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CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS RESEARCH: A RESOURCE FOR COUPLE AND FAMILY THERAPISTS
Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, Jan 2004 by Hendrick, Susan S
My own research for more than 20 years has been largely a collaborative research program with Clyde Hendrick that has focused on love attitudes, sexual attitudes, and relationship satisfaction. Our love research is highlighted in this article as an example-and only an example-of what close relationships research has to offer couple and family researchers and therapists. Although the focus is on the couple rather than the family, systemic therapists will be able to apply the dyadic concepts to the dyads who form subsystems within the larger systems that couple and family therapists encounter.
RESEARCH ON LOVE
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Before discussing our love attitudes research, it is important to be acquainted with some of the other close relationships approaches to love, because this broader view exemplifies the multidimensional theoretical approach to concepts that characterizes close relationships research. Love is not simply attachment, nor is it simply my own work on love. And the more conceptual tools that couple and family therapists have to choose from, the more likely they are to find close relationships research useful to their own work.
Passionate and Companionate Love
Social psychologists Ellen Berscheid and Elaine Hatfield (formerly Walster; 1978) developed the contrasting perspectives of passionate love (high emotional intensity-the blazing fire of love) and companionate love (consistent, if not intense emotion-the glowing embers of love). This approach is either/or in the sense that the excitement of passionate love early in a relationship evolves naturally into the more secure stability of companionate love as a relationship endures over time. Research on passionate love continued with development of the Passionate Love Scale (Hatfield & Sprecher, 1986). Although this sort of evolution of love over time may capture the reality of some couples, other research (S. Hendrick & Hendrick, 1993) indicates that many couples value highly both passionate and companionate love, more of a both/and approach. Indeed Noller (1996) concluded that the "combination of passionate and companionate love is likely to be related to the love that supports marriage and family" (p. 101).
Prototype Approaches
Fehr (1988, 1993, 1994) has employed a prototype perspective, in which a concept (in this case, love) is studied based on its "best example" or "best set of features." Across several research studies, she and her colleagues (see also Fehr & Russell, 1991) found that when asked to list features of love and rate the typicality of various features, people consistently found companionate features to be more important than passionate ones and also rated maternal love, parental love, and friendship as more prototypical of love than passionate or more general romantic love. Fehr (1993) proposed that people distinguish between passionate love and companionate love, with the former more particularized to one significant other person and the latter more generalized to several types of love relationships.
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