[0:00]When people are victims of abuse, they often wonder, did my abuser ever actually truly love me? Would someone capable of love actually abuse that person? Well, a recent study tried to answer this question and the answer is kind of surprising. But first, apparently there's this new quiz feature on these videos where you can answer a question yourself. So I'm going to put that on screen or wherever it shows up and let me know, do you think that abuser truly love their victims? Yes or no? And tell me why or why not down in the comments. Without further ado, let's get into the study.
[0:48]So the study surveyed 1,061 women in Western Europe. 96% of them had male partners, so we're talking primarily about women being interviewed about men. And they assessed levels of psychological abuse as well as the three components of Sternberg's triangular model of love, which consists of intimacy, commitment and passion. Intimacy is what we refer to as closeness, affection, sharing your inner world with the other person and vice versa. Passion relates to physical and emotional attraction, think like magnets, like being pulled towards someone. And commitment refers to the effort to maintain the relationship across time, usually through things like loyalty and willingness to work on things when things get tough. So the way I want you to think about Sternberg's triangular model of love is it has three components. Passion is I want you, commitment is I want to keep you, and intimacy is I want us to share our inner worlds with each other. If you have all three, you have what's called consummate love, and I go into this model of love in more detail in the connection course if you're interested in that. But moving on to the study, they found four clusters among the women that they surveyed. Moderate love, which consisted of 48% of the sample, low passion, which was 24% of the sample, this is sort of what we call companionate love, where you don't have passion, but you are intimate with each other at least on an emotional level and you're committed to each other. The third category was mostly passion, which was 14% of the sample, and the fourth one was no love, which was 12% of the sample. So which of these groups would you think had the highest amount of psychological abuse? The first one, the top one was the no love cluster. This one had significantly higher levels of psychological aggression as well as threatening and controlling behaviors compared to the other clusters characterized by higher amounts of love. But the second one, and this one was sort of surprising to the researchers, but not surprising to me, which I'll explain in a second, was the mostly passion cluster. The mostly passion cluster had higher levels of severe psychological aggression as well as threatening and controlling behaviors compared to those with low passion. And this surprised the researchers because they assumed that some types of love, like having passion, would be protective against abuse. Well, to me it wasn't surprising at all, and I'm about to tell you why, as well as what we can learn from the study in just a moment. But first, a word from today's sponsor, Babel. Ciao, come stai? Sto imparando l'italiano per più di due anni, e finalmente lo parlo abbastanza bene. That means hi, I've been learning Italian for just over two years, and I can finally speak it pretty well, but you guys can let me know in the comments if you're Italian speaking. People are always surprised when I tell them that I learned Italian entirely from the comfort of my own home, just on my phone. And I've tried different apps over the years, and the one that I most highly recommend is Babbel. Babbel is one of the top language learning apps in the world. Why I think it's superior to a lot of others is it's the most thorough that I've ever used for learning grammar rather than just rote memorizing specific phrases. Alex, Robin, ciao. Conoscete già Matteo? No, non penso. È un mio caro amico, è spagnolo. È qui in vacanza. Piacere di conoscerti, Matteo. It's also very user-friendly. It's clearly made with the psychology of learning in mind. Its lessons are created by over 650 language experts and that does come across in the app. You gain practical conversations about travel, business, food. It's kind of like having your own language personal coach. Whether you want to learn a new language to just keep yourself fresh or because you're moving someplace or you're traveling someplace or you're marrying into a family where the your other side of the family doesn't speak a certain language. I strongly recommend you give Babbel a try. Get 55% off your subscription by using my link below. And let me know what language you're trying to learn and why. Now, what are the real life implications of this article? People in loveless relationships are indeed at highest risk of intimate partner violence. So when there is this stereotype of the abusive relationship as like cold and detached without care or empathy, there is some truth to that. At least for a chunk of people in abusive relationships, their partner doesn't actually love them, it seems. But the surprising thing is that people in high passion relationships, who lack the other two components of love, intimacy and commitment, are also at risk. So a huge red flag is any sort of relationship where you have very high passion, low commitment, and low intimacy. Because those types of relationships are ultimately just I want you without the other two components of loving someone. I want to keep you and I want to share my emotional world with you. You can imagine how that can sort of come across as just possessiveness, just wanting to possess someone almost like an object. Because if you don't want to commit to someone, you don't really care if you keep them long term and you also don't care about connecting them. You just want them. Do you actually really love them? The researchers said, contrary to popular belief, love does not serve as an inherent buffer against psychological violence. But I would argue this type of love is not really love. It doesn't have the three components of love. Infatuation alone is not love. Pretending it is is like calling a parasocial obsessed stalker in love with one of their victims. Those people don't actually have all the components of love, so why are we acting like they do? So the way that I would personally interpret this finding too, is that yeah, like even in that category of people, there isn't love. There's just obsession, and unfortunately, sometimes people stay in this type of relationship, this type of like abusive high passion relationship, because it doesn't fit the typical stereotype of the loveless cold detached abusive relationship. They see the passion, and it causes them to perceive it as romantic or intense. And while this article was about people in committed relationships, I simply cannot help but wonder about the implications regarding hookup culture. So often casual relationships follow the formula: high passion, low commitment, low intimacy. In fact, there are even therapists out there who encourage people to emotionally disconnect from their casual partners, to not share their inner worlds with each other at all, to treat the other person as nothing but a sex object.
[6:53]You don't have to be in a friends with benefits situation. No, you don't. You don't have to do that. Nobody's forcing you. Nobody's forcing you. But if you were going to do it, how would you do it? Okay, here's some rules. As Jeff. Okay. No sleepovers. Oh. First rule. Okay. That's why. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. No sleepovers. Second rule, no um favors. No. Not doing nice things for each other. No favors. We're not going out of the way for anybody here. Uh-uh. Nothing like, no like being like, oh tell me how you feel so I can give you some support. Literally no feelings. Literally no feelings, yes. There's no caretaking happening. You don't give a sh-. How they feel. They have other people for that. Exactly, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. You're just there for that dick. Okay, wait. I've got a good one. Okay, okay. I've got a good one. Let's hear it. Have a few. Have a few. Don't just have one. Exactly. Be safe, be smart. Um, I mean, come on. But wrap it up, right? Have a glove on it, you know? When I saw this video, I was honestly pretty enraged to tell you the truth. Because you would think that a therapist should understand how dangerous it is to sell people the idea of seeing their sexual partners as nothing but an object. Hookups are already low commitment and high passion by definition. If you cut out the intimacy component, too, and you treat that person worse than you would treat any friend, just acting like you completely do not care what's going on in their inner world, in their life, you just completely disregard all of that. You're putting people at risk of the second most common type of abuse, the type where the abuser wants you, but doesn't actually care about you beyond that. And now we have empirical evidence of how dangerous this type of recommendation actually is. I just keep wondering if there's ever going to be any sort of accountability for the mental health professionals who keep pushing hookup culture on us, despite the fact that the research consistently shows its risks. But anyway, I digress. The answer to the question, does love prevent psychological violence, seems to be most abusive relationships do seem to be loveless. But there's also a chunk of abusive relationships where there's this sort of flimsy definition of love if we can even call it that. Something more akin to infatuation or possessiveness, or another way of looking at it is, no, abuser don't not love their victims, they just want them. Now, some of the limitations of this article was, it was, like I said, a Western European sample. It was self-reported and it was not longitudinal. But what did you think about this? Let me know down in the comments and don't forget to check out Babel.
