Love and Romance Questions Essay

Love and Romance Questions

Love and Romance Questions

I’m studying for my Psychology class and don’t understand how to answer this. Can you help me study?

LOVE QUESTIONS
1. How old do you have to be to fall in love? Why?
2. How do you know you are in love?
3. What is the difference between love and infatuation?
4. What does love have to do with sex?
5. Can you be in love with more than one person at a time? Explain.
6. Does true love last forever? Why or why not?
7. Do you believe in fate? (One “right” person for you that you must find)
8. If you are in love, will you be attracted to other people?
9. Does love change over time? How?
10. Can people live satisfying lives without romantic love? Explain.
11. Can people grow to love each other? Explain.
12. Can you love without being loved back? What happens to unrequited love?
13. What is the age limit for love? Why?
14. Which would you rather be, the lover or the beloved? Why?
15. Can you love someone and not want to be with them? Explain.
16. Is love all you need to make a relationship successful? Explain.
17. What ideas about love are there in music? Movies? TV?
18. Go to http://www.5lovelanguages.com/ (Links to an external site.). Take the assessment, The Five Languages of Love. Tell me what you learned about your love language. What does this mean for your current/future relationships? Can you love someone according to your love language?

Romance or romantic love is a feeling of love for, or a strong attraction towards another person, and the courtship behaviors undertaken by an individual to express those overall feelings and resultant emotions.

Love and Romance QuestionsPsychology

Anthropologist Helen Fisher, in her book Why We Love,[51] uses brain scans to show that love is the product of a chemical reaction in the brain. Norepinephrine and dopamine, among other brain chemicals, are responsible for excitement and bliss in humans as well as non-human animals. Fisher uses MRI to study the brain activity of a person “in love” and she concludes that love is a natural drive as powerful as hunger.

In his book What Women Want, What Men Want,[52] anthropologist John Townsend takes the genetic basis of love one step further by identifying how the sexes are different in their predispositions. Townsend’s compilation of various research projects concludes that men are susceptible to youth and beauty, whereas women are susceptible to status and security. These differences are part of a natural selection process where males seek many healthy women of childbearing age to mother offspring, and women seek men who are willing and able to take care of them and their children.

Psychologist Karen Horney in her article “The Problem of the Monogamous Ideal”,[53] indicates that the overestimation of love leads to disillusionment; the desire to possess the partner results in the partner wanting to escape; and the friction against sex result in non-fulfillment. Disillusionment plus the desire to escape plus non-fulfillment result in a secret hostility, which causes the other partner to feel alienated. Secret hostility in one and secret alienation in the other cause the partners to secretly hate each other. This secret hate often leads one or the other or both to seek love objects outside the marriage or relationship.

Love and Romance QuestionsPsychologist Harold Bessell in his book The Love Test,[54] reconciles the opposing forces noted by the above researchers and shows that there are two factors that determine the quality of a relationship. Bessell proposes that people are drawn together by a force he calls “romantic attraction”, which is a combination of genetic and cultural factors. This force may be weak or strong and may be felt to different degrees by each of the two love partners. The other factor is “emotional maturity”, which is the degree to which a person is capable of providing good treatment in a love relationship. It can thus be said that an immature person is more likely to overestimate love, become disillusioned, and have an affair whereas a mature person is more likely to see the relationship in realistic terms and act constructively to work out problems.

Romantic love, in the abstract sense of the term, is traditionally considered to involve a mix of emotional and sexual desire for another as a person. However, Lisa M. Diamond, a University of Utah psychology professor, proposes that sexual desire and romantic love are functionally independent[55] and that romantic love is not intrinsically oriented to same-gender or other-gender partners. She also proposes that the links between love and desire are bidirectional as opposed to unilateral. Furthermore, Diamond does not state that one’s sex has priority over another sex (a male or female) in romantic love because her theory suggests[according to whom?] it is as possible for someone who is homosexual to fall in love with someone of the other gender as for someone who is heterosexual to fall in love with someone of the same gender.[56] In her 2012 review of this topic, Diamond emphasized that what is true for men may not be true for women. According to Diamond, in most men sexual orientation is fixed and most likely innate, but in many women sexual orientation may vary from 0 to 6 on the Kinsey scale and back again.[57]

Love and Romance QuestionsMartie Haselton, a psychologist at UCLA, considers romantic love a “commitment device” or mechanism that encourages two humans to form a lasting bond. She has explored the evolutionary rationale that has shaped modern romantic love and has concluded that long-lasting relationships are helpful to ensure that children reach reproductive age and are fed and cared for by two parents. Haselton and her colleagues have found evidence in their experiments that suggest love’s adaptation. The first part of the experiments consists of having people think about how much they love someone and then suppress thoughts of other attractive people. In the second part of the experiment the same people are asked to think about how much they sexually desire those same partners and then try to suppress thoughts about others. The results showed that love is more efficient in pushing out those rivals than sex.[58]

Research by the University of Pavia[who?] suggests that romantic love lasts for about a year (similar to limerence) before being replaced by a more stable, non-passionate “companionate love.”[59] In companionate love, changes occur from the early stage of love to when the relationship becomes more established and romantic feelings seem to end. However, research from Stony Brook University in New York suggests that some couples keep romantic feelings alive for much longer.[60]

Attachment patterns
Attachment styles that people develop as children can influence the way that they interact with partners in adult relationships, with secure attachment styles being associated with healthier and more trusting relationships than avoidant or anxious attachment styles.[61][62] Hazen and Shaver found that adult romantic attachment styles were similar to the categories of secure, avoidant, and anxious that had previously been studied in children’s attachments to their caregivers, demonstrating that attachment styles are stable across the lifespan.[63] Later on, researchers distinguished between dismissive avoidant attachment and fearful avoidant attachment.[64] Others have found that secure adult attachment, leading to the ability for intimacy and confidence in relationship stability, is characterized by low attachment-related anxiety and avoidance, while the fearful style is high on both dimensions, the dismissing style is low on anxiety and high on avoidance, and the preoccupied style is high on anxiety and low on avoidance.[65]

Love and Romance QuestionsRomantic love definition/operationalization
Singer (1984a,[66] 1984b,[67] 1987[68]) first defined love based on four Greek terms: eros, meaning the search for beauty; philia, the feelings of affection in close friendships, nomos, the submission of and obedience to higher or divine powers, and agape, the bestowal of love and affection for the divine powers. While Singer did believe that love was important to world culture, he did not believe that romantic love played a major role (Singer, 1987[68]). However, Susan Hendrick and Clyde Hendrick at Texas Tech University (1992,[69] 2009[70]) have theorized that romantic love will play an increasingly important cultural role in the future, as it is considered an important part of living a fulfilling life. They also theorized that love in long-term romantic relationships has only been the product of cultural forces that came to fruition within the past 300 years. By cultural forces, they mean the increasing prevalence of individualistic ideologies, which are the result of an inward shift of many cultural worldviews.

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Love and Romance QuestionsPassionate and companionate love
Researchers have determined that romantic love is a complex emotion that can be divided into either passionate or companionate forms.[71] Berscheid and Walster (1978[72]) and Hatfield (1988[73]) found that these two forms can co-exist, either simultaneously or intermittently. Passionate love is an arousal-driven emotion that often gives people extreme feelings of happiness, and can also give people feelings of anguish.[citation needed] Companionate love is a form that creates a steadfast bond between two people, and gives people feelings of peace. Researchers have described the stage of passionate love as “being on cocaine”, since during that stage the brain releases the same neurotransmitter, dopamine, as when cocaine is being used.[74] It is also estimated that passionate love (as with limerence) lasts for about twelve to eighteen months.[75]

Robert Firestone, a psychologist, has a theory of the fantasy bond, which is what is mostly created after the passionate love has faded. A couple may start to feel really comfortable with each other to the point that they see each other as simply companions or protectors, but yet think that they are still in love with each other.[76] The results to the fantasy bond is the leading to companionate love. Hendrick and Hendrick (1995) studied college students who were in the early stages of a relationship and found that almost half reported that their significant other was their closest friend, providing evidence that both passionate and companionate love exist in new relationships.[77] Conversely, in a study of long-term marriages, Contreras, Hendrick, and Hendrick (1996) found that couples endorsed measures of both companionate love and passionate love and that passionate love was the strongest predictor of marital satisfaction, showing that both types of love can endure throughout the years.[78]

Love and Romance QuestionsThe triangular theory of love
Psychologist Robert Sternberg (1986[79]) developed the triangular theory of love. He theorized that love is a combination of three main components: passion (physical arousal); intimacy (psychological feelings of closeness); and commitment (the sustaining of a relationship). He also theorized that the different combinations of these three components could yield up to seven different forms of love. These include popularized forms such as romantic love (intimacy and passion) and consummate love (passion, intimacy, and commitment). The other forms are liking (intimacy), companionate love (intimacy and commitment), empty love (commitment), fatuous love (passion and commitment), and infatuation (passion). Studies on Sternberg’s theory love found that intimacy most strongly predicted marital satisfaction in married couples, with passion also being an important predictor (Silberman, 1995[80]). On the other hand, Acker and Davis (1992[81]) found that commitment was the strongest predictor of relationship satisfaction, especially for long-term relationships.

The self-expansion theory of romantic love
Researchers Arthur and Elaine Aron (1986) theorized that humans have a basic drive to expand their self-concepts. Further, their experience with Eastern concepts of love caused them to believe that positive emotions, cognitions, and relationships in romantic behaviors all drive the expansion of a person’s self-concept.[82] A study following college students for 10 weeks showed that those students who fell in love over the course of the investigation reported higher feelings of self-esteem and self efficacy than those who did not (Aron, Paris, and Aron, 1995[83]).

Mindful relationships
Gottman studies the components of a flourishing romantic relationship have been studied in the lab (1994;[84] Gottman & Silver, 1999[85]). He used physiological and behavioral measures during couples’ interactions to predict relationship success and found that five positive interactions to one negative interaction are needed to maintain a healthy relationship. He established a therapy intervention for couples that focused on civil forms of disapproval, a culture of appreciation, acceptance of responsibility for problems, and self-soothing (Gottman, Driver, & Tabares, 2002[86]).

Love and Romance QuestionsRelationship behaviors
Recent research suggests that romantic relationships impact daily behaviors and people are influenced by the eating habits of their romantic partners. Specifically, in the early stages of romantic relationships, women are more likely to be influenced by the eating patterns (i.e., healthiness/unhealthiness) of men. However, when romantic relationships are established, men are influenced by the eating patterns of women (Hasford, Kidwell, & Lopez-Kidwell[87]).

Relationship maintenance
Daniel Canary from the International Encyclopedia of Marriage[88] describes relationship maintenance as “At the most basic level, relational maintenance refers to a variety of behaviors used by partners in an effort to stay together.” Maintaining stability and quality in a relationship is the key to success in a romantic relationship. He says that: “simply staying together is not sufficient; instead, the quality of the relationship is important. For researchers, this means examining behaviors that are linked to relational satisfaction and other indicators of quality.” Canary suggests using the work of John Gottman, an American physiologist best known for his research on marital stability for over four decades, serves as a guide for predicting outcomes in relationships because “Gottman emphasizes behaviors that determine whether or not a couple gets divorced”.[89]

Furthermore, Canary also uses the source from Stafford and Canary (1991),[90] a journal on Communication Monographs, because they created five great strategies based on maintaining quality in a relationship, the article’s strategies are to provide:

Love and Romance QuestionsPositivity: being joyful and optimistic, not criticizing each other.
Assurances: proving one’s commitment and love.
Openness: to be honest with one another according to what they want in the relationship.
Social networks: efforts into involving friends and family in their activities.
Sharing tasks: complementing each other’s needs based on daily work.
On relational maintenance, Steven McCornack and Joseph Ortiz, the authors of the book “Choices & Connection” states that relationship maintenance “refers to the use of communication behaviors to keep a relationship strong and to ensure that each party continues to draw satisfaction from the relationship”.[91]

Love and Romance Questions Essay

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