Healthy Relationships

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What's Your Love Story?

Author/s: Robert J. Sternberg Issue: July, 2000

In your relationship, are you a cop, a comedian, a prince or a martyr? Robert J. Sternberg, Ph.D., reveals how you can use your "love story" to find your perfect match.

Relationships can be as unpredictable as the most suspense-filled mystery novel. Why do some couples live happily ever after, while others are as star-crossed as Romeo and Juliet? Why do we often seem destined to relive the same romantic mistakes over and over, following the same script with different people in different places, as if the fate of our relationships, from courtship to demise, were written at birth?

Perhaps because, in essence, it is. As much as psychologists have attempted to explain the mysteries of love through scientific laws and theories, it turns out that the best mirrors of the romantic experience may be Wuthering

Heights, Casablanca and General Hospital. At some level, lay people recognize what many psychologists don't: that the love between two people follows a story. If we want to understand love, we have to understand the stories that dictate our beliefs and expectations of love. These stories, which we start to write as children, predict the patterns of our romantic experiences time and time again. Luckily, we can learn to rewrite them.

I came up with the theory of love as a story because I was dissatisfied not only with other people's work on love, but also with my own. I had initially proposed a triangular theory of love, suggesting that it comprises three elements: intimacy, passion and commitment. Different loving relationships have different combinations of these elements. Complete love requires all three elements. But the theory leaves an important question unanswered: what makes a person the kind of lover they are? And what attracts them to other lovers? I had to dig deeper to understand the love's origins. I found them in stories.

My research, which incorporates studies performed over the study showed. But some stories seem to predict doom more than others: the business, collectibles, government, horror, mystery, police ("I believe it is necessary to watch your partner's every move" or "My partner often calls me several times a day to ask what I am doing"), recovery ("I often find myself helping people get their life back in order" or "I need someone to help me recover from my painful past"), science fiction ("I often find myself attracted to individuals who have unusual and strange characteristics") and theater stories ("I think my relationships are like plays" or "I often find myself attracted to partners who play different roles").

How Stories Spin Our Relationships

When you talk to two people who have just split up, their breakup stories often sound like depictions of two completely different relationships. In a sense, they are. Each partner has his or her own story to tell.

Most important to a healthy, happy relationship is that both partners have compatible stories--that is, compatible expectations. Indeed, a 1998 study conducted with Mahzad Hojjat, Ph.D., and Michael Barnes, Ph.D., indicated that the more similar couples' stories were, the happier they were together.