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

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

You've phrased things beautifully, especially "The only thing preventing them from fully experiencing it is their fear of it. That made the relationship unstable and they tried to tame it by limiting it..." That's it in a nutshell, I think. And you're so right that one or the other was unsatisfied whenever they tried to shift the relationship off of its deep central axis. They were willing to settle for less with other people, but they could never bring themselves to do the same thing with each other.

Your suggestion that their problem was with intimacy is very interesting. I associated intimacy with friendship in the diagram, and I assumed that their friendship was more open than their other feelings. Lee tells Kara that he's her friend quite often, and means it, I think (the moments in Home and in Scar come to mind ~ in fact in Scar he says explicitly that the problem with her viewing him as "just a quick lay" is not that they have a deeper romantic relationship but rather that he's her friend and he deserved better than to be used and discarded. They are going to have to face each other the next day, no matter what. They have a kind of closeness that isn't wrecked by the bad break-up of their attempt at passion).

And I thought that the forms of intimacy that Kara is comfortable sharing with Lee tended to be couched in terms of friendship - she can't tell him she loves him, but she can congratulate him on a mission ("I couldn't have done it better myself") or a promotion ("congratulations, you deserve it") and she can ask for forgiveness ("Are we okay?" and "I missed you" both seem more affectionate than passionate to me, but that may be me being delusional). I'd say that as friends they were surprisingly affectionate both publicly and privately (they hugged like a million times, including on a hangar deck infront of everyone they knew, they played around with paint in front of Lee's dad, they had a water-fight in the middle of Cloud Nine - they were not shy about that kind of physical affection).

I definitely see your point that so often they function with unspoken intimacy and don't verbalize their feelings. That's true across the board. But my impression is that what verbalization we do get tended to come in terms of friendship. I guess the question is, was that honest intimacy or was it using "friendship" to cover their deeper feelings and channel them in some safer direction? I don't know, but I think in most of the examples I mentioned above they were expressing genuine friendly intimacy while repressing the passionate side of things with greater or lesser success.

[damao2010.livejournal.com]

"I associated intimacy with friendship in the diagram and I assumed that their friendship was more open than their other feelings."

Me, too.


"I guess the question is, was that honest intimacy or was it using "friendship" to cover their deeper feelings and channel them in some safer direction?"

Yes, I think that is the big question here. I'm sure they were friends and genuinely liked each other. In fact, it is my belief that the most succesful romantic relationships need to have a friendship foundation. I think you need to LIKE the person you love in the sense that you admire and respect them for who they are is spite of any flaws they might have.

However, there are many kinds of friends. Lee and Kara had a natural friendship, they liked, respected and admired each other's qualities. They had an easy banter, they teased and challenged each other. In lots of ways they could only be themselves with the other. For people who were, deep down, very private, they revealed very intimate things to the other, things they didn't share with anybody else (like when Kara talked about her deepest fears when they first met, or when Lee confessed he had wanted to die). That reveals a great deal of intimacy. And it was very natural, effortless.

But I think friends, especially best friends, are more than just people you like, admire, respect and are able to have fun with. Best friends are people you are able to confide in, people you open up to. You aren't afraid of your friends.If they are to be your friends, you CAN'T be afraid of them. You count on their support and cherish their criticism (even when it hurts).

And despite all the easy, deep connection Kara and Lee shared, they were terrified of each other on so many levels. That led them to hold back, to bottle up feelings. And that made them lonely. Were they really friends, then? My answer is yes and no. Because they were trying to run from what you called the deep central axis of their relationship and because and so much of the friendship they did have was based on emotions that went beyond friendship, they were never able to just BE friends, unconditionally. That is why I think they had intimacy issues. And because although lots of times you don't really know why you like/love some people, feel more comfortable with them than with others, deciding to open up and reveal/share all that you are with them (being complete intimate) is a choice (here is the word BSG loves again). And for lots fo reasons, Kara and Lee kept deciding not to do it, unless it was so natural they didn't even realized they were doing it or the situation was so dire/desperate they couldn't help themselves.

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

Wow. Word.

I love how you delve into the deepest meanings of friendship and intimacy here, I think what you say makes a lot of sense for both characters. Lovely.

Thank you!