Exploring The Important Component Of Love In Marriage Relationship

Abstract

ABSTRACT Love has always been a hot topic for discussions. Every day in the social life we could see how couples expressing love. Robert Sternberg (as cited in Taylor, Peplau, & Sears, 2009) formulated that love has three components. Intimacy involves the desire to give affection and attention. Passion, in which element of physical attractiveness drives the emergence of strong emotions in love. Commitment includes decisions to love and desires to live together with other people. This study aims to explore the components of love that encourages married couples in maintaining their marriage relationship. Participants were 26 Indonesian (13 male, 13 female) who have been married for more than ten years. It is a form of qualitative research, which used interview method to obtain data. Results showed that commitment becomes the main component (69%). Religious teachings about marriage and the presence of children made the subjects committed to maintain their marriage relationship. Intimacy becomes the second component (31%). It is carried out with openness, honesty, trust, communication, and understanding. The result of this research may be influenced by the eastern culture, in which participants possessed from their home country. This is contrary to research in western countries that showed romantic love is more common (Matsumoto, 2004). Romantic love is a kind of love where commitment is precisely to be less important than the other components.