Release Date: Friday, March 28, 2008

You'll get less than you ‘settle’ for

When a new love enlivens us, especially after a dead spell, we can be tempted to run with it — whatever it is, with no real foundation.

We have proven that it's rare to find "everything" in a relationship, so why not take the part we can get? Truth be told, breakups (ours and everybody else's) often leave us wondering exactly what "everything" is.

Perfect love is one way to think about it, and according to Robert J. Sternberg, a distinguished psychologist, perfect love is a triangle with three parts: intimacy, passion, and commitment.

Passion is erotic attraction, the part that's apt to engross all of our senses early in a relationship. Intimacy is psychological knowledge and connection based on what we know. And commitment is the decision to share a future.

We can settle for less than perfect love. There might even be times when we want less, but those times tend to be short-lived, because less than perfect love gets old. When it does, we invest less in the relationship and neglect eats away at the part(s) we do have. With that picture in mind, it's easy to see how relationships literally fall apart.

Conversely, if we have a high level of all three parts of perfect love — intimacy, passion and commitment — they feed each other. The relationship is nurtured. And we're so satisfied, we continue to invest our time and energy ensuring that the relationship flourishes!

That brings us to a commitment model by Caryl Rusbult, another distinguished psychologist, which tells us we commit based on three factors that act to strengthen and weaken each other: satisfaction, quality of alternatives and investment.

Early in a relationship, after that dead spell, you might be wonderfully satisfied with passion. Once your most immediate needs are met, though, and you're feeling less desperate, you're apt to uncover a few quirks or shortcomings that put you off.

As you become less satisfied, you instinctively look around to see what your options are. And if they look favorable enough, you begin to think that maybe you can get more of what you want elsewhere. Without any commitment, you just might find an exit!

But, what if you have more than passion; what if you also have intimacy? Of course, you're more apt to talk about the quirks and the shortcomings in a straightforward way — without apologizing or accusing. You're more apt to overcome differences, to get to know each other better and thus connect on a deeper level in the process.

Sharing objectively when you're emotionally involved sounds easier than it is...but at least you can be hopeful. In fact, you can be hopeful enough to commit. And it's commitment that helps to get you through the inevitable, albeit, temporary setbacks.

Still, commitment by itself makes for a lifeless relationship. Sternberg labels it "empty."

You might be thinking intimacy is enough as long as you're committed. After all, "passion can't last." True: Intimacy is the foundation for perfect love. True: Infatuation is generally based on the false sense that somebody else can MAKE you happy; thus, it can't last.

We can learn to base passion on intimacy, though. We can learn to feed passion with intimacy (more on that next week). When we do that, we might lose the anxious feelings and the butterflies; but we don't lose the appetite to love all of our partner.

In fact, only when we know all of our sweetheart can we truly love all of our sweetheart.

When we settle for knowing less, we settle for loving less. We settle for less than perfect love...and something that just might die, rather than grow.