Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Passionate Love

Passionate Love

So I found this article that defines what is passionate love and why does it need to exist in a relationship. What I found interesting about it is that it defines what is passionate love. What are the characteristics that define passion and how can they be defined. It reminded me of the time in class when we defined people's reaction to our breaking of social norms. It's a cognitive study. But what I found most interesting about the article is that "Hatfield’s and Sternberg’s models, pure passion hardly exists in the real world outside of romantic poetry, songs, and literature." But from what we studied passion must exist in a stable relationship, but if it only exists in fairy tales how are we ever to find love? I strongly believe that fairy tales and love stories are the reason why people, especially girls have a skewed view of what love is but I find that when people get that fairy tale relationship it's not what they thought or want. I mean seriously do you really want a guy that is your prince charming, completely perfect in every way or someone who makes mistakes, who is human? So I guess what I'm getting out is doesn't true passion exist in real life but it goes beyond the external behavior? 

4 comments:

  1. It's a good point to make that young children tend to be saturated with dreamy stories of fairy tale romances that can lead to misconceptions of love. Furthermore, what I think is even more misconstruing is the love & sex guides that are published and skewed and then published again... those really inform adolescent boys and girls of an over idealized type of romance. It sounds like the article at first describes passionate love as what we understand as consummate love. The understanding of consummate love is one that I believe can only be achieved when a person has reached a full state of maturity. Until then, these exaggerated notions of consummate love tend to resemble either romantic, companionate, or fatuous love in that the immature ideal is missing one of the three essential components. On another note, it is interesting to consider the impact of growing up with divorced parents... is consummate love then usually skewed to be over- or under-idealized?

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  2. There is a way saying the great love only exist in great poetry, literature and fairy tales. The kind of love we read, perceive and dream for is actually just passionate love. It is only a made-up thing. Far from the perfect love which is composed by intimacy, passion and commitment. I agree that Passionate love actually did not exist and cannot survive in the real life. There is no direct relationship between happiness and passion. Instead of mimicing the fake "perfect"
    love on the screen, it is better to study and try to understand what each person want. I found the components that the article include are really helpful in term of helping people understand what kind of relationship they want.

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  3. I agree that the idea of love has been changed or made into something completely different due to other influences. Movies and other influences today, make love seem always perfect, but according to Sternberg’s theory of love, most of the time is only made up two of the three elements, which are intimacy, passion and companionship. In the article it says that people who get married often lose their “consummate love” because they lose passion. I’m sure its not always passion that is lost between marriage couples, but it could be companionship or intimacy. The idea of the perfect love is formed from movies and books, things that are not real and often create an idea that cannot be reached or ever obtained.

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  4. I agree about how different influences as media change the definition or the expectations of love which is pretty interesting. But according to the three components they create what true love is but easily that changes over time. People don't always feel the same towards each other but I do believe that there is a sense of caring or investment when losing someone in any sort of loving relationship. Media does exaggerate and perfect the three components in the situations created. But that doesnt sound interesting to me, I think you need the sour to enjoy the sweet and learn the most from hardships with each other. Real love is out there but not perfect love which makes it great.

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