Love is one of the most well known and yet elusive concepts out there. We are all familiar with the term ‘love’ in one way or another and yet, we are still befuddled by what it actually is. Love is one of the concepts that I like to live my life by. In order to do that, though, I need to understand what I mean by love. A few years ago, I came across the Triangle Theory of Love by Robert J Sternberg, which posited that love is made of three different components totalling eight different types of love. This intrigued me and helped me reframe my own love experiences. Over the last couple of years, I have also delved deeper into my spiritual self and my connection with God. One thing that I had come to realise is that the core principle of spirituality is Love. But what has love got to do with spirituality? And how does that relate with the different types of love Sternberg mentions?
To explain the relationship between Love and Spirituality I first need to define them. Spirituality is a connection to something bigger than us. Often this connection can give us our life’s purpose and meaning. People have a variety of names for the ‘something bigger than us’; some people call it God, others Allah, the Universe, Source, Nature, etc. Whatever the name is, it is something greater than us all. Carl Jung actually suggested that our deep consciousness is the voice of God and therefore, our consciousness could be the ‘something bigger than us’, too. We can connect to our deep consciousness through a variety of means such as prayer, meditation, time spent in nature, art, and even through therapy. In engaging in these practices, some we have more affinity with than others, we begin to bring our deep consciousness (and the voice of God) closer to the surface. For some, likening our deep consciousness to the voice of God does not resonate. Instead, connecting with one’s deep consciousness could be seen more as someone becoming their true and authentic Self. Love is then the embodiment of this connection with our deep consciousness. Spiritual love is that connection with the voice of God/our true, authentic Self. The different ways in which we demonstrate this connection – through our relationships with others and ourselves, through our art, and prayers and meditation, and so on so forth – expresses spiritual love.
And how does this spiritual love relate to the different types of love formulated by Robert Sternberg? Well, just as there are different ways to embody our spiritual connection, there are different ways to love. Spiritual love is yet another, perhaps, overarching type of love. The others relate more closely to our relationships with others. Sternberg theorises that love is made of three components: intimacy – closeness, connection and bondedness that evokes feelings of warmth; passion – the drive to romance, physical attraction and sexual consummation that evokes feelings of arousal; and, decision/commitment – short-term decision to choose to love another, and/or a long-term commitment to maintain that love. The combinations of these three components form eight types of love: non-love is the absence of all three components; liking is the presence of intimacy only (I have found this is most similar to friendship); infatuation is the presence of passion only; empty love is the presence of decision/commitment only; romantic love is the presence of both intimacy and passion but not of decision/commitment; compassionate love is the presence of intimacy and decision/commitment but not of passion; fatuous love is the presence of passion and decision/commitment but not of intimacy; and lastly, consummate/complete love is the presence of all three components.
After reading through the various types of love, I realised that often what we refer to as ‘love’ is consummate/complete love. Knowing that there are many types of love helps me to reframe my experiences with love. It helps me to understand why we hear ‘I love you’ thrown around more often these days because we aren’t always talking about complete love. I tell my friends that I love them, but what I am actually referring to is the ‘liking’ type of love. I remember being completely into a guy many years ago and thinking that I ‘loved’ him but it was actually the ‘infatuation’ type of love. And fatuous love, fatuous meaning silly or childish, reminds me of what we used to call ‘puppy love’ when I was younger and had a crush on someone: we felt that attraction and had chosen to love that person but the closeness and connection was not really there.
Understanding that there are many types of love that we can feel for others links to spiritual love in the sense there are many ways we can express spiritual love. There is not one type of love and so there is not one way to express spiritual love. Taking time to reflect on what love means to us, love in general and spiritual love, can help us understand ourselves better and further develop our spirituality. What does love mean to you? How do you express love (all the different types, including spiritual)?