Strengthening the bonds of love
DO you visualise building a concrete wall when you consider how to maintain the bonds in a relationship? Seems a tad unromantic at first glance, doesn’t it? Actually, relationship counsellor Wayne Powell holds this view: “You need a bonding agent (cement) to keep the building blocks together, hence erecting a stable structure. Likewise, the relationship requires bonding agents — intimacy, commitment, and passion (Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love), to keep it strong and resistant to internal and external pressure.”
According to Sternberg, Professor of Human Development in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University and Honorary Professor of Psychology at Heidelberg University, Germany, the triangular theory of love holds that love can be understood in terms of three components that together can be viewed as forming the vertices of a triangle. Each component manifests a different aspect of love.
“Intimacy refers to feelings of closeness, connectedness and bondedness in loving relationships. It thus includes within its purview those feelings that give rise, essentially, to the experience of warmth in a loving relationship,” Sternberg says on his website.
“Passion refers to the drives that lead to romance, physical attraction, sexual consummation, and related phenomena in loving relationships. The passion component includes within its purview those sources of motivational and other forms of arousal that lead to the experience of passion in a loving relationship.”
He added: “Decision/commitment refers, in the short term, to the decision that one loves a certain other, and in the long term, to one’s commitment to maintain that love. These two aspects of the decision/commitment component do not necessarily go together, in that one can decide to love someone without being committed to the love in the long term, or one can be committed to a relationship without acknowledging that one loves the other person in the relationship.”
Using Sternberg’s model, Powell explained that couples who allow internal and external stressors to overwhelm them will see weakened emotional links. This disconnection would negatively impact the intimacy in the union.
He noted that when a couple is disconnected emotionally, they will become less interested in sexual activities with each other and eventually their fire is extinguished. Often when intimacy and passion no longer exist, the commitment is weakened.
There are different ways to rekindle the fire in a relationship and keep it going. Powell gave some pointers on how to reconnect when things start to lag:
• Make a deliberate attempt to rebuild the intimacy that was present in the initial stages of the relationship. Go out on dates and enjoy each other’s company.
•Talk with each other about any and everything. Listen to your partner and offer emotional support.
•If there are problems in the sexual relationship, have a conversation on the matter with the aim of ensuring mutual satisfaction.
• When there is an interpersonal conflict, speak to the issue and don’t attack the individual.
• Maintain an atmosphere of respect and avoid any physical and emotional abuse.
• Try out new things with each other.
In this age of instant gratification and multiple sexual encounters, Powell’s view of building a structure to maintain a stable relationship does have some merit after all.
— Falon Folkes
