“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”
I didn’t write that. Elizabeth Barrett Browning did. She was a poet. You probably knew that. But do you know what Thursday is?
It’s Valentine’s Day, which means if you are a male person and you have a significant other, you better get Thursday right or you won’t have a significant other for long.
You know what to do and what to get, my brothers, but let’s be honest — you’re just not very good at it.
If she loves you, she will smile and express pleasure, but in your heart, you’ll know you did it wrong. We can’t help it. We’re wired that way.
In the meantime, I thought it might be helpful to see what the experts have to say about this thing called love.
Biologists tend to see love as a body thing, a physical response much like hunger or thirst.
Psychologists tend to see it as a mind thing — an emotional response that is an expression of certain needs.
They’re both right of course. One thing all the love doctors agree on though is that what makes your heart go thump-a-thump is an impossibly complex mixture of hormones and attitudes, stimuli and responses and, in my case, pasta.
Dr. Robert Sternberg at Tufts University has developed something called the Triangular Theory, in which the three sides of the love triangle are intimacy, passion and commitment.
He mixes and matches those three elements to come up with eight types of love, ranging from Non-Love, which is a bummer, to Consummate Love, which comes fully equipped with passion, intimacy and commitment.
Between the two is infatuation, which is the overwhelming, all-consuming, hormone-induced frenzy stage, when you obsess about them while you’re awake and dream about them when you’re asleep.
If he or she really is the one, not to worry: You will eventually reach the Consummate Love stage, which is the bottom of the ninth, walk-off grand slam home run of love, the one we’re all after — that intense emotional bond between two people who are connected on many levels and totally committed to each other, a.k.a. soul mates. Easier said than found, but when you do, you’ll know it.
Anthropologist Helen Fisher takes a simpler view, slicing and dicing love into three phases: lust, attraction and attachment.
