Personality traits, at least one personality trait, is strongly correlated to love style, the Hendricks have discovered. People with high self-esteem are more apt to endorse eros, but less likely to endorse mania than other groups. "This finding fits with the image of a secure, confident eros lover who moves intensly but with mutuality into a new relationship," they maintain.
When they turned their attention to ongoing relationships, the Hendricks' found that couples who stayed together over the course of their months-long study were more passionate and less game-playing than couples who broke up. "A substantial amount of passionate love" and "a low dose of game-playing" love are key to the development of satisfying realtionships - at least among the college kids studied.
YOUR MOTHER MADE YOU DO IT
The love style you embrace, how you treat your partner, may reflect the very first human relationship you ever had-probably with Mom. There is growing evidence supporting "attachment theory," which holds that the rhythms of response by a child's primary caregiver affect the development of personality and influence later attachment processes, including adult love relationships.
First put forth by British psychiatrist John Bowlby in the 1960s and elaborated by American psychologist Mary Ainsworth, attachment theory is the culmination of years of painstaking observation of infants and their adult caregivers - and those separated from them - in both natural and experimental situations. Essentially it suggests that there are three major patterns of attachment; they develop within the first year of life and stick with us, all the while reflecting the responsiveness of the caregiver to our needs as helpless infants.
Those whose mothers, or caregivers, were unavailable or unresponsive may grow up to be detached and nonresponsive to others. Their behavior is Avoidant in relationships. A second group takes a more Anxious-Ambivalent approach to relationships, a response set in motion by having mothers they may not have been able to count on - sometimes responsive, other times not. The lucky among us are Secure in attachment, trusting and stable in relationships, probably the result of having had consistently responsive care.
While attachment theory is now driving a greal deal of research on children's social, emotional, and cognitive development, University of Denver psychologists Cindy Hazan and Philip Shaver set out not long ago to investigate the possible effect of childhood relationships on adult attachments. First, they developed descriptive statements that reflect each of the three attachment styles. Then they asked people in their community, along with college kids, which statements best describe how they relate to others. They asked, for example, about trust and jealousy, about closeness and desire for reciprocation, about emotional extremes.
The distribution of the three attachment styles has proved to be about the same in grown-ups as in infants, the same among collegians as the fully fledged. More than half of adult respondents call themselves Secure; the rest are split between Avoidant and Ambivalent. Further, their adult attachment patterns predictablly reflect the relationship they report with their parents. Secure people generally describe their parents as having been warm and supportive. What's more, these adults predictably differ in success at romantic love. Secure people reported happy, long-lasting relationships. Avoidants rarely found love.
Secure adults are more trusting of their romantic partners and more confident of a partner's love, report Australian psychologists Judith Feeney and Patricia Noller of the University of Queensland. The two surveyed nearly 400 college undergradutes with a questionnaire on family background and love relationships, along with items designed to reveal their personality and related traits.
In contrast to the Secure, Avoidants indicated an aversion to intimacy. The Anxious-Ambivalent paticipants were characterized by dependency and what Feeney and Noller describe as "a hunger" for commitment. Their approach resembles the Mania style of love. Each of the three groups reported differences in early childhood experience that could account for their adult approach to relationships. Avoidants, for example, were most likely to tell of separations from their mother.
It may be, Hazan and Shaver suggest, that the world's greatest love affairs are conducted by the Anxious-Ambivalents - people desperately searching for a kind of security they never had.
THE MAGIC, NEVER DIES
Not quite two decades into the look at love, it appears as though love will not always mystify us. For already we are beginning to define what we think about it, how it makes us feel, and what we do when we are in love. We now know that it is the insecure, rather than the confident, who fall in love more readily. We know that outside stimuli that alter our emotional state can affect our susceptability to romance; it is not just the person. We now know that to a certain extent your love style is set by the parenting you received. And, oh yes, men are more quickly romantic than women.
The best news may well be that when it comes to love, men and women are more similar than different. In the face of continuing gender wars, it is comforting to think that men and women share an important, and peaceful, spot of turf. It is also clear that no matter how hard we look at love, we will always be amazed and mesmerized by it.
LOVE ME TENDER
How to Make How to Make
Love to a Man Love to a Woman
Tags:
arthur aron,
babies,
belief that,
california santa cruz,
carl rogers,
cold hearts,
facets,
fait accompli,
false notion,
hesitation,
human experience,
intangibles,
last decade,
love,
marriage,
perfect in every way,
perfectman,
philosophers,
playwrights,
pregnancy,
public campaign,
public resistance,
ready to have a baby,
relationship,
rush,
sena,
senator william proxmire,
Sigmund Freud,
songwriters,
time at home,
unilateral approach,
united states senator,
university of california santa cruz,
waste of time,
wedded bliss,
wrong choice
