Romantic Love: Attraction, Attachment, and Relationship Loss

Introduction: How We Met

In my first year of college, I enjoyed an extremely passionate love relationship. We met during freshman orientation, and our initial chemistry was instant as well as mutual. On the night we met, he "rescued" me, so to speak, because one of the guys from my dormitory floor was annoying me by ignoring all of my very obvious signals that I was not particularly interested in talking to him.

I smiled the first time he looked at me, but to be perfectly honest, I would have smiled at almost anybody at that moment, because I was trying — unsuccessfully — to discourage the guy who would not leave me alone. The idea was simply to hint that I was not interested in him by making eye contact with someone else. My eventual boyfriend was very polite about it; after we smiled at each other, he drifted over to my chair. He could tell what was going on, and he was very polite about introducing himself. That was something I noticed right away, because I have always admired gentlemen.

He was already a junior at the time, which seemed to explain why he was so much more mature than my classmates, and that appealed to me very much. In addition, he had beautiful blue eyes, and it was quite obvious from his physique that he spent more time involved in athletics than simply drinking every night the way almost all the immature freshman guys seemed to. He happened to be wearing the same cologne as my father, which I have always loved.

Our relationship developed very quickly, and by the time classes were in full swing, we were dating exclusively. In fact, there were many times that I had difficulty paying attention in class because I found myself drifting off to thoughts of him, even though we were already spending most of our free time together. We met each other's families during the first holiday break, and we were even talking about living together for his senior year — and my sophomore year — after his roommate graduated that upcoming spring.

We were able to arrange to spend the summer together by applying for the same summer studies abroad program, but it was during that summer program that our relationship started to fall apart. One of the problems was that I began to see another side of him that was somewhat immature, especially in the way he could never admit that he was wrong. Instead, he would always find some excuse to be angry, so the topic of the original disagreement was obscured. There were also other compatibility issues, despite the fact that we always had a fabulous physical relationship — sometimes even more so after a fight.

How We Fell in Love

There were communication issues as well. I was very open with him about my thoughts and feelings, whereas he kept his thoughts to himself much of the time, and I began to feel lonely even when we were together. Ultimately, what really ruined things was his unjustified jealousy, which was all the more frustrating because he was the one who was interviewing for positions out of state, even though he knew I would have two more years of school remaining — years during which I had hoped we would live together until my own graduation.

To be perfectly honest, when I first arrived at college, I was quite ready to begin a new relationship. I had experienced one serious romantic relationship in high school, but it had been more than a year since I had known that kind of love. My first boyfriend had been my closest friend and confidante, and I missed having that kind of intimacy in my life.

On one hand, my good relationship with my family helped fill that void while I still lived at home; on the other hand, the closeness to which I was accustomed contributed to my feelings of loneliness during those first few weeks of college. When I met my boyfriend, much of that loneliness seemed to dissipate almost immediately, especially when we were together. This comports with the views of social scientists, who consider romantic love to be, fundamentally, a "manifestation of our need for affiliation with others" (Johnson & Marano, pp. 225, 227), especially as concerns the intimacy of romantic love.

Another factor that may have accounted for some of our chemistry is that we shared such a similar sense of humor; in fact, he reminded me very much of one of my best male friends from home, whom I adored. We had very similar taste in music, and I liked my boyfriend almost immediately, partly for that reason. In many ways, the friendship component of our relationship was almost identical to that which I shared with my best male friend from home, except that, in his case, I was never physically attracted to him. According to Robert J. Sternberg, the fact that we liked each other so much — wholly apart from the physical attraction — played a major role in our developing a romantic love (Trotter, p. 243).

In retrospect, it might not have been such a coincidence that my boyfriend was so drawn to me on the night we met, even if I was also, as he used to tell me, "just his type." Studies have established that men are particularly likely to be attracted to women whom they perceive to be selective; more specifically, men are most attracted to women who seem completely unavailable to other men but comparatively receptive to them (Hatfield, p. 207).

Hatfield demonstrated that men are much less likely to express a romantic interest in women who are seen as too receptive to many different men, but they are also less likely to express interest in women who seem completely unreceptive to any man (pp. 213, 216). The circumstances under which we met, therefore, could not have been more favorable from his perspective. The mechanism underlying this feature of male perception is a form of self-fulfilling stereotype, in which one elicits some of the behaviors and responses one expects to find by treating someone in a manner consistent with a prior presumption (Snyder, pp. 99, 100).

On my end, a similar phenomenon might have played a role in my immediate attraction to him. I was feeling quite uncomfortable and upset — almost to the point of wanting to leave the pub because of the unwanted attention from my dormitory mate — when he first approached me. While the studies into the effect of one's emotional state at the time of exposure to a potential suitor conducted by Berscheid and Walster related mainly to fear, it is nevertheless conceivable that my discomfort about my pushy classmate contributed to my receptivity toward my soon-to-be boyfriend in a very similar fashion.

At the time we met, I had already been disappointed by some of the behavior I had witnessed on the part of college-age males, partly because I lived in an all-freshman dormitory. Naturally, I had anticipated meeting more mature men in college, but I had almost overlooked the fact that at least half of the student body was barely older than I was. I was therefore quite thrilled when I realized that he was almost three full years older than me.

Why We Broke Up

Even though I may not necessarily have been looking for an older romantic partner, the fact that I considered it such a positive thing is very consistent with research into gender-based differences in mate selection: women are generally much more likely to be drawn to slightly older men, whereas men are comparatively more likely to prefer somewhat younger partners (Sprecher, p. 213).

Finally, it is equally conceivable that factors analogous to a self-fulfilling prophecy (Snyder, pp. 99, 100) accounted for my immediate perception — or expectation, rather — that he would be considerably more mature than men exactly my age. This observation is only corroborated by the fact that I discovered, much later in our relationship, that aspects of his immaturity had contributed to my growing disillusionment.

In retrospect, some of the factors that contributed to the eventual deterioration of our relationship actually had their roots in the very mechanisms that had facilitated our initial attraction, especially in my case. The immaturity issues that surfaced later were particularly disappointing to me precisely because my expectation at the beginning of the relationship was that he was more mature than men my age. In all likelihood, I accepted the premise that a man three years my senior would surely be more mature than anyone my age — in the manner described by Snyder (p. 99) — rather than observing his behavior more objectively on a continuing basis in order to confirm the validity of my initial expectations. The elements of immaturity that proved so disappointing at the end of our relationship had actually surfaced much earlier, but I excused them through a form of denial.

One of the most painful disappointments was the hostility and defensiveness he displayed virtually any time we had a disagreement. He reacted to any criticism or request for change as though it were a personal attack and a complete rejection of him, responding with either hostility or complete silence and emotional withdrawal. He admitted to me that this was at least partly a function of the way his mother had treated him, telling him he was "useless" or a "disgrace" for quite minor disappointments.

On an emotional level, I never felt that I was as important a part of his life as he was in mine, largely because he kept his feelings to himself — which he admitted was a response to his fear of rejection. While I do not know exactly how his mother responded to him in infancy and very early childhood, I would guess that she was, at least at times, somewhat inattentive during his earliest formative years. I draw this conclusion primarily by inference from the Bowlby and Ainsworth attachment studies linking inattentive and rejecting parental figures to insecurely attached children who may have difficulty with trust in romantic relationships (Johnson, pp. 226–7).

While the physical chemistry we shared persisted at a very high level throughout most of our relationship, it was not at all in proportion to the two other essential elements of Sternberg's Triangular Theory of Love (Trotter, pp. 243, 245): I was much more committed to the relationship than he was, which I discovered to my profound disappointment in connection with his plans to interview out of state instead of planning a life together between his graduation and mine. Needless to say, the emotional intimacy in our relationship was essentially one-way: only I shared my feelings and fears openly, while he kept his most intimate thoughts and feelings primarily to himself.

Furthermore, while the physical — that is, sexual — component of our relationship was always healthy in its own right, this was hardly mirrored by the non-sexual physical expression of intimacy. He was always uncomfortable with public displays of affection and exhibited very little inclination toward — or even tolerance for — non-sexual, affectionate touching. He expected any physical expression to lead, necessarily, to overt sexuality, and he felt rejected or "teased" otherwise.

Despite the fact that many of the factors contributing to my dissatisfaction had surfaced much earlier, it took me far longer to "fall out of love" than it had taken to become swept away by the euphoria I experienced when we first met. According to Sternberg, this is typical of the deterioration of love as compared to its quick onset — a process that, in many respects, mirrors the rapid development of other addictive behaviors (Trotter, p. 244).

Conclusion: The Nature of Romantic Love

There is perhaps no human urge that is more universal or timeless than the pursuit of love, reflected as poignantly in contemporary Western music as in two-thousand-year-old poems from the Far East.