Theories of Love

Okay, let's start with something positive. Love through the lens of psychology. In Western society, at least, love is thought to be the deepest and most meaningful of emotions. It is the Alpha and the Omega. The best of the best. Love rates higher than happiness. Love can be viewed in a number of ways, as a multifaceted attitude, an emotion, a need, interpersonal attraction, or even simply a series of behaviors initiated by a chemical response in the brain. This post will talk about how psychology views love and a bit on common opinion. That way, it can both help you figure out how love should work in your stories, and also help you decide what your characters believe.

So, on to the actual theories (if you're still with me):

Biological View

If you take the biological view, love is like hunger or thirst and satisfies the same end goal as lust: child production. Lust makes you take notice of potential mates, romantic attraction makes you focus on a mate, and attachment leads you to actually tolerate your mate and the child long enough to rear it! Not exactly a glorious explanation of love though it may be an opinion that you, or one of your characters, might hold. Characters who take this rather pragmatic view are probably less likely to lose their head or even fall in love in the first place. They may well choose their mates with a bit more of a practical eye. Of course, people can be the biggest cynics in the world and get bitten by the love-bug but they're less likely to have many romantic 'illusions'.

Psychological Theory

One of the leading theories on the psychological side, is Sternberg's Triangular Theory of Love. Basically, love is made up of three different things: intimacy (the extent to which they confide in each other alongside feelings of bondedness), commitment (expectation of permanency and shared achievements and plans), and passion (the heart hammering and sexual side of things).


Nonlove is a sense of absence of all those positive qualities of love. The partners may fake an attachment in public but generally have little to do with each other.

Liking/friendship is a sense of truly bonding with someone, feeling close to them, and enjoying their company, but without any intense passion or even long-term commitment. While they may be quite upset to learn the other will be leaving soon, they can readily come to terms with it, because it's simply the loss of a companion that bothers them and not the loss of a future together.

Infatuated love is the pure, whirlwind passion that is most commonly found in novels, particularly Fantasy novels involving squabbling characters with nothing in common. This can generally disappear quite quickly as it lacks the long-term commitment or even the deep understanding and bonding with the other partner to sustain it. Of course, over time, infatuated love can become another form of love as other aspects develop. Some people can become quite addicted to the heady experiences of infatuation and jump from bed to bed in pursuit of it. Generally, this form of love requires more than a one night stand - if the passion is high enough to warrant the title, then it's probably high enough to sustain itself over several nights, at least, if not weeks or even months. This is often a highly sought after love to experience on holiday as it lends a pleasant quality to the entire experience.

Empty love has neither intimacy nor passion to give it any real sparkle. It may be that a stronger form of love has dwindled over time or the individuals have had their marriage arranged for them or that they married for individual or communal gain.

Romantic love doesn't involve any long-term commitment but does involve a lot of sharing of pasts, hopes and dreams, as well as a passionate enjoyment of each other's company. This is the Western ideal of the start of the relationship. In fact, if most romantic movies and other such tales are to be believed, this is the Western ideal full stop as it's rare that long-term commitment gets a look-in. Heart rates go up at the sight of them, hours are spent in eager conversation, and people are eager to meet and greet again.

Companionate love is similar to friendship love but far more lasting as there is a long-term commitment of shared goals and values. It's lack of sexual desire makes this form of love quite looked down upon in modern, Western society as a relationship whose flame has gone out and some view it as hell to be stuck within it. However, while the passion may have gone out (or never existed in the first place) there is a deep affection and commitment leads to a strong bond of its own. This form of love might be found also in the platonic close friendships and family relationships that people have.

Fatuous love is rarely explored and it probably should be. This is probably what happens after all those Fantasy novels including hateful characters bedding each other probably winds up. Commitments are made (normally by the end of the book so as not to bore us with the lack of will-they/won't-they) after a whirlwind courtship and marriage. Trouble is, they've never really gotten the chance to get to know each other. Perhaps they preferred not to or simply didn't think of it at the time.

Consummate love is the so-called complete form of love as it comprises all three of the aspects in relatively equal dimensions. Their passion for each other hasn't dimmed (they're the eighty-year-olds that make the rest of us squick), they know so much about each other, and they can't imagine being with anyone else. They try to deal with their issues as they have an eye on the long-term but they do take a moment to indulge.

Of course, relationships can ebb and flow. Nonlove can become consummate love as the boxes are ticked off. An arrangement marriage can glow brightly as Empty Love becomes imbued with passion and intimacy over time.

The Character Therapist speaks on Abuser's mentality

Well, I came across this wonderful article and this one on what makes an abuser's mind tick. I've mentioned Jeannie's wonderful blog before but this is worth directing you to just because the post is quite thought-provoking. It's always difficult to understand why 'bad people' do the terrible things they do. What motivates them? How do they justify that?

I think I might do some of my own reading into the subject. See if I can find more reasons behind the abusive mind-set, in and around my scheduled posts on studies of emotion. Probably bore the hell out of you guys but I'm a psychology student so nyah! I can research / post what I want to.

*does the little dance of power*

Subtlety ... or Understatement Is The Win

Maybe it's just because I'm Australian but I've always preferred well-worded understatement to emotional outbursts - in film, books, and videogames. I think my preference might also be that the big screaming, gasping, gurgling, is normally a bit out-of-proportion or they don't sit well with the character, or they're melodramatic and theatrical rather than gutteral and grotesque. After all, most people will have their characters sob and wail and pull their hair in dramatic defiance - a beautiful icon of human emotion! But in truth humans are ugly when they're highly emotional.

Gutteral grief means eyes so swollen they're almost shut, twisted grimaces that almost make a mockery of the human features, red faces, hitching breath, possibly even choking on their own sobs which might lead to dry retching, and other signs of emotional ugliness.

Rage isn't handsomely defiant - it's again twisted exaggeration of the face, jaws clamped so tight the teeth go white, unattractively red faces, and a lurch of fear or confusion in the viewer's bellies. It also tends to spill over into actions people wish they hadn't done - particularly if they feel frustrated by other people's reactions to their rage. They lash out verbally leaving behind scars they'll regret or they bite their tongue and simmer in hate-stew or they smack, shove, or hit someone nearby. They might even 'kick the dog' so to speak and take it all out on some innocent schmuck. It's completely unattractive.

The heights of joy have a word attached to them: hysteria. Hysteric fits of giggling, confusing passages of disconnected thought, lots of loudness and hype, and a lot of very confused spectators who might be able to smilingly go along with it but feel somewhat disconnected.

Of course, normally what you get are angry declarations and ruminations that inspire or intimidate; weeping maidens that wrench the heart but make them all the more beautiful like kicked puppies whimpering into the night; or shining eyes and joyous exaltations. I mean, they do all have their place. Anger isn't always rage, sorrow can be sad yet sweet, and joy can be pure and simple, but the writer isn't always clear on that point. The reactions don't even necessarily fit the character or the personality (innocent girl returns home to find everyone spread about like crumbs from a toddler's cookie). So I guess I've just grown tired of it.

Also, they keep reaching these crescendoes, particularly of grief and rage, yet never seem to feel gutted by it. Remember the last time you were caught in the throes of grief or rage and how you felt afterwards. Relief, sometimes. Other times you just felt drained and numb. If your grief or rage keeps being triggered, well, there's something off with your state of mind and you're likely to do something crazy.

Generally, you're better off with under-stated unless you're dealing with theatrical cultures in my book. A few perfectly formed words can describe things so perfectly where lines of over-emphasis would just have me shrink back away from it. I've been reading a few WWII diaries and one of the women on the Home Front plum broke my heart. Everyone thinks she's so cheerful but in truth, she smiles because she doesn't know what else to do. The lines are dynamite and they're injected into otherwise homely scenes.

I think I'll do some research into some of the big emotions later and do up a few articles on them.

Daylight

I miss it. I get up at 7:30, bum around for an hour and a half, and that's the sunlight I actually see. Luckily I have big windows in the dining room / computer room where I normally sit in the mornings. Okay, so I normally get up at 8:00 because it's damn cold at 7:30 (a whole 8 degrees celsius! I'm sure all you folk in England would gasp at such frightfully chilly weather in winter!) and we try to keep our electricity bills down low by only putting on the ducted heading for a few hours a day.

Anyway, not the point. The point is that I get off work at 5:00PM most days, catch a bus, and by the time I get off the O'Bahn at home, it's 5:45 and it's been dark for almost half an hour. We go for a lot of walks, me and my fiance, but it's almost always dark at night. No wonder I'm so pale.

I never realized how early night fell in winter until I got this job. Now I crave Spring, not just for the weather, but for the sun!

Philosophical Rant: Comprehension of the Other

Forgive me for going off on a bit of a tangent but, trust me, it's relevant. I've realized that the greatest intimacy with another person comes when you take a step back from them. It sounds counter-intuitive, but bear with me as I explain. As infants, we viewed the world as an extension of ourselves. We couldn't comprehend that our perception of the world wasn't the world or that the people we met weren't simply a part of us. As we grew older, we began to divide the world into I and Not-I. Of course, this division has never been perfect and often we fall back into bad habits with people we are most familiar with.

How often have you made assumptions based off your own belief systems when dealing with someone else, even when that assumption doesn't fit anything else you know about that person? While you doubtless know on a literal level that other people are distinct organisms, wholly separate from us, and yet relating to us on a number of levels, how often do you actually acknowledge it with the people you're close to?

Sometimes consciously looking at another person and really acknowledging their complete and utter separation from us as thinking, feeling organisms in their own right, can really help you see them in a new light. Cutting through those assumptions, taking a step back, and going 'Wow, you are you' can really assist a person in understanding someone else better.

I think this is important to consider for writers on a number of levels. So:

First of all, I believe that all writers are philosophers and psychologists. We try to understand the human condition. What better way to do that then to learn more techniques on recognizing and understanding differences.

Secondly, it's an important point to note when writing your character's perspective. So often we make assumptions based on our own core beliefs, even when those core beliefs are not shared by the person in question. This is something that should happen with out POVs. They shouldn't be able to accurately guess everyone's motivation all the time. There should be a sense that the image being received (and shown to us) is a biased one.

Hopefully some of my rant made some sense. I'm new to trying to put philosophy into words.

Also, apologies to people who dislike the term 'organism'.

The Envy Bug

I've gotta admit that I'm quite envious of all those people who have 100+ Followers lurking on their pages. I'm not sure why. I'm sure I'd feel self-conscious about my work if I had a bigger audience. Well, okay, I am a bit of a prima donna (years in a youth theatre will do that to you) but I'm sure that I would at least be forced to edit. And worry about pacing myself so that I've got enough free space in my head left to make more posts.

Of course, I'd have to say that my cardinal sin is Envy. Fairly feline in that respect. It's primarily Attention that I envy. Attention and people socializing without me. Very much the only child that I used to be for 10 years before my little sister came along.

On the plus side, I can put thoroughly non-productive posts up about twine and not worry too much about irritating massive amounts of people.

So, what's your favourite? Twine or wool? And why?

Side Project: Call of Cthulhu Monographs part 2

Well, I guess the reason why I locked down last time was because I was up to the artwork part. Got to place all your own art in them. Being a writer, not a drawer, I naturally put that off. I'm finding it easier now that I'm forcing myself to do it.

Side Project: Call of Cthulhu Monographs

Well, I've dug out the old side project. A London Home Front monograph submission for Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game that I have left in a state of near-completion. Man, I've been working on it every so often over the past four years. On the plus side, it's looking good ... even if it hits my ego to see how long I've spent wasting about not finishing it. Ah well, it'll be worth it when it's done.

Advice on Developing Geological / Climate Development

For Rosentia Island, I knew I wanted a decidedly Australian flavor so when I built my world map I placed the continental mainland in a similar region to Australia and placed Rosentia Island along the southern coast of that continent. I knew I didn’t want to use a cut-and-paste Australia so I made sure the mainland continent is far larger than Australia (closer to Russia in size) and gave it a ‘spine’ of mountain ranges that cut through it suggesting far greater activity in the tectonic plates. Later, when developing my continent, these details alone will provide significant differences from Australia will give me license to world build creatively.

Since Rosentia Island isn’t far from the spine of mountain ranges, when I began looking at mineral resources I started researching volcanic rock. I settled on granite as I used to live near a Granite Island and knew a bit about the texture and look of granite. Since the mineral resources of Rosentia Island is simply background material, I used the internet to dig up some basic information on the formation of granite and some of its shapes (i.e. tors and rounded massifs). Books are better for more in-depth and precise information. I also researched what other rock might develop alongside granite but have so far had no luck.

The real world Granite Island, despite being both smaller and uninhabited, became a starting point for my Rosentia Island. I researched its geological beginnings to understand how Rosentia Island might have been shaped. The size of the island was determined through considering how long I wanted a journey across the island to take (2 – 3 hours from west to east).

The story needed both stretches of wilderness and a settlement that had lasted centuries. Some dark secrets have kept down the population but it needed something more to justify the expanse of wilderness. Thus I made it a harsher island. The rockiness in the middle defeats most attempts at crop lands and helps protect a few stretches of the open woodlands to the far west. The western and central parts are also higher above sea level and more hilly even in the wooded parts. This is also keeps a large stretch of the island relatively unpopulated as most can’t be bothered walking far up-hill. To reduce the impacts of deforestation I not only gave them a re-planting cultural custom (if you’re not clearing for farmland, replant for tomorrow) but also decided that in a bushfire-prone country, they would build their houses out of stone. It also helps that the temperate climate keeps that many seasons warm enough that fire places are unnecessary for much of the year.

Wikipedia can also be handy for designing islands and mainlands by looking at some of their categories. Check out coastal geography: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastal_geography

World Building Example: Rosentia Island Geography

This is an example of the geology and climate of Rosentia Island. I'm including this just so you can see how another writer sets up their world, what information they include or track down, etc. As I'm no geology student, some of this may be slightly off but I won't be quoting this in the novels itself so that should be okay.

Climate Region: Warm temperate. Temperature in winter averages 16C during the day and 6C at night with a risk of frost in low-lying areas. Temperature in summer averages 30C during the day and 20C at night with a risk of heat waves (generally high 30s due to coastal winds) for weeks at a time in the world-equivalent of January/February. This most often occurs when the weather comes down off the northern Ihlander salt plains. The mean sea surface temperature varies from 14C in winter to 19C in summer.

Ecological Regions: There are three primary biomes in Rosentia Island: scrubland, open forest, and coastal. Scrubland dominates the rockier, wind-swept regions to the west and center of the island. Open canopies of predominantly eucalypt forests cover the rolling hills in the outer and more eastern areas of the island. The coastal biomes obviously dominate the beaches.

Geological History: The granite that makes up Rosentia Island formed 10 km below the surface of the earth around 480 million years ago. The granite formed when layers of sediment were folded by the extreme pressure in the world’s crust alongside melting of the base rock by the extreme heat. Rosentia Island was located at a weak point in the world’s crust – a weak point formed by the footprint of an ancient spirit when it leapt from this world to the cosmos – which gave room for the molten rock to force its way upwards to the surface where it cooled and hardened into granite. Sediment has been layered over this land on a number of occasions, often linking it to the greater land mass, but a war between the weather spirits, sparked by the greed of a tidal princess for the storm prince’s electrical crown, caused the gradual erosion of the land, both exposing the granite beneath the dirt and eroding the land link between Rosentia Island and the main land.

Geography: The island is 14.7 kilometres long (2 hour walk) and 9.5 kilometers wide (1.5 hour walk). Large swathes of the south and west coastline are filled with steeply sloping granite cliffs. Along the north, particularly the north east, there are sandy surf-beaten beaches. The north-west Flycatcher Bluff (so-named after the old glass house of a long-dead Rosentia lady who grew carnivorous plants within) has an old lighthouse that overlooks the Shipgutter Cove whose rocky shallows consume any ship that ventures too near.

The ocean shelf in this region experiences cool-water non-tropical flows and these conditions favour growths of carbonate-producing bryozoans, coralline algae, sponges, molluscs, and asteroids. Much of the ocean shelf surrounding Rosentia Island is rocky but the region to the west has more pronounced granite features due to more severe weathering due to tidal / wind strength differences and due to the original geologic formation though the tidal influences is greatly reduced inside the cove. The original granite formation occurred less commonly to the eastern coast of Rosentia Island and this has allowed for a safer approach for ships and other vessels. There is also less severe weathering on the eastern side allowing for greater sediment build-up, a richer top soil, and thus more arable land.