Love Is a Story

In the foreword, Sternberg traces the path of the research on love. In the early 1980s, with Susan Grajek, a theory based on «building blocks» was developed: love was made of parts such as liking, good communication and support. The problem was that the list did not explain why we love some people and not others. In the mid-1990s the author saw that people tell very different stories about relationships, and that the further the stories diverge, the more dissatisfied couples are. The central idea: we fall in love with people who share the same or a similar story but whose role complements ours. The author says plainly that this is ongoing work, not a fully tested theory.

The first chapter opens with two couples. Zach and Tammy, married for 28 years, fight every day and their friends are sure they will divorce. Valerie and Leonard, whose marriage looked perfect, split up. Sternberg says that to understand this, we must look at which story each person carries about what love is and should be. The point is illustrated with aspirin: treating only symptoms, for instance taking medicine for depression, does not fix the relationship; aspirin lowers the fever but does not rid the body of the virus. The stories themselves are what we must examine.

The film «When Harry Met Sally» is another example: in Harry's head there is a friendship story for Sally, not a love story, and when the story changes, so does the relationship. In the case of Tyrone and Samantha, Tyrone becomes sure after three months that Samantha is secretly seeing someone, though Samantha is seeing no one. We know people through a story that comes from our own past. A well-known love researcher, after more than twenty years of marriage, realizes one evening by the stove, from a single remark of the spouse, that the two views of the relationship have almost nothing in common.

In a study with Michael Barnes, couples guessed each other's answers. The correlation between guess and actual answer was only 0.3, and these were couples with solid relationships. Beth and Blake are both secretly seeing other people and their shared story is so thin that it cannot stand a test. An engaged couple who split over a lottery ticket shows the same issue: was the ticket «hers» or «ours»? The author says that trying to work out what love «is» is a futile effort, because love is not the same thing for every couple.

The next section shows that everyone has not one story but several. Aaron is involved with Lucy and Dottie at the same time because each plays a role in a different story of his. The metaphor of climbing a mountain in dark, foggy weather explains this: you cannot know you have reached the summit, perhaps only a local peak. For Dean, love is calm and free of conflict, for Susan it means facing differences; the more Dean withdraws, the more insistent Susan becomes. The colour example and Kant's idea that we cannot know «the thing in itself» show that we know a partner only through our perception.

The story-elements section separates the beginning, development and end of a story, and says that the «retrospective» stories we write after a break-up differ from earlier ones. The surface and deep levels of the plot, the theme (the lesson we draw from events) and the characters (past and present partners) are explained one by one. The comparison of narrative and rational thinking by psychologist Seymour Epstein is applied to the case of Brian and Sylvia: for Sylvia, the relationship had become a business story rather than a love story. At the end, story types such as addiction and humour are given, with examples of when each works.

• An exemplary style that shows each concept through a real or composite couple (Zach–Tammy, Tyrone–Samantha, Dean–Susan)
• Everyday metaphors: aspirin, climbing a mountain in fog, colours
• A clear theoretical frame that draws on Kant, Epstein and the film «When Harry Met Sally»
• Transitions at the end of each section that bridge to the next