Thursday, June 14, 2007

Do I Love Her?

Love…that commonly used term in our daily life….in our public and in our secret life too…used by all of us sometime…maybe it is all the time dormant inside us…just need a trigger and it will come spontaneously from our unconscious hidden memories to our consciousness….we have said "I love you" many times to many persons…but what did that really mean?....what is love is all about?...does it mean the same thing for all of us?....

A chat with an intelligent sensitive person before 2 days made feel in need that I search for theories of love especially from the psychological point of view….and for that person who knows herself I dedicate this summary:

From the many theories about love that varies in their views and almost all of them have no evidence to prove worthy…but I found few to worth mention here….this is not to say that other theories are not nice to read about but I want to give a summary to be stick in our memory and not lost in details…..

Plato said that when we love a person, we love an abstraction or image of the person's best qualities….so we don't love a person for his or her unique qualities….

In 1986, Robert Sternberg comes with his famous triangular theory of love…which states that love has three components:
1. Intimacy (closeness, connectedness, and bondedness)
2. Passion (romance, physical attraction and sexual consummation)
3. Decision / Commitment (in the short term there is the decision to love and in the long term there is the decision to maintain the love).

What was strange to find is that about 13 % of cultures have no word for love (from the book of a natural history of love by Ackerman, Diane in 1994).....

The Chinese character for love is also worth to mention:

It means from top to bottom: that which gives breath (i.e.spirit) to the heart, with graceful motion…

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