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Why is Similarity the Main Basis for Attraction? There can be many different definitions to what attraction is. Indeed, the aforementioned concept is rather elusive in its nature and demands a close examination in order to pose some valid points concerning the question what attraction actually is. However, it appears that the basis any sort of attraction is similarity of forms that compose any feeling or desire produced by human nature. Let us further discuss as to how it happens. Loving ourselves is sometimes seen as an impossible barrier to loving others; others see it as a necessary step towards being able to love others, as in the popular saying, "You have to love yourself before you can love others. " Clearly both excessive self-love and self-scorn can kill romance.
General self-tolerance probably facilitates the acceptance of a lover's foibles. Human love relations involve very complex dynamics. In this section, we will review several kinds of love, some of which have been mention already (romantic, companionate, and bargain-hunting non-romantics). Different kinds of lovers mean different things when they say, "I love you. " We all would like to think we know the real thing, real love, but do we? We assume everyone loves the way we do. That's not true.
Also, we usually give love in the way we want to be loved, not in the way the lover wants to be loved. What kind of lover are you? What kind of love do you want from your lover? What does your partner want? A Canadian sociologist, John Lee, has described six kinds of lovers. Two California sociologists, Thomas Lasswell and Terry Hatkoff, have developed a Love Scale to measure several of these types (Lasswell & Lobsenz, 1980): Romantic love -- this lover thinks constantly about the loved one, is jealous, unrealistic, will tolerate anything, is sexually attracted by physical appearance, needs repeated reassurance he / she is loved in return.
Typically lasts a few months or a few years (some anthropologists say it lasts 4 years, i. e. until the baby is through nursing and can walk and run. Then the love bond releases the more powerful males to find another female to impregnate with his genes. ) Best friend or companionate love -- this lover enjoys the companionship and intimacy of a close friendship. It is a comfortable, slowly developing, trusting, committed relationship, not intense excitement, desperation, or sexual obsessions. Unselfish love -- the lover is devoted and self-sacrificing to the loved one, gives without expecting anything in return, is gentle, caring, and dutiful.
Logical love -- the lover carefully selects the "right person" logically, looking for someone with compatible interests, similar education and religion, a harmonious personality, common values, and long-term goals. Game-playing love -- this person may be charming but is hardly a lover; he / she merely enjoys the dating game. He / she relishes the meeting, the impressing, the seducing, the challenge of a conquest but usually makes it clear there is little or no long-term commitment to the other person. There are other kinds of loves and lovers, of course, like the one who searches for a physical ideal -- a great body or some specific bodily feature -- or the one who is so possessive he / she wants to control the other person and gets physically sick or depressed or does foolish things when the relationship seems threatened. Perhaps you can easily tell which type of lover you are. If not, take the test (Lasswell & Lobsenz, 1980).
You might also realize what kind of love you want to receive. You are probably wondering what kinds of love make the best combinations? According to Lasswell and Lobsenz, best friends partnerships work well, so do two logical lovers or a best friend-logical combination. What are likely to be mismatches? A romantic and a best friend (or a logical) lover may have problems because they certainly do not show love in the same ways. One wants to be wooed with candlelight dinners and passionate love-making; the other wants to have a quiet evening at home reading and planning a trip or a new house.
Even a romantic lover may not please another romantic; indeed, romantic lovers will be unhappy if they do not find new ways to show love after three or four years when the thrills and sexual throbs have subsided (Lasswell & Lobsenz, p. 144, 1980). Likewise, the combination of a possessive and a best friend will be a clash of styles -- one stormy and one easy going. If the possessive is gone for a while, she / he will be bothered that the best friend didn't miss her / him more, "If you loved me, you would have missed me a lot!" As one would expect, game players and possessive lovers are hard for anyone to love. Many lovers don't clarify what they need; they expect the lover to read their minds. They hesitate to say, "You can do this to make me feel loved" and eventually end up saying, "When you do this I know you don't love me. " Robert Sternberg (Bennett, 1985) at Yale has a theory that there are three components to love: (1) Intimacy = baring souls, sharing, liking, and bonding (a slowly developing emotional-interpersonal involvement, as in a friendship). (2) Passion = sexual attraction (an instant or quickly developing motivation or addiction which usually declines over the years to a stable level). (3) Commitment = stable, dependable devotion (a slowly developing cognitive decision to stick by the other person in bad times, as in a marriage A good-to-acceptable arrangement, according to Sternberg, is when both partners want, receive, and give the same amounts of the three ingredients, i. e.
they both have the same kind of love in about the same intensity. However, as the partners' three dimensions of love differ more and more from each other, especially in terms of total investment, the quality of the love relationship deteriorates. For example, within limits, partner A can be primarily interested in sex (passion) while partner B is more interested in love (intimacy), providing both A and B are devoted to each other. But there are three threats to the relationship: if A loses sexual interest or B falls out of love or if either decides to "look around" for the ingredient they aren't getting. The less we get of what we want, the more unhappy we become.
Brehm (1985) believes there are basically only two types of lovers -- romantic (passionate) and best friend (companionate). Most love relationships, she thinks, are a mixture of both types. Romantic love is intense, sexual, and frantic (e. g. strong efforts to win and hold on to the affection).
In contrast, companionate love is calmer, involves more relaxed love making and is based on respect, trust, and security as friends. Romantic love is what is measured on Rubin's (1973) Loving Scale and best friend love is measured on his Liking Scale. Using these two scales and measures of romanticism, it has been possible to study the differences between males and females. Brehm (1985) has a good summary of the research.
On Rubin's (1973) Liking Scale, females tend to like their partners better than males do. Moreover, women fall in love more often, report more intense feelings (feeling euphoric and wanting to scream), are ready to marry earlier, love more often when it isn't returned, think love is more rewarding, and idealize the partner more than males do. In spite of the fact that women have more loves and more intense romantic experiences (their perceptions and behaviors are more affected by their affection), males score higher on the Romanticism Scales than females and they fall in love earlier in a relationship. Almost 25 % of males are "in love" before the fourth date, only 15 % of females are. In fact, 50 % of women take over 20 dates to decide they are in love.
There is also some evidence that males hurt more than females during a break up, but individuals vary greatly. Both males and females score about the same on the Love Scale and they experience love at first sight about equally often (54 % of women and 63 % of men believe in love at first sight). It would seem that men and women love each other about the same amount but perhaps in different ways. Men may be more naive (lacking experience? ) and believe more of the nonsense on the Romanticism Scales, like "there is only one real love for a person" or "true love leads to almost perfect happiness" or "a person should marry whomever he / she loves regardless of social position. " Women may be wiser (as long as their strong emotions have not overwhelmed their reason) and / or forced by socioeconomic reality to be slightly more careful and practical about whom they fall in love with, have sex with, and marry. The more rewarding relationships are more likely to continue (unhappy ones may, of course, continue if the partners see no alternative). Also, giving the partner full credit for his / her contributions makes for a happier relationship.
Unfortunately, about 75 % of the time a partner over-estimates his or her contribution to daily activities, like cooking, cleaning, planning activities, etc. This indicates he / she is not giving full credit to his / her partner. It's also possible to disagree about the value of an activity, such as sweeping the floor or hugging the partner. Indeed, males and females have a major difference of opinion here. Males think positive activities, like washing the dishes, are more important than positive affection, like kissing. Women think just the opposite.
Thus, when one man was told by a therapist to go home and do something affectionate towards his wife, he washed her car! His wife considered the car wash helpful but not at all affectionate. He saw it as a great way to show his love for her. Many traditional men would sincerely say, "I show her I love her by supporting her. " Both men and women need to be aware of this difference. Men could say, "Sweetheart, I washed your car to say 'I love you'. " Women could tell themselves "washing the car is how he shows his love for me. " One way or another, both sexes need to be clearly told "I love you" often. Of course, there are many differences in how males and females view love and relationships.
For women, intimacy means talking; for men, a relationship means doing things together ("all she wants to do is talk"). Women value relationships more than men, especially relationships with parents. Women value most his income potential and fidelity and her ties to family and friends; men value most her sexuality and nurturance and their shared interests. Women complain more about the relationship and problems; men think "everything's fine. " Women want to resolve disagreements; men want to avoid them. A person in love does not see his / her lover as others do. Freud believed we saw the lover as our ideal, and the more dissatisfied with ourselves we were, the more we needed a lover to make up for our weaknesses and the more inclined we were to idealize our lover.
In contrast, Neo-Freudians and Humanists would say "you have to love yourself first" before you can maturely and truly love others. If you are insecure and dislike yourself, you will be unable to love, avoid love, or be fragilely dependent on love. Both of these views imply that there are two kinds of love: immature love and mature love. Surely, mature, healthy love would be better than immature, needy, neurotic love, right? Well, the research done to date doesn't support that reasonable-sounding statement. There is little relationship between our claimed self-esteem and how much we like (not love) others, such as friends, or how much we think others like us.
You might think we would select partners with similar self-esteem, but that doesn't seem to be the case either. One problem with this research is that people tend to be defensive about their low self-esteem, they sometimes try to hide it and claim high self-esteem. If you study only people high in self-esteem and low in defensiveness (truly self-confident), they will tell you that they have frequently been in love and have frequently lost love. Thus, it isn't just the insecure, needy person who has a string of failed relationships, perhaps it's all of us who try to love. People who score high in self-esteem and high in defensiveness report the lowest frequency of loving and of losing. We don't know if these people take fewer risks or if they conceal their rejections.
Low self-esteem people report a moderate frequency of loving and of losing. There is some evidence that people, who love themselves less, love their partners more. Compared to high-esteem persons, low-esteem persons (males and females) scored higher on the Liking and Loving Scales, trusted their partners more, and rated them more favorably. As we saw in the last section, women with either high or low self-esteem tend to get more involved in love relationships and idealize their partner more than men do. Apparently, the high self-esteem male tends to get less emotionally involved in his numerous love affairs. Does this mean that a low-esteem male is the better lover?
We don't know, maybe both the high self-esteem and low self-esteem male brings his own unique problems to the love nest. This is an unclear area; we need more research. Surely the effects of insecurity and low self-confidence on a marriage will depend on how the partner responds in the long haul to these characteristics. Some of us like humble, self-depreciating, unassertive partners. However, one thing that is obvious about attraction of any sort is the common theme that produces our attraction, hence, the similarity of desire that leads us to attraction appears to balance out the normal distribution of qualities of different objects of attraction.
Word Count: 2301 Bibliography: Brehm, S. S. (1985). Intimate relationships. New York: Random House, Inc. Rubin, Z. (1973). Liking and loving: An invitation to social psychology.
New York; Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Sternberg, R. J. (1991). Love the way you want it. New York: Bantam Books. Lasswell, M. & Lobsenz, N. (1980).
Styles of loving. New York: Ballantine Books. Lazarus, A. (1974). Clinical behavior therapy. New York: Brunner-Mazel. Leman, K. (1987, 1992).
The pleaser's: Women who can't say no and the men who control them. New York: Dell Hadley, J. & Staudacher, C. (1985). Hypnosis for change. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications. Header, F. (1958).
The psychology of interpersonal relations. New York: Wiley.
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