5: Liking and Loving
5.4 Chapter Summary
Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani and Dr. Hammond Tarry
Relationships characterized by love, caring, commitment, and intimacy, such as those between adult friends, dating partners, lovers, and married couples, are known as close relationships.
Our close relationships make us happy and healthy. We experience higher self-efficacy, self-esteem, and positive mood when we believe that our friends and partners respond to us supportively and with concern for our needs and welfare.
When we say that we like or love someone, we are experiencing interpersonal attraction. People are strongly influenced by their partners’ physical attractiveness during initial encounters. On average, we find younger people more attractive than older people; we are more attracted to faces that are more symmetrical than those that are less symmetrical; and we prefer faces that are more, rather than less, average. Although the preferences for youth, symmetry, and averageness appear to be universal, there is evidence that at least some differences in perceived attractiveness are due to social and cultural factors.
Overall, both men and women value physical attractiveness. However, for men, the physical attractiveness of women is more important than it is for women judging men, whereas women are relatively more interested in the social status of men. These gender differences may have evolutionary origins. The tendency to perceive attractive people as having positive characteristics, such as sociability and competence, is known as the what is beautiful is good stereotype.
Relationships are more likely to develop and be maintained to the extent that the partners share values and beliefs. The basic principles of social exchange and equity dictate that there will be general similarity in status among people in close relationships. And we tend to prefer people who seem to like us about as much as we like them.
Simply being around another person also increases our liking for that individual. The tendency to prefer stimuli (including people) we have seen more frequently is known as mere exposure.
We tend to like people more when we are in a good mood and less when we are in a bad mood. And it has been found that arousal polarizes our liking of others. The strong feelings that we experience toward another person that are accompanied by increases in arousal are called passion, and the emotionally intense love that is based on arousal and sexual attraction is known as passionate love.
As partners stay together over time, cognition becomes relatively more important than passion, and close relationships are more likely to be based on companionate love than on passionate love. As a relationship progresses, the partners come to know each other more fully and care for each other more deeply—they grow closer. Intimacy is marked in large part by reciprocal self-disclosure—that is, the tendency to communicate frequently and openly.
Partners in close relationships increasingly turn to each other for social support and other needs. The members of a close relationship are highly interdependent and rely heavily on effective social exchange. When partners are attentive to the other person’s needs and help the other meet his or her needs without explicitly keeping track of what they are giving or expecting in return, we say that the partners have a communal relationship.
In relationships in which a positive rapport between partners is developed and maintained over time, the partners are naturally happy with the relationship and become committed to it.
The triangular model of love proposes that there are different types of love, each composed of distinct combinations of the basic components of passion, intimacy, and commitment.
Children have been found to develop either a secure or insecure attachment style with their caregivers, and individual differences in these styles remain somewhat stable into adulthood. People with secure attachment styles may make better partners. Attachment styles, though, do show some diversity across different cultural and age groups. They can also shift somewhat, even in adulthood, so people who are currently showing an insecure attachment can move toward a more securely attached relationship.
Image Attribution
References
Jhangiani, Rajiv, and Hammond Tarry. “7.4 Chapter Summary.” Principles of Social Psychology – 1st International H5P Edition, BCcampus, 2022. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
