Passionate and companionate love

In psychology, a distinction is often made between two types of love:

Evolutionary theories suggest these two types of love exist for different purposes, and research from psychology and biology suggests they follow somewhat different mechanics. Both passionate and companionate love can contribute to relationship satisfaction. Passionate and companionate love can also be further distinguished from a third important type of love, compassionate love, which is love focused on caring about others.

Passionate love is also commonly called "romantic love" in some literature, especially fields of biology, but the term "passionate love" is most common in psychology. Academic literature on love has never adopted a universal terminology. Other terms compared to passionate love are "being in love", having a crush, obsessive love, limerence and eros.

Companionate love is commonly called "attachment" or compared to strong liking, friendship love or storge. This is usually considered the same as the "attachment system" from attachment theory, but not all authors agree.

Passionate love feelings are most commonly measured by psychologists with a questionnaire called the Passionate Love Scale (PLS). In the PLS form, Elaine Hatfield & Susan Sprecher specify the components of passionate love as:

Passionate love is linked to passion, as in intense emotion, for example, joy and fulfillment, but also anguish and agony. Hatfield notes that the original meaning of passion "was agony—as in Christ's passion." Rather than being an emotion itself, passionate love is said to be a motivational state which produces different emotions depending on the situation (e.g. joy when requited, and sadness when unrequited). A 2014 study of Iranian young adults found that the early stage of romantic love was associated with the brighter side of hypomania (elation, mental and physical activity, and positive social interaction) and better sleep quality, but also stronger symptoms of depression and anxiety. The authors conclude that romantic love is "not entirely a joyful and happy period of life".

Passionate love is said to usually only be present (or the most intense) in the early stage of love, when a relationship is new or before a relationship has started. However, in a rare phenomenon called long-term intense romantic love, intense attraction can remain for much longer than is typical, even for 10 years or more.

In contemporary literature, the original characteristics of passionate love are seen to some degree as being a mixture of things. For example, it's been determined that the PLS has questions which measure companionate love, which led Sandra Langeslag and colleagues to develop the Infatuation and Attachment Scales (IAS) as a newer measure of passionate and companionate love. The PLS also measures an obsessional element which is distinguishable in that it's possible to experience love feelings (and even intense attraction) with lower levels of obsession. Finally, while Elaine Hatfield originally described passionate love as having a component of sexual attraction, contemporary authors generally agree that sexual attraction and romantic attraction are distinct. People are motivated to initiate and maintain a pair bond in a way that's different from the sex drive, and in some rare cases it's even possible to fall in love in the absence of sexual desire.