Chapter 14 The Major Motives of Life: Food, Love, Sex, and work 493attachment styles can create cascading effects
on adult relationships. Children who are treated
poorly early in life and lack secure attachments
may end up on a pathway that makes commit-
ted relationships difficult. As children, they have
trouble regulating negative emotions; as teenagers,
they have trouble dealing with and recovering from
conflict with their peers; as adults, they tend to pro-
tect themselves by becoming the less-committed
partner in their relationships. If these individuals
are lucky enough to get into a relationship with a
securely attached partner, however, these vulner-
abilities in maintaining a stable partnership can be
overcome (Oriña et al., 2011; Simpson, Collins, &
Salvatore, 2011).The Ingredients of Love. When people are
asked to define the key ingredients of love, most
agree that it is a mix of passion, intimacy, and
commitment (Lemieux & Hale, 2000). Intimacy
is based on deep knowledge of the other person,
which accumulates gradually, but passion is based
on emotion, which is generated by novelty and
change. That is why passion is usually highest at
the beginning of a relationship, when two people
begin to disclose things about themselves to each
other, and lowest when knowledge of the other
person’s beliefs and habits is at its maximum, when
it seems that there is nothing left to learn about the
beloved.
Nonetheless, according to an analysis of a
large number of adult couples and a meta-analysis
of 25 studies of couples in long- and short-term
relationships, romantic love can persist for many
years and is strongly associated with a couple’s
happiness. What diminishes among these happy
couples is that part of romantic love that can
foster obsessiveness, constant thinking and wor-
rying about the loved one and the relationship
(Acevedo & Aron, 2009).
Biological factors such as the brain’s opiate
system may contribute to early passion, as we
noted, but most psychologists believe that the
ability to sustain a long and intimate love rela-
tionship has more to do with a couple’s attitudes,
values, and balance of power than with genes or
hormones. One of the most important psycho-
logical predictors of satisfaction in long-term rela-
tionships is the perception, by both partners, that
the relationship is fair, rewarding, and balanced.
Partners who feel over-benefited (getting more
than they are giving) tend to feel guilty; those
who feel under-benefited (not getting what they
feel they deserve) tend to feel resentful and angry
(Pillemer, Hatfield, & Sprecher, 2008). A couple
may tootle along comfortably until a stressful
event—such as the arrival of children, seriousbe close but worry that their partners will leave
them. Other people often describe them as clingy,
which may be why they are more likely than se-
cure lovers to suffer from unrequited love. Their
anxiety is physiological as much as psychological:
Their levels of cortisol (a stress hormone) spike
when they feel the relationship is threatened—for
example, when the partner travels somewhere
without them—and take longer to calm down
(Pietromonaco, DeBuse, & Powers, 2013).
Where do these differences come from?
According to the attachment theory of love, people’s
attachment styles as adults derive in large part
from how their parents cared for them (Dinero et
al., 2008; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007). Children
form internal “working models” of relationships:
Can I trust others? Am I worthy of being loved?
Will my parents leave me? If a child’s parents are
cold and rejecting and provide little or no emo-
tional and physical comfort, the child learns to
expect other relationships to be the same. If chil-
dren form secure attachments to trusted parents,
they become more trusting of others, expecting
to form other secure attachments with friends
and lovers in adulthood (Feeney & Cassidy,
2003).
However, a child’s own temperament and ge-
netic predispositions could also help account for
the consistency of attachment styles from child-
hood to adulthood, as well as for the working
models of relationships that are formed during
childhood (Fraley et al., 2011; Gillath et al., 2008).
A child who is temperamentally fearful or difficult
may reject even the kindest parent’s efforts to con-
sole and cuddle (see Chapter 3). That child may
therefore come to feel anxious or ambivalent in
his or her adult relationships.
The Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk
and Adaptation has followed a large sample of
children from birth to adulthood, to see how early“My preference is for someone who’s
afraid of closeness, like me.”© The New Yorker Collection, 1989 Robert
weber
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