Companionate versus Passionate Love

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Love is many things; it has not one description that can be pin pointed. Love can be described as the openness of a relationship, the sexual attraction between partners, or can be seen as pure attraction to each other’s personalities. In Jonathon Haidt’s book, The Happiness Hypothesis, he writes about the types of love there are and which he believes is the most important. There are two main types of love, companionate and passionate love. Haidt defines true love as companionate love, having more importance in a relationship than that of passionate love. Companionate love is perceived as a stronger love than Passionate love, because of a better understanding in companionship and passionate love will not be everlasting. The idea of companionate over passionate makes sense, but media has formed a different outlook on love that has warped the genuine imagery of love.

All relationships have the stage of new love, but the companionate stage is what allows the relationship to last. The passion in a relationship starts and can affect what the relationship could turn into. Haidt quotes Ellen Berscheid and Elaine Walster, two social psychologists, as they explain passionate love as a “wildly emotional state in which tender and sexual feelings, elation and pain, anxiety and relief, altruism and jealousy coexist in a confusion of feelings” (124), while companionate love was also described by Berscheid and Walster as “affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply intertwined” (125). The main difference between the two types of love is, passionate love can, and most likely will, fade overtime; it does not evolve into companionate love. Passionate and companionate are two bases of love that develop at their own pace with no real r...

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... endless passionate love; this mistaken idea has come from the mass media in our everyday lives. Media has given us a false hope in what love is supposed to be. Companionate love is the real love that we need to have the effect of an everlasting bond with a person. Companionate love has an accepting agent in love, so once a person has accepted the love, and his partner for the person he is, it is more of a love than the affection shared in passionate love. That is all love really is; it is just an acceptance in understanding a person’s connection to another.

Works Cited

Haidt, Jonathan. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. New York: Basic, 2006. Print.

Galician, Mary-Lou. Sex, Love & Romance in the Mass Media: Analysis & Criticism of Unrealistic Portrayals & Their Influence. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004. PDF.

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