and from relatively affluent backgrounds. Therefore we must consider the possibility that these tests may only accurately reflect their notions of romantic love. What then of individuals from different cultural and sociological backgrounds? Hatfield and Sprecher (1986) acknowledged this problem in their Passionate Love Scale when they listed their objectives as being in exploring the universality of love across different cultures, age gaps and gender variances. However the point being made by Hendrick and Hendrick (1988) was that as we were unsure of the nature of love itself we could not be certain what implications our construal of love would have on our measurement of it and if these construals were culturally exclusive we would certainly jeopardise our chances of getting representative data if we failed to recognise this. They were also dubious about the generalisability of love research carried out on 18-20 yr. olds and the generalisability of romantic love relationships to other love relationships. These doubts proved to be well founded in fact when we look at Acker and Davis's (1992) work. They were examining intimacy, passion and commitment in adult romantic relationships; much the same as many other researchers in the field but they used subjects in dating relationships aged from 18-61yrs. Their results differed considerably from the trend. They found that on the whole intimacy increased over time, that only women reported a decline in sexual interest, not both partners on the whole, and that there was an increase in 'love' and commitment levels as time went on; rather different to the gloomy picture painted by most research carried out with students as subjects.
Fehr (1988) also looked at the nature of love. She developed a prototype analysis of the content and structure of love and commitment. She was also interested in how the two concepts were related in peoples minds. This has been another area of research in recent years, with people becoming increasingly interested in staying together, rather than the 'disposable relationships' days of the 1970s. It is debatable what precipitated this change in attitudes to begin with but certainly in the past 5 years it would be difficult to dispute that the advent of A.I.D.S. has not had something to do with it and that along with having an effect on peoples sexual behaviour it has also affected their attitudes to commitment and exclusivity. Commitment appears to be rather easier to define than love, although it is certainly not simple. Definitions include the dominant idea of engaging in or pledging to engage in a consistent line of activity (Becker 1960; Brehm and Cohen 1962; Kiesler 1971) and more specific to romantic relationships the idea of one or both partners perceiving the relationship as continuing indefinitely or directing their behaviour towards its continuation. (Hinde 1979) Fehr was interested in examining what people perceived as being the central components of love and commitment and how many attributes p[people thought the two shared. She also wanted to know what effect the two concepts had on each other. Did commitment help love to grow or did it diminish it as people began to feel trapped or take the other partner for granted? There have been various theories on the independence or otherwise of love and commitment as separate or inclusive notions. Money (1980) saw them as one and the same thing whilst Solomon (1981) stated the very opposite by saying"Love is an emotion; a commitment is a promise ............to do something or to continue to do something whatever one's feelings." There had also of course been various definitions in between these two extremes including Sternberg's(1986) definition of commitment as being a component of love whilst Rusbult(1980) suggested the opposite was true; that love was a component of commitment
Table 1 shows a diagrammatic representation of their differing views. It also shows that Fehr (1988) found that of the 68 components people attributed to love and the 40 components that people attributed to commitment when asked to list freely, there were 21 that overlapped ie. were attributed to both concepts. She suggests that as a certain percentage (20.22%) of subjects mentioned love as a feature of commitment and 14.58% mentioned commitment as a feature of love, and that these concepts shared certain features, that love and commitment are not seen as completely independent, but that as the majority of subjects did not spontaneously mention love for commitment and commitment for love and that some but not all features are shared this also suggests that the concepts are not synonymous. Fehr firstly asked subjects to free list features of love and commitment and then asked them to rate the features on a scale of 1(extremely poor feature) to 8(extremely good feature) and the main centrality ratings were then calculated. The top 5 attributes of love were listed as being
i)trust
ii)caring
iii)honesty
iv)friendship
v)respect
with the worst 5 being
i)see only other's good points
ii)butterflies in stomach
iii)uncertainty
iv)dependency
v)scary
The top 3 for commitment were
i)loyalty
ii)responsibility
iii)living up to your word
whilst the worst 3 were
i)security
ii)think about other all the time
iii)feel trapped
Commitment scored more highly as a central feature of love(6.919) than did love as a central feature of commitment(6.039) leading to the assumption that people see love as being less central to commitment than vice-versa. However with 68 features being seen as central to love and 21 of them overlapping with a different concept it would seem that the only idea this research can support is that love and commitment are at least partially different concepts. However the vast amounts of attributes generated for love do not really bring us any closer to being able to define what it is in essence.
Another area of popular research over the past 5 years would appear to be that of looking at the effect of infant attachment styles on later adult love relationships. Hazan and Shaver (1987) and Mikulincer and Erev (1991) looked into this area and Hazan and Shaver found that Bowlby's (1969) three styles of attachment
a)secure
b)anxious / ambivalent
c)avoidant
were replicated almost identically in adult romantic relationships. Feeney and Noller (1990) also researched this notion and their findings indicated that certainly for the non-secure types patterns were frequently repeated. Bowlby himself suggested that the expectations, experiences and resulting mental models of self and relationships formed during infancy have implications for peoples experiencing of self and relationships in later life.
Another area of interest over the past few years has been in the area of determining what criteria help a relationship to 'work' as a pose to breaking down. This has been of special interest with Divorce rates rising all over the western world. One theory that exists today is that of people expecting more from love or marriage than they have in the past. Is this so or has the dissatisfaction always been present and the increasing secularisation of society merely made divorce easier? Bradbury and Fincham (1987) in their Contextual Model of Marriage found evidence to suggest that higher expectations led to higher marriage failure rates and also that the perceived femininity of the wife by her husband and by herself correlated positively with the likelihood of successful marriage. The degree of commitment of the partners also had a significant effect on the success of the marriage.
Other theories on what enabled relationships to succeed include the subconscious devaluation of alternative partners by the people involved. Johnson and Rusbult (1989) found that contrary to expectations subjects indicated that they felt less attracted to exchange partners as their marriages progressed - Leik and Leik (1977) stated this as one of their definitions of commitment 'the unwillingness to cosider exchange partners.
It would appear then that despite thousands of years of interest we are still no nearer an explanation. The large amount of work of the past 5 years has revealed some interesting findings but if anything has only made us more aware of how little we know or can predict. This may be due to the tenuous and subjective nature of the topic being explored but it is only with patient, open-minded exploration of the current approaches to love that we will have any possibility of developing the overarching theory of love that still eludes us.