My Personal Experience: Personal Essay: Love And Self

Exploring love and myself

In our daily lives, we always mention love and experience love. However, no one can truly, completely know what “love” is. That is the reason why love has been a topic that many philosophers, psychologists or common people keep discussing for decades. Besides, we often talk about “self”. There are classes to teach people how to build up their self-esteem and self-confidence. Also, the importance of self-discipline is taught at schools. In this essay, I am going to talk about how love and self are related to me with my personal experience as explanations. First of all, Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love (Sternberg, 1986) suggested that there are three components of love, including intimacy, passion and commitment,

He said he felt right and good when being with me, so he asked me to be his girlfriend. Then I agreed and we have made a decision to be in a romantic relationship. Every time when we were having a date, we had a lot of conversations and shared our joys and sadness. Sometimes we held hands and kissed each other's lips. Sometimes I would sit aside to watch him playing basketball with his friends because he was so charming when doing sports. We were very close at that time. With commitment, intimacy and passion components, we were adopting consummate love style, which is also called true love (Sternberg,

We have not been contacting each other anymore. With absence of passion, intimacy and commitment components, we were back to non-love again (Sternberg, 1986).

In the following, I am going to talk about the self-concept. Self-concept suggested that there are different kinds of self, such as actual self, ideal self, physical self, public self and spiritual self (Buss, 2001).

First, let’s talk about the actual self. Actual self means how we think about ourselves and the actual characteristics we have. I am a lazy person. Every time when I take the clean clothes that have just been washed and dried back to my room, I will not fold them and put them back into the wardrobe immediately. I will leave them there for a period of time. When I have to go to bed at night, I usually put those unfolded clothes on my chair and my desk and put them back on the bed when I have to use my desk. After a week or longer, I will finally tidy up my room. So this shows that I am really lazy and that is a part of my actual