romance without a future being built. Intimacy plus commitment is companionate love — common in long marriages, and frequently described as the passion having gone, which it partly has. Passion plus commitment without intimacy is a relationship built fast on intensity, and it is fragile. All three is what people mean by a good relationship, and it requires maintenance in all three, not one.

The practical use of the model is diagnostic. When something is wrong, ask which of the three is depleted. The three have different remedies, and treating a commitment problem with romantic gestures, or an intimacy problem with a holiday, is why so much effort produces nothing.

What lasts

Two clear findings.

Passion declines and does not have to disappear. Studies of long-married couples find a minority reporting continued intense love, and their profile is distinctive: high shared activity, continued novelty, physical affection maintained, and — importantly — the intensity is present without the obsessive, anxious component of the early phase (12.2).

And commitment is a decision that has to be made repeatedly, not once. The people in long relationships describe choosing it again in bad periods rather than never having doubts.

The uncomfortable half

Two things this material usually leaves out.

Love is not sufficient. Two people can genuinely love each other and be unable to live together — incompatible values, incompatible lives, or one of them causing harm. The presence of love is not an argument for staying, and treating it as one keeps people in relationships they should leave (12.10, 13.8).

And love is not the same as being good for each other. The intensity of feeling and the quality of the relationship are separate variables, and the most intense relationships people report are frequently not the healthiest ones — because intensity is fed by uncertainty (12.2).

What to do

Diagnose which component is low before trying to fix anything. Intimacy, passion, or commitment.

For intimacy: time talking about something other than logistics, and asking questions you do not know the answer to (10.11).

For passion: shared novel activity, physical affection independent of sex, and time apart — all three have support, and the third is the one nobody expects.

For commitment: say it out loud. Explicit statements of intent to stay have more effect than people assume, particularly in a bad period.

And check the question this page opened with: which form am I expecting, and is that the form this relationship is currently in? A great deal of disappointment is a mismatch between the expected form and the actual one, and naming it converts a vague dissatisfaction into a specific thing to work on.

Next: 12.4 is the practical core of this Part — the full menu of ways affection is actually expressed, and why so much genuine love never arrives.