the glossary · concept
what is companionate love?
companionate love
Companionate love is intimacy plus commitment without the fire, in Robert Sternberg's triangular model of love. It's the calm, chosen, long-haul kind, and people mistake it for settling constantly. That's the part worth arguing with. It is not the absence of feeling. It is a different feeling: steady instead of loud. Passionate love gets all the coverage because it is dramatic and it burns fast. Companionate love is what most long relationships turn into if they last at all, and it is what people are actually describing when they say they would choose the same person again.
where it comes from: Sternberg, triangular theory of love ↗
this one has a whole chapter under it. read: is it love, or just comfort? →
what to read on this
- The Art of Loving Erich Fromm love as something you do, not something that happens to you. his phrase is standing in love, not falling for. written in 1956 and it still ends the argument.
- Mating in Captivity Esther Perel the collision in asking one person to be both your safe home and the source of your desire. those two demands do not want the same conditions.
- The Course of Love Alain de Botton a novel about what happens after the crystals fall off. loving the ordinary disappointing actual person instead of the one your head built.
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also asked
is companionate love enough for a relationship?
For a lot of people, yes, and for some it isn't. The honest version is that this is a preference and not a hierarchy. The failure mode isn't having companionate love. It's having it and reading it as evidence that something died, when what actually happened is that the thing changed shape.
come think with me
one word a week.
this is one of about thirty words i have collected for feelings most people never got names for. i send one a week, with the reason it works that way.
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