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Published on: May 14, 2019
A formula for love: partner merit and appreciation beget actor significance
Arie W Kruglanski1, Molly Ellenberg1, Huixian Yu1
1University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA.
None:
We offer a model of romantic love as a means to the end of feeling significant and worthy. According to this model, the partner's perceived merits and their appreciation of the actor combine with the actor's magnitude of significance quest to determine the likelihood of the actor falling in love with the partner. Our model affords a broad account of diverse love phenomena and the derivation of specific hypotheses supported by prior and new data and offers novel avenues for further research on classic issues in romantic love. The discussion considers our model's unique implications and its relation to other theories of love.
None:
We offer a novel motivational account of romantic love, which portrays it as a means to the end of feeling significant and worthy. According to the model, falling in love with a partner depends on the actor’s perceptions that (1) the partner possesses meritorious characteristics and (2) that they appreciate the actor and view them as significant. We assume that these two factors multiplicatively combine with the magnitude of the actor’s quest for significance to determine the likelihood of the actor becoming enamored with the partner. The multiplicative model has two major implications: 1. If any one of the partner’s merit, appreciation, or actor’s significance quest factors falls below its respective threshold of acceptability (such that it is subjectively non-existent), the likelihood of falling in love will be negligible. 2. Above their acceptability thresholds, levels of (partner’s) merit, appreciation, and (actor’s) significance quest factors compensate for one another. A partner’s lower standing on merit or appreciation is compensated in its impact on falling in love by the partner’s higher standing on the remaining dimension. Furthermore, lower levels of either or both of these factors are compensated for by the actor’s higher level of significance quest.Our model affords a broad account of diverse love phenomena, allows the derivation of several specific hypotheses supported by prior close-relations research as well as new data, and it offers novel avenues for further research on classic issues in romantic love. The discussion considers our model’s unique implications and examines its relation to other theories of love.
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