The Anatomy of Love
Commitment comes in levels. Sometimes couples start off with a strong commitment that gets weaker, but usually it increases as people invest more in a relationship (Rusbult & Buunk, 1993). You won’t be surprised to learn, then, that people who are engaged or married report more commitment than do people who are only dating (Stanley & Markman, 1992). But in today’s topsy-turvy world of chaos and upset does commitment really mean so very much? Actually it does; couples who report more commitment have relationships that last longer, on average (Cate & Lloyd, 1992), and are also more willing to forgive the other person, leading to healthier and happier lives (Karremans, Van Lange, Ouwerkerk & Kluwer, 2003). Not bad, eh?
One of the secrets to building commitment in relationships is to convince your partner that you really like them. A lot. People who are confident that their partner likes them seem pretty unshakeable about their relationships, to the point that they will engage in what John Holmes terms “knights move thinking”. If you tell them that their partner is angry at them, that their partner has some horrendous fault, or thinks that THEY have a horrendous fault, they report liking their partner, if anything, more than they did before. Told, for instance, that their partner is painfully quiet ("two hours, three syllables. Honest to heck"), they might make a knights move, acknowledging the fault, but connect it to a greater virtue: “Ah yes, he’s the strong silent type.” People who aren’t so sure about their partner (which, in practical terms, is often people with lower self esteem) behave quite differently. Faced with a challenge, they will often start backing out and proactively distancing themselves, seemingly preparing to reject their partner before they themselves can be humiliatingly rejected (Murray, Holmes & Griffin, 1996).
On the darker side, Caryl Rusbult and John Martz (1995) interviewed battered women at a shelter, and found that feelings of commitment predicted who would return to their partner immediately on leaving the shelter. Where did this misplaced commitment come from you ask? It was higher in women who had few financial alternatives to their partner, were more heavily invested in their relationship (i.e., they were married), and who reported less severe abuse. Forgiveness is a good thing, but when we are financially or emotionally trapped into giving them, good things often do not stay so.
Intimacy
“Seems like you're the only one who knows what it's like to be me.
…
Someone I'll always laugh with, even at my worst, I'm best with you.”
-The Rembrandts
Intimacy, more so than the other parts of love, is hard to put your finger on. One can have an intimate relationship with one’s spouse, one’s friend, one’s sibling, or one’s hair dresser (you’d be amazed). It doesn’t involve the violent pyrotechnics of passionate love, but is rather a more stable and warm sense of emotional closeness. The key active ingredient, as it turns out, seems to be self revelation. As you get to know somebody you tend to start by revealing fairly trivial things about yourself (“I’m Canadian”), and then as the relationship develops you reveal yourself more broadly (“I also like skiing”), and also more deeply, unveiling things you normally hide about yourself (“I’m afraid of my boss”). Eventually, at the higher peaks of intimacy, one shares one’s deepest hopes and fears (“I’m also afraid of maple syrup”).
Indeed, you can run an experiment like so: Take two strangers, place in lab, and start them interviewing each other. Start with mundane topics (“where are you from?”) before gradually blending in more intimate questions. Keep stirring for half an hour or so, and a loose friendship should start to form (Collins & Milller, 1994). Real relationships tend to follow just such a pattern early on, with tit for tat exchanges of information that “broaden and deepen” over time (Altman & Taylor, 1973). Most people don’t feel comfortable spilling their guts to a person who hasn’t even given their name yet. If you reveal something to a stranger (“I wish I wasn’t reading this stupid article”) and they give nothing back, then perhaps you will infer that they don’t want to be any closer than they already are. From then on you’ll either shut down and stick to the weather, or possibly just feel shameless about pressing on. On the other hand, they might realize that you will interpret their silence as indifference, and try to avoid this by coming up with some tidbit in return (“you should have seen his last one. It was worse”). This may all seem a bit convoluted, but it can be unnerving when people get it wrong. The comedian Chris Rock, asked what it was like to be famous, once replied that it can give the impression of being on a second date the first time you met people. You don’t know them, but they feel like they know you, and so are immediately comfortable making deeper revelations than you normally expect from strangers.
