There is indeed a triangular theory on love. Sternberg, posited that love, is formed, in all instances on the emotions of passion, liking and commitment. All when combined you have what we all seek, consummate love.
For me, I approach love from two perspectives. First the biology. How does it happen, what is it's purpose, it's biochemistry, it's role in adaptation. And secondly, it's role in well being and ultimately the meaning and purpose of life. Is the need and search for love an innate biological process? Or is it something more?
Well despite many pseudo psychologists quoting examples of the love hormone oxytocin, there is in fact no single hormone or process that can account for, deliver, or be responsible for the many facets of what we know as love. Indeed that very hormone can make us feel the best of human emotions, and the worst. It can indeed promote what we consider negative feelings such as jealousy. There is a difference between love and infatuation, between losing oneself and control and being calculated and controlling (in love and in life).
Indeed many of us may have been on the receiving end of a type of love, ludus. The architect of ludus sees love as a game, a test of feelings and attraction. It is interesting to note the type of personality, perhaps a disorder here. This type of person sees it as a game. It is emotional manipulation. Having more than one partner or picking fights for reaction purposes. Often associated with childhood experiences of loss and abandonment by maternal or paternal figures, a pattern is set that becomes normal for the protagonist, but bizarre by any other measure.
For many, beyond the physical allure, the chemical overload, is the matching of values and reciprocity of affection. It's a complex cocktail that no mixologist has yet mastered and that's what makes it so surprisingly intoxicating when we come across it.
In those circumstances, self awareness, self disclosure, transparency, are all critical ingredients to stability of love, of the initial attraction. And sustainability is not the gifts that we liked, the expensive dinners, but it is the relinquishment of a degree of control that can only come when one is accepting of themselves. That's what makes love so hard to find. Know thyself is not something we've all yet mastered.
There are many theories on love. Many friends with advice. But in the end it comes down to whether in a partnership each person has the ability and the tools to reveal the magnificence of the ideal person they are with, and whether or not that person is ready to be revealed.
It is the Michelangelo phenomenon, where that statue, that magnificence is waiting to be released from the block of stone in which it sits. The sculpture is always there, but it takes a partner with the right skill to reveal it. And the stone needs to yield in the right way.
Love is the answer. The beauty and magnificence to find it is within all of us.
