From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
General definitions
Romantic love is a
relative term that distinguishes moments and situations within
intimate relationships as contributing to a deepened relational connection.
- The addition of "drama" to relationships of close, deep and strong love.
- Anthropologist Charles Lindholm
defined love as "an intense attraction that involves the idealization
of the other, within an erotic context, with expectation of enduring
sometime into the future".
Historical usage
The word "romance" comes from the French
vernacular where initially it indicated a
verse narrative. The word was originally an adverb of Latin origin, "romanicus," meaning "of the
Roman style". European medieval vernacular tales,
epics, and
ballads generally dealt with
chivalric adventure, not bringing in the concept of
love until late into the seventeenth century.
The word romance developed other meanings, such as the
early nineteenth century Spanish and Italian definitions of
"adventurous" and "passionate," which could intimate both "love affair"
and "idealistic quality."
Anthropologists such as
Claude Lévi-Strauss
show that there were complex forms of courtship in ancient as well as
contemporary primitive societies. There may not be evidence, however,
that members of such societies formed loving relationships distinct from
their established customs in a way that would parallel modern romance.
Before the 18th century, many marriages were not arranged, but rather developed out of more or less spontaneous relationships.
After the 18th century, illicit relationships took on a more
independent role. In bourgeois marriage, illicitness may have become
more formidable and likely to cause tension. In
Ladies of the Leisure Class,
Rutgers University
professor Bonnie G. Smith depicts courtship and marriage rituals that
may be viewed as oppressive to modern people. She writes "When the young
women of the Nord
married, they did so without illusions of love and romance. They acted
within a framework of concern for the reproduction of bloodlines
according to financial, professional, and sometimes political
interests." Subsequent
sexual revolution has lessened the conflicts arising out of liberalism, but not eliminated them.
Anthony Giddens, in
The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Society, states that romantic love introduced the idea of a
narrative to an individual's life, and telling a story is a root meaning of the term
romance. According to Giddens, the rise of romantic love more or less coincided with the emergence of the
novel. It was then that romantic love, associated with
freedom and therefore the ideals of romantic love, created the ties between freedom and
self-realization.
David R. Shumway states that "the discourse of intimacy" emerged
in the last third of the 20th century, intended to explain how marriage
and other relationships worked, and making the specific case that
emotional closeness is much more important than
passion, with intimacy and romance coexisting.
One example of the changes experienced in relationships in the early 21st century was explored by Giddens regarding
homosexual
relationships. According to Giddens, since homosexuals were not able to
marry they were forced to pioneer more open and negotiated
relationships. These kinds of relationships then permeated the
heterosexual population.
Popularization of love
The conception of romantic love was popularized in
Western culture by the concept of
courtly love.
Chevaliers, or knights in the
Middle Ages,
engaged in what were usually non-physical and non-marital relationships
with women of nobility whom they served. These relations were highly
elaborate and ritualized in a complexity that was steeped in a framework
of tradition, which stemmed from theories of etiquette derived out of
chivalry as a moral code of conduct.
Courtly love and the notion of
domnei were often the subjects of
troubadours, and could be typically found in artistic endeavors such as lyrical narratives and poetic prose of the time. Since
marriage was commonly nothing more than a formal arrangement,
courtly love sometimes permitted expressions of emotional closeness
that may have been lacking from the union between husband and wife. In terms of courtly love, "lovers" did not necessarily refer to those engaging in
sexual acts, but rather, to the act of caring and to emotional intimacy.
The bond between a knight and his
Lady, or the woman of typically high stature of whom he served, may have escalated psychologically but seldom ever physically. For
knighthood
during the Middle Ages, the intrinsic importance of a code of conduct
was in large part as a value system of rules codified as a guide to aid a
knight in his capacity as champion of the downtrodden, but especially
in his service to the Lord.
In the context of dutiful service to a woman of high social
standing, ethics designated as a code were effectively established as an
institution to provide a firm moral foundation by which to combat the
idea that unfit attentions and affections were to ever be tolerated as
"a secret game of trysts" behind closed doors. Therefore, a knight
trained in the substance of "chivalry" was instructed, with especial
emphasis, to serve a lady most honorably, with purity of heart and mind.
To that end, he committed himself to the welfare of both Lord and Lady
with unwavering discipline and devotion, while at the same time,
presuming to uphold core principles set forth in the code by the
religion by which he followed.
Religious meditations upon the
Virgin Mary
were partially responsible for the development of chivalry as an ethic
and lifestyle: the concept of the honor of a lady and knightly devotion
to her, coupled with an obligatory respect for all women, factored
prominently as central to the very identity of medieval knighthood. As
knights were increasingly emulated, eventual changes were reflected in
the inner-workings of
feudal society. Members of the
aristocracy were schooled in the principles of chivalry, which facilitated important changes in attitudes regarding the value of women.
Behaviorally, a knight was to regard himself towards a lady with a
transcendence of premeditated thought—his virtue ingrained within his
character. A
chevalier
was to conduct himself always graciously, bestowing upon her the utmost
courtesy and attentiveness. He was to echo shades of this to all women,
regardless of class, age, or status. Over time, the concept of chivalry and the notion of the courtly
gentleman
became synonymous with the ideal of how love and romance should exist
between the sexes. Through the timeless popularization in art and
literature of tales of knights and princesses, kings and queens, a
formative and long standing (sub)consciousness helped to shape
relationships between men and women.
De amore or
The Art of Courtly Love,
as it is known in English, was written in the 12th century. The text is
widely misread as permissive of extramarital affairs. However, it is
useful to differentiate the physical from without: romantic love as
separate and apart from
courtly love
when interpreting such topics as: "Marriage is no real excuse for not
loving", "He who is not jealous cannot love", "No one can be bound by a
double love", and "When made public love rarely endures".
Some believe that romantic love evolved independently in multiple
cultures. For example, in an article presented by Henry Grunebaum, he
argues "
therapists mistakenly believe that romantic love is a
phenomenon unique to Western cultures and first expressed by the troubadours of the Middle Ages."
The more current and Western traditional terminology meaning
"court as lover" or the general idea of "romantic love" is believed to
have originated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
primarily from that of the French culture. This idea is what has spurred
the connection between the words "romantic" and "lover", thus
coining
English phrases for romantic love such as "loving like the Romans do".
The precise origins of such a connection are unknown, however. Although
the word "romance" or the equivalents thereof may not have the same
connotation in other cultures, the general idea of "romantic love"
appears to have crossed cultures and been accepted as a concept at one
point in time or another.
Types
Romantic love is contrasted with
platonic love, which in all usages, precludes sexual relations, yet only in the modern usage does it take on a fully
nonsexual sense, rather than the classical sense, in which sexual drives are sublimated.
Sublimation tends to be forgotten in casual thought about love aside from its emergence in psychoanalysis and Nietzsche.
Unrequited love
can be romantic in different ways: comic, tragic, or in the sense that
sublimation itself is comparable to romance, where the spirituality of
both art and
egalitarian ideals is combined with strong character and emotions. Unrequited love is typical of the period of
romanticism, but the term is distinct from any romance that might arise within it.
Romantic love may also be classified according to two categories, "popular romance" and "divine or spiritual" romance:
- Popular romance
- may include but is not limited to the following types: idealistic, normal intense (such as the emotional aspect of "falling in love"),
predictable as well as unpredictable, consuming (meaning consuming of
time, energy and emotional withdrawals and bids), intense but out of
control (such as the aspect of "falling out of love") material and
commercial (such as societal gain mentioned in a later section of this
article), physical and sexual, and finally grand and demonstrative.
- Divine (or spiritual) romance
- may include, but is not limited to these following types: realistic,
as well as plausible unrealistic, optimistic as well as pessimistic
(depending upon the particular beliefs held by each person within the
relationship.), abiding (e.g. the theory that each person had a
predetermined stance as an agent of choice; such as "choosing a husband"
or "choosing a soul mate."), non-abiding (e.g. the theory that we do
not choose our actions, and therefore our romantic love involvement has
been drawn from sources outside of ourselves), predictable as well as
unpredictable, self-control (such as obedience and sacrifice within the
context of the relationship) or lack thereof (such as disobedience
within the context of the relationship), emotional and personal, soulful
(in the theory that the mind, soul, and body, are one connected
entity), intimate, and infinite (such as the idea that love itself or
the love of a god or God's "unconditional" love is or could be everlasting)
In philosophy
Plato
Roman copy of a Greek sculpture by Lysippus depicting Eros, the Greek personification of romantic love
Greek philosophers and authors have had many theories of love. Some of these theories are presented in
Plato's
Symposium. Six Athenian friends, including Socrates, drink wine and each give a speech praising the
deity Eros. When his turn comes,
Aristophanes says in his
mythical
speech that sexual partners seek each other because they are descended
from beings with spherical torsos, two sets of human limbs, genitalia on
each side, and two faces back to back. Their three forms included the
three permutations of pairs of gender (i.e. one masculine and masculine,
another feminine and feminine, and the third masculine and feminine)
and they were split by the gods to thwart the creatures' assault on
heaven, recapitulated, according to the comic playwright, in other myths
such as the
Aloadae.
This story is relevant to modern romance partly because of the
image of reciprocity it shows between the sexes. In the final speech
before
Alcibiades arrives,
Socrates gives his encomium of love and desire as a lack of being, namely, the being or form of
beauty.
René Girard
Though there are many theories of romantic love—such as that of
Robert Sternberg, in which it is merely a mean combining liking and
sexual desire—the
major theories involve far more insight. For most of the 20th century,
Freud's theory of the family drama dominated theories of romance and
sexual relationships. This gave rise to a few counter-theories.
Theorists like Deleuze counter Freud and
Jacques Lacan by attempting to return to a more naturalistic philosophy.
René Girard argues that romantic attraction is a product of
jealousy and rivalry—particularly in a
triangular form.
Girard, in any case, downplays romance's individuality in favor of
jealousy and the
love triangle,
arguing that romantic attraction arises primarily in the observed
attraction between two others. A natural objection is that this is
circular reasoning, but Girard means that a small measure of attraction reaches a critical point insofar as it is caught up in
mimesis. Shakespeare's
A Midsummer Night's Dream,
As You Like It, and
The Winter's Tale are the best known examples of competitive-induced romance.
Girard's theory of mimetic desire is controversial because of its alleged
sexism.
This view has to some extent supplanted its predecessor, Freudian
Oedipal theory. It may find some spurious support in the supposed
attraction of women to aggressive men. As a technique of attraction,
often combined with irony, it is sometimes advised that one feign
toughness and disinterest, but it can be a trivial or crude idea to
promulgate to men, and it is not given with much understanding of
mimetic desire in mind. Instead, cultivating a spirit of self-sacrifice,
coupled with an attitude of appreciation or contemplation, directed
towards the other of one's attractions, constitutes the ideals of what
we consider to be true romantic love. Mimesis is always the desire to
possess, in renouncing it we offer ourselves as a sacrificial gift to
the other.
Mimetic desire is often challenged by
feminists, such as
Toril Moi, who argue that it does not account for the woman as inherently desired.
Though the centrality of rivalry is not itself a cynical view, it
does emphasize the mechanical in love relations. In that sense, it does
resonate with
capitalism and
cynicism
native to post-modernity. Romance in this context leans more on fashion
and irony, though these were important for it in less emancipated
times.
Sexual revolutions
have brought change to these areas. Wit or irony therefore encompass an
instability of romance that is not entirely new but has a more central
social role, fine-tuned to certain modern peculiarities and subversion
originating in various social revolutions, culminating mostly in the
1960s.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The process of courtship also contributed to
Arthur Schopenhauer's pessimism, despite his own romantic success,
and he argued that to be rid of the challenge of courtship would drive
people to suicide with boredom. Schopenhauer theorized that individuals
seek partners who share certain interests and tastes, while at the same
time looking for a "complement" or completing of themselves in a
partner, as in the
cliché
that "opposites attract", but with the added consideration that both
partners manifest this attraction for the sake of the species:
But what ultimately draws two individuals of different
sex exclusively to each other with such power is the will-to-live which
manifests itself in the whole species, and here anticipates, in the
individual that these two can produce, an objectification of its true
nature corresponding to its aims.
—World as Will and Representation, Volume 2, Chapter XLIV
Other philosophers
Later modern philosophers such as
La Rochefoucauld,
David Hume and
Jean-Jacques Rousseau also focused on
morality,
but desire was central to French thought and Hume himself tended to
adopt a French worldview and temperament. Desire in this milieu meant a
very general idea termed "the passions", and this general interest was
distinct from the contemporary idea of "passionate" now equated with
"romantic". Love was a central topic again in the subsequent movement of
Romanticism, which focused on such things as absorption in nature and the
absolute, as well as
platonic and unrequited love in German philosophy and literature.
In literature
Shakespeare and
Søren Kierkegaard share a similar viewpoint that marriage and romance are not harmoniously
in tune with each other. In Shakespeare's
Measure for Measure,
for example, "...there has not been, nor is there at this point, any
display of affection between Isabella and the Duke, if by affection we
mean something concerned with sexual attraction. The two at the end of
the play love each other as they love virtue." In
Romeo and Juliet, in saying "all combined, save what thou must combine By holy marriage",
Romeo implies that it is not marriage with Juliet that he seeks but simply to be joined with her romantically.
In the first place, I find it
comical that all men are in love and want to be in love, and yet one
never can get any illumination upon the question what the lovable, i.e.,
the proper object of love, really is.
— Stages, p. 48
- Do not flirt with someone unless you might mean it.
- Do not pursue people who you are not interested in, or who are not interested in you.
- In general, express your affection or uncertainty clearly, unless there is a special reason not to.
Tragedy and other social issues
The "tragic" contradiction between romance and society is most forcibly portrayed in literature, in Tolstoy's
Anna Karenina, in Flaubert's
Madame Bovary, and
William Shakespeare's
Romeo and Juliet.
The female protagonists in such stories are driven to suicide as if
dying for a cause of freedom from various oppressions of marriage.
Even after sexual revolutions, on the other hand, to the extent
that it does not lead to procreation (or child-rearing, as it also might
exist in
same-sex marriage), romance remains peripheral though it may have virtues in the relief of
stress,
as a source of inspiration or adventure, or in development and the
strengthening of certain social relations. It is difficult to imagine
the tragic heroines, however, as having such practical considerations in
mind.
Romance can also be tragic in its conflict with society. The
Tolstoy family focuses on the romantic limitations of marriage, and
Anna Karenina
prefers death to being married to her fiancé, however this is because
she is tired of waiting and being hidden away from public, when her
fiance makes failed attempts to get his mother's approval of the
marriage. Even being aristocrats did not make them both free, as the
society was nevertheless equally binding for all. Furthermore, in the
speech about marriage that is given in Kierkegaard's
Either/Or,
Kierkegaard attempts to show that it is because marriage is lacking in
passion fundamentally, that the nature of marriage, unlike romance, is
explainable by a man who has experience of neither marriage nor love.
Reciprocity of the sexes appears in the ancient world primarily in myth where it is in fact often the subject of tragedy, for example in the myths of
Theseus and
Atalanta. Noteworthy female freedom or power was an exception rather than the rule, though this is a matter of speculation and debate.
Psychology
Many theorists attempt to analyze the process of romantic love.
Anthropologist
Helen Fisher, in her book
Why We Love, 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. She is famous for the use of MRI to study the brain activity of a person "in love", discovering the importance of the
ventral tegmental area and the
caudate nucleus
in this biological drive. Fisher concludes that these reactions have a
genetic basis, and therefore love is a natural drive as powerful as
hunger.
In his book What Women Want, What Men Want,
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",
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.
Psychologist Harold Bessell in his book The Love Test,
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
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 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.
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.
Martie 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.
Research by the University of Pavia suggests that romantic love lasts for about a year (similar to
limerence) before being replaced by a more stable, non-passionate "
companionate love."
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.
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.
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. Later on, researchers distinguished between dismissive avoidant attachment and fearful avoidant attachment.
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.
Romantic love definition/operationalization
Singer (1984a, 1984b, 1987) 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). However, Susan Hendrick and Clyde Hendrick at Texas Tech University (1992, 2009)
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.
Passionate and companionate love
Researchers
have determined that romantic love is a complex emotion that can be
divided into either passionate or companionate forms. Berscheid and Walster (1978) and Hatfield (1988)
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.
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. It is also estimated that passionate love (as with
limerence) lasts for about twelve to eighteen months.
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. 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. Conversely, in a study of
long-term marriages, researchers (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.
The triangular theory of love
Psychologist Robert Sternberg (1986) 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). On the other hand, Acker and Davis (1992) 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. 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).
Mindful relationships
Gottman studies the components of a flourishing romantic relationship have been studied in the lab (1994; Gottman & Silver, 1999).
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).
Relationship 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).
Physiology
Researchers
such as Feeney and Noller question the stability of attachment style
across the life span since studies that measured attachment styles at
time points ranging from 2 weeks to 8 months found that 1 out of 4
adults' attachment style changed.
Furthermore, a study by Lopez and Gormley found that attachment styles
could change during the first year of college and that changes to more
secure attachment styles were associated with adjustments in
self-confidence ratings and coping styles. On the other hand, attachment styles in childhood mirror the ones found in adult romantic relationships.
In addition, research has shown that building interpersonal connections
strengthens neural regulatory systems that are involved in emotions of
empathy, enjoyment of positive social events, and stress management, providing evidence that early social interactions affect adult relationships.
Another topic of controversy in the field of romantic relationships is that of
domestic abuse.
Following the theory that romantic love evolved as a byproduct of
survival, it can be said that in some instances, it has turned into a
maladaptation.
Oxytocin
is a neurophysical hormone produced in the brain. It is known to cause a
decrease in stress response. It also can cause an increase in feelings
of
attachment.
In the beginning stages of a romantic relationship, OT levels surge and
then remain relatively stable over the duration of the relationship.
The higher the surge of OT, the greater the likelihood is of partners
staying together. It plays an important role in increasing positive interpersonal behaviors such as trust, altruism, empathy, etc.
This response is not universal and can in fact, cause the opposite to
occur depending on environment and individual. Individuals ranked high
in
rejection sensitivity
exhibited aggressive tendencies and decreased willingness for
cooperation, indicating a link between oxytocin and relationship
maintenance.
The feelings associated with romantic love function to ensure the
greater reproductive fitness of individuals. The obligations of
individuals in romantic relationships to preserve these bonds are based
in
kin selection theory, where by exhibiting aggressive behavior, a mate can use intimidation and
dominance
to ward off other potential predators, thus protecting the pair bond
and their actual or potential offspring. This has however evolved to the
point where it has become detrimental to the fitness of individuals;
what is causing attachment to occur in a relationship, is now causing
one partner to harm the other.
In the search for the root of intimate partner violence,
intranasal oxytocin was administered to a control group and a group of
participants with aggressive tendencies. Participants were then surveyed
on how willing they were to engage in 5 behaviors towards their
romantic partner. What they found was that oxytocin increased IPV
inclinations only among the participants with a predisposition towards
aggressive tendencies.
Oxytocin decreases trust and prosocial behavior in individuals with
interpersonal difficulties. This, coupled with its role in relationship
maintenance, illustrates that oxytocin serves to instill a sense of
territoriality and protectiveness towards a mate.
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