Romantic love

Romantic love is probably the most complex of all emotions. Unlike other emotions, which often involve only the person herself, romantic love involves the dynamic connection between two people.

The two major frameworks refer to (1) the overall value of the beloved in relation to other people, and (2) the scales determining this overall value. In the first framework, the beloved receives a far higher value than other people get. The second framework is composed of two subscales: the comparative, nonrelational scale that measures the value of the beloved's proper­ties as they stand on their own, and the noncomparative, suitability scale that refers to features determining the quality of the relationship between the two partners.

It is clear that romantic love attaches greater value to the beloved than to other people. This value does not conflict with humility, but rather complements it, since it refers to realms requir­ing investment of time, efforts, and resources that one person cannot spread much beyond those who are very close to him/her. This does not mean that such weight overcomes all considera­tions concerning other people.

At the basis of romantic love, there is a global, noncomparative, positive evaluation of the beloved. By making this evaluation, lovers do not necessarily distort reality nor are they com­pletely blind to the beloved's faults; they simply do not consider many, but not all, of such faults to be significant and sometimes they even perceive them to be charming. The psychological mechanism underlying love does not merely evaluate the object's characteristics as good or bad, but also gives each characteristic a relative weight.This relative weight expresses the significance we attribute to each characteristic and accordingly establishes the order of priority underlying the emotional experience.

There are psychological findings supporting this conceptualization of love. Lisa Neff and Benjamin Karney proposed a model of global adoration and specific accuracy in love, whereby spouses demonstrate a positive bias in global perception of their partners, such as being “won­derful,” yet are able to display greater accuracy in their perception of their partners' specific attributes, such as being not punctual. In this model, spousal love may be conceived as a hierar­chically organized experience giving different relative weight to the global characteristic than to the specific ones. Spouses appear to rate the positive perceptions of their partners as more important for the relationship than their negative perceptions. In this manner, an accurate per­ception of a partner's specific traits and abilities would not interfere with the global belief that one's partner is a wonderful person (Neff and Karney, 2003, 2005). Since importance is a mat­ter of degree, the impact of specific negative perceptions upon the positive global one depends upon many personal and contextual features.

A related significant difference between humility and romantic love concerns the fact that humility is a stable attitude that is not so sensitive to specific circumstances and changes and does not always have immediate behavioral implications. Romantic love is quite different—it is an ongoing attitude highly sensitive to specific circumstances and changes and involves ongoing processes of development (or deterioration). Accordingly, whereas humble people are likely to remain humble for the rest of their lives, lovers often replace their beloveds. Changes in lovers or their beloveds, as well as changes in life circumstances, can end love; in this sense, life often wins over love. However, this does not imply that the initial love was not genuine. In the beautiful words of Edna St.Vincent Millay:“After all, my erstwhile dear, My no longer cherished, Need we say it was not love, Just because it perished?”

The case of humility is different. Life can hardly change one's humility, since humility is much less sensitive to life circumstances. Thus, people will not stop being humble in light of their significant successes or failures, or the successes and failures of those around them. Hence, we would usually say that it was not humility, if it perished. Indeed, while it is rare to find a humble person who stops being so, it is common to find a lover who replaces his or her beloved with someone else.

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