For centuries, theorists have bitterly debated it, poets have interpreted it through verse; and even, Frank Sinatra has sung about it. And yet, the question remains: What is this thing called love?

Is it an intensely pleasurable experience, a painful one or both? Perhaps many of you have already begun generating the answer to that question from your own experiences of love. Love can be exciting, rewarding, laced with thrilling fantasies of encounters. The movies, replete with such examples, reinforce this notion. How many times have you come away from a movie feeling like Clark Gable? Greta Garbot? Humphrey Bogart? Lauren Bacall? Tom Cruise? Sharon Stone? Hey! It worked for them, didn’t it? But that’s only part of the story.
Passionate love is expressed as a form of excitement. Like any form of excitement, there is a continuous interplay between elation and despair; thrills and terror. Watching a movie is one thing, living the intense and conflicting emotions is another– sort of your own version of “An Affair to Remember.” The excitement of passionate love, experienced as a clashing of emotions may be better understood when compared to another aspect of your life in which several emotions occur and clash. Think of the mixed and rushed feelings of a novice skier. Like love, skiing evokes a host of passionate and fearful experiences.
I first learned to ski in Canada. They showed us films of people performing gracefully, exquisitely on skis. Then they had us ski down a “bunny slope”, another word for a hill that would be a mountain in Florida! After coming down the bunny slope, an instructor would yell out a number corresponding to your ability and, hence, your class for the week. As I approached the instructor he yelled, “thirty-nine!” I would soon discover that groups were numbered from one to forty. I took a tow rope to the top of the mountain, where the groups formed Ski trails are organized as to level of difficulty. My group was limited to trails that featured pictures of Walt Disney characters.
Any of this sound familiar? As a novice skier, your heart may begin to pound as you wait for the ski lift (and wonder if you will remember how to get on and off). On the easy ride to the top, you are still unnerved as you realize the only way down is to ski and maybe break something. Your hands begin to tremble as you consider dismounting and perhaps falling. The landing platform is within sight. It looks icy and steep. You can’t turn back. You rise and ski down the platform, elated and panicky– it’s difficult to say which emotion predominates! Then you begin to ski down the mountain, apprehensive, anxious, then confident and elated. Finally, reaching the bottom, you feel relieved. Choking back tears, you approach the lift line again; because, despite the terror, there is an unexplainable ecstasy to the experience. Eventually, with considerable practice, you believe you “own” the mountain– you can trust yourself to prevail under virtually all conditions. Your expectations of success change as a function of your openness to new experiences.
In a similar vein, with time, passionate love becomes companionate love. The catalytic ingredient– that grows as a function of time– is “intimacy.” Intimacy is the process by which people become close to one another. It represents attempts to explore similarities and differences in the way they think, feel and behave. Unlike the factors that lead someone down the road of passionate love, intimacy is a two-way street. It requires that two individuals be able to express: (1) Trust, a way of comparing favorably your interpretation of another’s experience; the likelihood that someone’s behavior is consistent with his/her language. (2) Empathy, trying on another person’s belief system so you can anticipate what that person is feeling. (3) Sharing each others’ “models of the world.” This is the process whereby each person explores the way in which the other knows things. While maintaining a solid sense of “self”, it necessitates trying on another person’s perceptions of experience.
The process of attaining intimacy with another person and, thus, shifting the manner of relating from passionate to companionate love, involves acknowledging the “moguls” of life, the fears that people often hide such as: being judged, abandoned; or fear of being hurt as a result of conflict. The acknowledgement of such fears involves transferring the energy of which they are comprised to opportunities for understanding the ways in which each person interacts with his/her world. When you achieve companionate love, life is all down-hill!