What is love actually? A Christmas romantic comedy (Love Actually, 2003), a question for the ages, an eternal mystery? It’s not that we lack answers. We have too many answers – from poets, philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists – each answering the question in their own language. Kruglanski and colleagues offer a new answer, one that is powerful, intriguing, and certainly a rarity in ideas about love, an answer that generates testable hypotheses. There are important ideas here, even if their answer, as seems to be true of all attempts to define love, remains a partial one.
They offer a model of love as a quest for significance. Or more precisely, as the authors describe it in their title, “a formula for love.” Rather than attempting to define love, they attempt to define the conditions under which love may arise. As they put it, “According to this model, a partner’s perceived merits and their appreciation of the actor combine with the actor’s magnitude of significance quest to determine the likelihood of the actor falling in love with the partner.” While the authors build bridges to others who have attempted to define the state of love into which the actor falls, in the end, love itself remains elusive. But perhaps defining love as the state that occurs when the conditions of the model are met is enough. We should not ask for the moon.
The model is one facet of a larger enterprise – what the authors have called Significance-Quest Theory, a theory that places the desire for significance at the center of human striving, though it operates with varying intensity among individuals and in a particular individual over time. In applying the theory to love, the authors make what has become the standard first move in almost all “scientific” explanations of human behavior since Freud – what you think you are doing and what you think you want is not what you’re actually doing and what you actually want. The model is not an experience-near picture of a lover’s motivation, at least for most lovers. While many would recognize the appeal of merit and appreciation, most would not recognize a fundamental wish to increase their own sense of significance in their desire for their beloved. Desire for a person and desire for significance do not easily collapse into a unitary longing. The relationship between motivation and desire is not at all straightforward. But that complexity points us back to the fact that Kruglanski and colleagues present a formula to specify the necessary conditions for love, rather than an attempt to tell us what love is.
Is the formula correct? The authors offer several hypotheses implied by their theory to test against “available evidence.” The evidence they present is consistent with the theory and supportive of it, but as they point out, it mainly examines indirect proxies for love and its presumed consequences. There is more work to be done, which appears to be underway. I do wonder, however, whether, in the end, the evidence will remain suggestive rather than conclusive because of the slipperiness of the fundamental constructs. In this model, it is clear that merit is partly but not completely culturally determined. It is also to some degree idiosyncratic to the individual lover. Like beauty, merit is in the eye of the beholder. We can define cultural norms for what is deemed meritorious, but many lovers will find merit in qualities that have acquired particular significance to them through their particular paths through life. But once we acknowledge the subjectiveness of merit, we risk ending up with a circular construct: lovers desire what has merit in their eyes, and we can know what has merit in their eyes by what they desire.
There is also difficulty in determining an individual’s “significance-quest magnitude,” an important variable in the formula. Is there any way to score it other than self-reports? And is self-knowledge about this drive sufficiently present in most people to trust their reports? The authors reference one study that includes a measure of significance quest, but that study is currently unpublished (Molinario et al.).
Still, as a clinician, I have already found the model useful. Sitting with a couple or an individual, it has helped me to see (or at least think I see) why someone has had an affair or turned away from their marriage now rather than three years ago or in some completely different phase of life. That understanding (a shift in a partner’s perceived merit, a decrease in a partner’s appreciation, a change in the focus of someone’s quest for significance) helps me to see what would need to change or to be undone to save the relationship. The model doesn’t always work. Those three variables do not encompass all that can break down in a relationship. But it is a useful lens for those of us trying to figure out what has gone wrong in a relationship. Whether the model can meaningfully predict who will fall in love and when remains to be seen.
Arie W. Kruglanski
[Opens in a new window]Arie W. Kruglanski
, Edward P. Lemay
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What is love actually? A Christmas romantic comedy (Love Actually, 2003), a question for the ages, an eternal mystery? It’s not that we lack answers. We have too many answers – from poets, philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists – each answering the question in their own language. Kruglanski and colleagues offer a new answer, one that is powerful, intriguing, and certainly a rarity in ideas about love, an answer that generates testable hypotheses. There are important ideas here, even if their answer, as seems to be true of all attempts to define love, remains a partial one.
They offer a model of love as a quest for significance. Or more precisely, as the authors describe it in their title, “a formula for love.” Rather than attempting to define love, they attempt to define the conditions under which love may arise. As they put it, “According to this model, a partner’s perceived merits and their appreciation of the actor combine with the actor’s magnitude of significance quest to determine the likelihood of the actor falling in love with the partner.” While the authors build bridges to others who have attempted to define the state of love into which the actor falls, in the end, love itself remains elusive. But perhaps defining love as the state that occurs when the conditions of the model are met is enough. We should not ask for the moon.
The model is one facet of a larger enterprise – what the authors have called Significance-Quest Theory, a theory that places the desire for significance at the center of human striving, though it operates with varying intensity among individuals and in a particular individual over time. In applying the theory to love, the authors make what has become the standard first move in almost all “scientific” explanations of human behavior since Freud – what you think you are doing and what you think you want is not what you’re actually doing and what you actually want. The model is not an experience-near picture of a lover’s motivation, at least for most lovers. While many would recognize the appeal of merit and appreciation, most would not recognize a fundamental wish to increase their own sense of significance in their desire for their beloved. Desire for a person and desire for significance do not easily collapse into a unitary longing. The relationship between motivation and desire is not at all straightforward. But that complexity points us back to the fact that Kruglanski and colleagues present a formula to specify the necessary conditions for love, rather than an attempt to tell us what love is.
Is the formula correct? The authors offer several hypotheses implied by their theory to test against “available evidence.” The evidence they present is consistent with the theory and supportive of it, but as they point out, it mainly examines indirect proxies for love and its presumed consequences. There is more work to be done, which appears to be underway. I do wonder, however, whether, in the end, the evidence will remain suggestive rather than conclusive because of the slipperiness of the fundamental constructs. In this model, it is clear that merit is partly but not completely culturally determined. It is also to some degree idiosyncratic to the individual lover. Like beauty, merit is in the eye of the beholder. We can define cultural norms for what is deemed meritorious, but many lovers will find merit in qualities that have acquired particular significance to them through their particular paths through life. But once we acknowledge the subjectiveness of merit, we risk ending up with a circular construct: lovers desire what has merit in their eyes, and we can know what has merit in their eyes by what they desire.
There is also difficulty in determining an individual’s “significance-quest magnitude,” an important variable in the formula. Is there any way to score it other than self-reports? And is self-knowledge about this drive sufficiently present in most people to trust their reports? The authors reference one study that includes a measure of significance quest, but that study is currently unpublished (Molinario et al.).
Still, as a clinician, I have already found the model useful. Sitting with a couple or an individual, it has helped me to see (or at least think I see) why someone has had an affair or turned away from their marriage now rather than three years ago or in some completely different phase of life. That understanding (a shift in a partner’s perceived merit, a decrease in a partner’s appreciation, a change in the focus of someone’s quest for significance) helps me to see what would need to change or to be undone to save the relationship. The model doesn’t always work. Those three variables do not encompass all that can break down in a relationship. But it is a useful lens for those of us trying to figure out what has gone wrong in a relationship. Whether the model can meaningfully predict who will fall in love and when remains to be seen.
Financial support
The author received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests
None.