The target article presents a multiplicative formula for the experience of romantic love that is intended to apply across the lifespan of relationships. It suggests that people fall in love and stay in love when prospective/actual romantic partners satisfy personal quests for significance (i.e., self-worth or mattering). Conversely, people fail to fall in love, or fall out of love, when prospective/actual romantic partners frustrate such quests. The love formula thus posits that romantic partners satisfy significance quests and fuel feelings of romantic love when they are high on conventional/objective merit (e.g., physical attractiveness), high on appreciation (e.g., supportiveness), or high on both merit and appreciation. In contrast, partners thwart quests for significance and extinguish feelings of love when they are low on both merit and appreciation.

The target article’s most provocative argument involves the love formula’s compensation logic. For instance, a partner’s high capacity for caring (i.e., a surplus in appreciation) can make up for an inauspicious career (i.e., a deficiency in merit), a partner’s undeniable physical attractiveness (i.e., a surplus in merit) could make up for ingratitude (i.e., a deficiency in appreciation), or an individual’s strong quest for significance could make up for a partner’s inauspicious career or selfishness. We suggest that the compensatory logic of the love formula may better describe romantic relationship initiation than maintenance. Why would this be the case?

Our first piece of evidence involves the stakes for the self. People invest more of themselves in romantic relationships as relationships become more interdependent. Over time, people increasingly include their partner’s qualities as part of their own self-concepts (Aron, Aron, & Smollan, Reference Aron, Aron and Smollan1992), rely on their partner for the pursuit of their personal goals (Fitzsimons, Finkel, & van Dellen, Reference Fitzsimons, Finkel and van Dellen2015), and define their worth through their partner’s feelings and behavior toward them (Murray et al., Reference Murray, Griffin, Rose and Bellavia2003b; Slotter, Gardner, & Finkel, Reference Slotter, Gardner and Finkel2010). Because established relationships put more of the self at stake, the success/failure of one’s personal quest for significance should more strongly depend on one’s capacity to maintain cherished relationships than form new ones (Finkel et al., Reference Finkel, Hui, Carswell and Larson2014).

Our second piece of evidence involves the ease of keeping evaluations of a partner’s merit and appreciation mentally separate. The logic of the love formula requires that people independently gauge partner merit and appreciation, which allows a surplus in one to compensate for a deficit in the other. However, when people’s personal quest for significance is invested in the maintenance of an established, committed relationship, this mental separation becomes difficult to maintain. People do not want to believe that meritorious or valued partners would hurt them. Indeed, motivated cognitive and behavioral processes protect people from reaching this conclusion. The risk-regulation model contends people self-protectively hedge their bets in established relationships – only allowing themselves to revel in their partner’s merit when they trust in their partner’s appreciation of them (Murray, Holmes, & Collins, Reference Murray, Holmes and Collins2006; Murray et al., Reference Murray, Bellavia, Rose and Griffin2003a; Murray & Pascuzzi, Reference Murray and Pascuzzi2024). In other words, when Jamie is feeling unappreciated by Quinn, she is likely to take less comfort in Quinn’s intelligence or attractiveness, not more. For instance, priming a romantic partner’s lack of appreciation elicits tendencies to depreciate or demerit that same partner, whether by desiring greater distance from them (Gillath et al., Reference Gillath, Mikulincer, Birnbaum and Shaver2008; Kane et al., Reference Kane, Mc Call, Collins and Blascovich2012; Murray et al., Reference Murray, Derrick, Leder and Holmes2008) or by valuing them less as a romantic partner (Finkenauer et al., Reference Finkenauer, Kerkhof, Righetti and Branje2009; Leong et al., Reference Leong, Chen, Fung, Bond, Siu and Zhu2020; Murray et al., Reference Murray, Holmes and Griffin2000). In addition, as the target article’s discussion of divorce correlates suggests, factors such as imprisonment or job loss that diminish partner merit also simultaneously diminish their capacity to provide reassurance or support. Therefore, rather than being interchangeable, evaluations of partner merit and partner appreciation may be highly contingent on one another in established relationships.

The third piece of evidence involves the paradoxical effects of stronger significance quests. The formula for love suggests that stronger quests for significance can compensate for low levels of partner merit or appreciation. In other words, someone who needs more validation of their worth or mattering should be more likely to stay in love than someone who needs less validation. The authors suggest that this is because the needier person should be more motivated, or better able, to tolerate times when their partner is less appreciative or meritorious. A needier person should also more readily compensate for deficiencies in partner appreciation with merit (or vice versa), so that the relationship can continue to affirm their personal significance. We agree with the target article in its assessment that low self-esteem is one way to characterize a strong need for significance. Low self-esteem people are more likely to doubt their worth or mattering than high self-esteem people (Leary & Baumeister, Reference Leary, Baumeister and Zanna2000). Following the logic of the love model, low self-esteem people, more than high self-esteem people, should better tolerate times when their partner is low in merit or appreciation and more readily compensate for deficiencies in one with the other. However, the literature on self-esteem in relationships points to the opposite conclusion (Cameron & Granger, Reference Cameron and Granger2019; Wood et al., Reference Wood, Forest, Frisen, Murray, Holmes and McNulty2024). Relative to highs, low self-esteem people are more likely to struggle to keep perceptions of partner merit and appreciation mentally separate. In fact, focusing on their partner’s greater merit actually makes lows feel less appreciated (Murray et al., Reference Murray, Rose, Holmes, Derrick, Podchaski, Bellavia and Griffin2005). Rather than being desperate to maintain romantic relationships, low self-esteem people seem more likely to dissolve them (Luciano & Orth, Reference Luciano and Orth2017). And relative to highs, low self-esteem people are more likely to protect themselves against the short-term pain of feeling unappreciated by their partner by finding less to love in them (Murray et al., Reference Murray, Derrick, Leder and Holmes2008). Thus, people with stronger personal quests for significance may have a harder time sustaining romantic love. Heightened pressures to self-protect in established relationships make it harder for them to weather the times when their partner falls short on appreciation or merit.

In conclusion, partner merit and appreciation may be less interchangeable in inspiring love when people’s quest for significance is bound up in the maintenance rather than the pursuit of a romantic relationship.