or too little ego strength can become too unyielding or too disrupting. According to Freud, the key to a healthy personality is a balance between the id, the ego, and
the superego.
2.1.5 Theory of Love
Elkrief 2013 says that love is complete acceptance: When someone comes to us and we allow him without any belief that they aren’t good enough,
without any belief that they would be “better” if they were different, this is love. In Popova’s collection of Famous Definitions from 200 Years of Literary
History, she found in Stendhal’s fantastic 1822, which he notes that love is like a fever which comes and goes quite independently of the will. There are no age
limits for love. Sternberg 1986 comes up with a Triangular Theory of Love. The
underlying idea of this theory is that love can be dissected into three main parts: intimacy, passion, and decisioncommitment pp. 119-135.
2.1.5.1 Intimacy
This encompasses feelings of closeness, connectedness, and boundaries. With passion, there is the initial infatuation, the strong emotions, and the
attraction. It involves a high level of trust between two individuals
2.1.5.2 Passion
This encompasses drives that lead to romance, physical attraction, and sexual consummation. With intimacy, the lovers become closer, inter-dependant,
and psychologically their self-concepts begin to overlap.
2.1.5.3 Commitment
This encompasses, in the short term, the decision to remain with another, and in the long term, the shared achievements and plans made with that other.
Commitment is the most volitional of the three, the decision to take steps to maintain the love and the relationship.
The table of combination of intimacy, passion, and commitment from Stenberg will help the writer to analyze the problem formulations easily.
Table I. Types of love
combinations of intimacy, passion, and commitment Liking or Friendship
Intimacy Passion
Commitment
Infatuation
Empty love
Romantic love
Companionate love
Fatuous love
Consummate love
The types of love can be simplified by using this table. Different stages and types of love are explained, as follows:
1 Liking or Friendship: It is intimacy, in which a person feels a bond, warmth,
and a closeness with another but not passion or long-term commitment.
2 Infatuated Love: It is passion.
3 Empty Love: It is commitment without intimacy or passion.
4 Romantic Love: It bonds individuals emotionally through intimacy and
physically through passionate arousal, but neither is sustained without commitment.
5 Companionate Love: It is intimacy and commitment. It is non-passionate
type of love that is stronger than friendship because of the element of long- term commitment. The love ideally shared between family members is a form
of companionate love, as is the love between close friends who have a platonic but strong friendship.
6 Fatuous Love: It is commitment and passion, its commitment is motivated
largely by passion without the stabilizing influence of intimacy.
7 Consummate Love: It is passion, intimacy, and commitment, which is the
complete form of love. Consummate love is theorized to be that love associated with the “perfect couple”. Stenberg 1987; p. 341.
2.1.6 Theory of Motivation
