How Can Love Be Explained?

Although there are many different explanations of love within psychology, the two theories of love I will explore in this essay will be Hendrick and Hendrick's theory of love (1986) and Sternberg's triangular theory of love.

Hendrick and Hendrick's theory of love contains six different styles which explain how love develops and forms. The six styles are logical style (love is treated as a practical logical decision making process), game playing (this is when love is treated as if it were a game or some kind of competition), the altruistic style (sacrifices are made i.e. putting the other persons happiness first, the erotic style (when partners both desire hedonism and sexual pleasure) and finally the companionate style (when partners share loving affection and friendship with develops over time).

Hogg and Vaughan used Sternberg's theory as they used it to explain different types of love, therefore expanding his theory and ideas', meaning the reliability of the theory is increased. We can also apply this theory to all different kinds of relationships such as elderly, young and homosexual, as all of these relationships will involve commitment, intimacy and passion. Therefore we can generalise this explanation to the majority of relationships as it relates to factors that are not affected by age or gender. However, despite this, the theory does not explain how love is developed. The theory identifies a particular type of love but neglects to explain how this developed in the first place. Nevertheless, Sternberg attempted to combat this by extending his theory to take into account the interpretations that people develop into what they believe love is. Also a perfect balance of love is substantially difficult to achieve. Sternburg believed that the type and strength of these three individual components. The ideal balance situation would exist when each side of the love triangle was experienced with sufficient intensity. However, such perfect balance is difficult to achieve as either one of the points are missing or lack the strength of others.

Sternburg's theory consists of three different factors of love, commitment, intimacy and passion. Commitment is the desire to maintain love. Intimacy is the closeness and bond between two partners and passion is physical attractiveness. Sternberg states that if you combine all of these factors then you can form 7 different types of love and this is where the importance of the theory lies i.e. the differences between long term and short term relationships. In long term relationships Sternberg found that intimacy is the most important and that passion is least important, it is different in short term relationships however as passion takes priority and commitment is unimportant.

Hendrick and Hendrick's study focuses upon real couples in data collection; this gives us accounts of love in reality as all of the participants give examples of real life love. Therefore this study has high ecological validity as it is inartificial and thus can be applied to real life situations. The research has lots of face validity as it can be applied to different types of relationships (for example, homosexuals, lesbians, young and the elderly). This is because the theories six styles do not consider gender and age therefore meaning the ecological validity of the study is increased. However, Hendrick and Hendrick support their own study, it is highly likely that Hendrick and Hendrick would support their own study, obviously because they are the ones that created it. Therefore, this means the research could be biased and thus reducing its reliability by a considerable amount. Also, it does not account for changes in a relationship overtime, people can become