DPP: Chemistry 101

[ninjamonkey73.livejournal.com]

Greetings and salutations, 'shipper nation! This is Amy, known on your internets as ninjamonkey73, and I'm driving the DPP bus this week. Sit back and enjoy the ride...

I'd like to start the week off with an academic bang. Today, I'd like to talk about Sternberg's Triangular Theory of Love (inspired by my link surfing problem at Wikipedia). Let's discuss what makes our pilots light up the screen and hold our attention more than a year after the finale.



Excerpted from Wikipedia:

The triangular theory of love is a theory of love developed by psychologist Robert Sternberg. The theory characterizes love within the context of interpersonal relationships by three different components:

• Intimacy - Which encompasses feelings of closeness, connectedness, and bondedness.


• Passion - Which encompasses drives that lead to romance, physical attraction, and sexual consummation.


• Commitment - Which encompasses, in the short term, the decision to remain with another, and in the long term, the shared achievements and plans made with that other.

The "amount" of love one experiences depends on the absolute strength of these three components; the "type" of love one experiences depends on their strengths relative to each other. Different stages and types of love can be explained as different combinations of these three elements; for example, the relative emphasis of each component changes over time as an adult romantic relationship develops. A relationship based on a single element is less likely to survive than one based on two or three elements.




For me, I think Lee and Kara fall into the Romantic Love category. They had a bond (intimacy of the nonsexual kind) and certainly some UST/passion, but the commitment part of the triangle just never made it. Or when it did, they swung over to Companionate Love and toned down the UST.

So, nation, I ask you: How do you see Lee and Kara with regards to Sternberg's Triangular Theory of Love? Feel free to answer differently for different story arcs. And I'm never opposed to photographic evidence, where useful. You can also go off on "hot people are hot" tangents and skip the psychology entirely, if your idea of Katee's and Jamie's onscreen fireworks isn't at all scientific. ;)

Comments

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

I'm going to be contrary and say that the answer to pilots is: EVERYTHING. ALWAYS.

But seriously, I feel like they have all of these things--YES, EVEN COMMITMENT. It's not a traditional marriage or dating commitment, but I think their level of commitment comes in through their working side/family side. Over and over they show how committed they are to supporting each other (like the mission to assassinate Cain or Under the Wing or end of Scar), to saving each other (in the mini and the mutiny), and to counting on only each other (The Oath, Islanded). Because they are both lovers (albeit briefly) and family (albeit not by blood--thankfully), I think they confound this chart a bit.

We all know--even a blind man could see--how much passion they have, whether frakking or fighting. And intimacy is fostered by the shared background, plus how much they're together and rely on each other, esp. in the earlier seasons, and really we got to see so much of that in the Final Cut to the Captain's Hand stretch. Unfortunately, the other relationships/marriages really made a big hit to this even more than their commitment in my opinion (hell, UB was all about how they were still and would always be committed to each other when you got right down to it).

[ninjamonkey73.livejournal.com]

I waffled on the commitment part this morning when I posted. I decided to stick with devil's advocate, but you're right. They are EVERYTHING and ALWAYS. :)

[cosetteferaud.livejournal.com]

It's funny, I was just thinking about their commitment this morning and I totally agree, I'd even say that they were commited from the moment they met. To me, the biggest proof of their mutual devotion and commitment was that they always came back to each other, no matter how messed up their relationship was.