According to psychology, we fall in love three times, in different ways, during our life .
Psychological theories on love
Different psychological theories on love include many aspects of the human being: physical and chemical, neuropsychological, behavioral, social, and even a little magical theories. Because in reality love is the foundation of our life and involves an infinite number of dimensions, and for this reason, it is difficult to define and understand. The heart cannot be commanded, much less programmed!
Indeed, very often it is love that is stronger than us and guides our actions, and for this very reason, it can be enormous, dizzying, passionate, distressing, painful, scary, pleasant, serene, and much more.
Love shakes our foundations and has the power to make us question everything, it can change our lives and push us in very different directions from our plans, sometimes it can even take us to the other side of the planet. However, although it is very intriguing, we don’t know what the feeling of love is for to perpetuate the human species. Or is it a social and mental construct? Something deeper, perhaps?
Research in psychology
In any case, research in psychology and neurology teaches us that love is a mental process that involves the unconscious and the subconscious. And according to the scientific world, we fall in love three times in our life. This doesn’t mean that we fall in love with three different people, but that we fall in love in three different ways and follow the same pattern. It can be with the same person, or with multiple people: life experiences are unique, just like individuals.
The theory of the three types of love
According to anthropologist Helen Fisher, not all of us experience love in the same way and very often the same person can experience different types of love depending on the people with whom they have a relationship.
For example, for many people love and passion could have different nuances, or for some people love could be something sweet and sensitive, and for others tumultuous and passionate, but full of ups and downs. However, these types of love and emotions are not just theory: the anthropologist’s team has studied for a long time the cognitive and biological processes that underlie love, finding a pattern underlying the different emotions found in the different phases of romantic relationships. In this way, Helen Fisher created a sort of neurobiological map of the different love experiences, which she then connected with the social and relational realities of the external world.
In this way, Fisher hypothesized the existence of 3 types of love which she called desire, passion, and commitment (in English: lust, passion, commitment).
Wish
We can thus describe desire as that form of love that we should all be able to understand because it is a purely instinctive response. This type of love is linked to the desire for sexuality and is a type of feeling that is instant and based on physical attraction. We could translate it from English as lust.
It is a transitory type of feeling, constantly changing in the person, and can leave as easily as it came. It has no form of attachment or emotional involvement but is completely linked to sexual attraction. This type of feeling, Helen Fisher studied, is one of the most basic feelings also found in the reptilian brain.
Passion
The second type of love is linked to passion, it is a typical feeling of the mammalian brain and implies an emotional connection between people. Two people united by passion are considered to be in love with each other and eager to spend time together continuously. Passion implies a high degree of emotional chemistry and is cultivated by trying to foment novelty and spontaneity within the couple. Passion darkens the mind and awakens the senses, it makes us do things we would never have imagined doing, while caught up in the moment we make promises of eternal love and project utopian futures for the relationship.
However, passion has an expiry date: once the novelty and the initial involvement have worn off, which can last even more than a year, the passion fades and the people involved in this relationship can decide not to continue. It’s a bit as if reason took over again and made us see who the other person is.
At that point, the relationship can move forward if the two people are truly compatible and manage to live new experiences together as a source of passion and love, but otherwise, the story will be doomed to fail. This is the case, for example, of the person who falls madly in love with someone and after a short time moves in together, but when this happens he discovers that he is not that much in love after all. Or of someone who declares eternal love but after 4 months he discovers that in reality, it was just a mistake. Passion is a beautiful feeling that overturns the senses and the soul, but you have to be careful when you feel it, and above all give it time, so as not to run the risk of getting too hurt.
I commit
Commitment emerges when two people remain passionate long enough, managing to overcome moments of crisis, because there is such strong compatibility that it allows new experiences to be shared indefinitely. This type of love is very strong and deep but at the same time it happens very rarely in people’s lives (but it exists, don’t worry!).
Commitment is that type of mature love, in which you love and respect both yourself and your partner with the associated and connected defects. Some research (for example well, he felt the sixth sense) has highlighted how for couples who reach this level of commitment, there is such a strong neuronal connection that their sense of self is fused with that of the other. In this type of relationship, the feeling of commitment and compromise arises with the idea that the relationship will last forever.
The various types of love according to age
Other types of studies, however, seem to underline how in our life we only fall in love 3 times and each of these represents a step towards a more complete and mature love. We will thus have an idealistic or fairytale love, a problematic love, and a true and unexpected love. Let’s look at them more closely.
Idealistic or fairytale love
Idealistic love is the first step towards happiness. This type of love is what is experienced by younger people between adolescence and a little later. Many might call it first love. That love is characterized by innocence, by dreams, by a shrewd heart open to what happens. They are the first experiences, the first times of everything characterized by butterflies in the stomach and all the emotions that are experienced on the surface of the skin (and heart). It is a type of love that is beautiful to experience because it opens the doors to the discovery of true love, but it is still an immature love that does not know what exactly this feeling is since it experiences it through social constructs or projections from our friends, acquaintances or family, who have passed down to us the idea of a love that is not necessarily truthful.
In the same way, in fact, at this age, one does not only experience love understood as a romantic relationship, but also friendships and family relationships. It is an all-encompassing feeling that presses in the hope of being wonderful and eternal and with the desire not to imitate the mistakes of others (for example quarrels in the family or with friends, parental divorce, etc.).
Precisely this last point, on the basis of idealized love, will be the one that can bring the most pain, once this type of relationship clashes with reality. Because if it is true that this love allows us to experience great stories made of discoveries and innocence, it is also true that when we find ourselves in a story far from what we had imagined or simply at the end of the relationship, everything this imagination of ours could fall to pieces and shatter, just like our heart. This clash with reality, however painful and inevitable it is, is fundamental because it allows us to understand that love is possible that it can be a wonderful (but also painful) adventure, and that above all it must be experienced in the real world.