Companionate Love in Long-Term Relationships
Romantic and companionate love give relationship satisfaction. However, the satisfaction tends to be greater for companionate love.
In most Western culture, there is a lot of emphasis on romantic love and people even make marriage decisions based on it. At the same time, it’s absence has become largely responsible for the termination of many marriages. While there’s so much talk about romantic love, there’s little talk about companionate love.
In fact, a lot of people have come to view romantic love as a source of achieving self-fulfillment and expression. Part of the lyrics of an old song says, “Love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage — you can’t have one without the other.” It seems that contemporary men and women have strongly bought into the idea coming from the words of this old song.
These ideological developments about love are despite the fact that most people believe that romantic love usually fades over time. And that in its place evolves a “warm afterglow” of a friendship-type love — companionate love.
Thus, it’s mindboggling why people consider romantic love to be so important and even going to the extent of basing their decision to…
