Three Ingredients and Eight Recipes

Robert Sternberg's triangular theory, published in 1986, says that love is composed of three components, and that what people call different kinds of love are different combinations of them.

Intimacy is closeness, connection, the sense of being bonded. Passion is drive: attraction, arousal, the physical and emotional intensity. Commitment is the decision to love and to maintain the relationship over time.

Three components, present or absent, produce eight combinations, and Sternberg names them all. Passion alone is infatuation. Intimacy alone is liking or friendship. Commitment alone is empty love. Intimacy with passion is romantic love. Intimacy with commitment is companionate love. Passion with commitment, without intimacy, is fatuous love, the whirlwind marriage between people who do not know each other. All three together is consummate love.

The eight names are the part that gets reproduced and the least valuable part of the theory.

The valuable part is what Sternberg says about time. The three components do not move together. Passion rises quickly, peaks early, and then declines or levels off. Intimacy builds more slowly. Commitment is slowest of all to arrive and, once established, can remain stable indefinitely.

That single observation does an enormous amount of practical work, because it reframes the most common crisis in long relationships. Somewhere around the second year, passion falls from where it was. If you believe love is one thing, this reads as love diminishing, and the conclusion is that something has gone wrong or that the relationship was a mistake. If love has three components moving on separate schedules, the same observation is a normal trajectory with two other components still developing.

The theory's genuine innovation, and the reason it has lasted, is treating commitment as a decision rather than a feeling.

Once commitment is a separate component, it becomes possible to say that somebody can choose to stay while feeling less than they did, and for that to be a real state with a name instead of a failure or a deception. English previously had no respectable way to say it. People experienced it constantly and described it as either love or the absence of love, neither of which was accurate.

The weakness is equally clear and should not be glossed. The theory describes states and says very little about transitions. It tells you what companionate love is and almost nothing about what moves a couple from romantic love to it, or whether anything moves them back. Naming is not explaining, and this is a naming theory that has been asked to carry more than it can.

Set it against the first book of this course and the family resemblance is unmistakable. The Greeks separated eros from philia. Sternberg separates passion from intimacy and adds a third element the Greeks did not isolate, which is the decision.

Splitting is what progress looks like in this subject. It looked like that in Athens and it looks like that in a psychology journal, twenty-three centuries apart.