Bizarre Love Triangle

or
I'll take one big slice of love, please

(hold the commitment)

My love is like a powder keg
in the corner of an empty warehouse
somewhere just outside of town
about to burn down.
- The Mountain Goats

What you see above is Sternberg's Triangle of Love. Allow me to explain...

Love can best be understood in terms of its three components, each represented by the points of the triangle: Intimacy, Passion, and Commitment. Intimacy involves feelings of closeness, passion is the desire for sexual communication, and commitment is both the decision that one is an love and the wish to maintain that love. If your relationship is stuck at any one point on the triangle then I'm sorry to break it to you, but it's lacking two of the key ingredients for it to be true love. If you are located on any line connecting two points than you are doing a little better, but still lacking one key ingredient. If, however, you are lucky enough to be smack dab in the centre, congratulations you glassy eyed morphine addict. You've hit the fucking love jackpot.

A lot of my relationships can be boiled down to this pizza slice shaped diagram. I tend to start in the Passionate bottom left corner. Gradually, as intimacy increases, I shift up and actually begin liking the person, but all the while losing my passion. I now think the problem is my inability to stop at second base. As I round the corner and start heading towards Empty Love, my bum knee from the war kicks in and I begin to hobble. Companionate Love (aka "let's just stay friends") trips me up and I fall face first into the dirt, stuck eating astroturf somewhere between Intimacy and Empty Love.

If Passion, Intimacy and Commitment add up to equal Consummate Love, than my divide and conquer method is perhaps not the best one to use. Lately it seems I've been spinning my wheels somewhere between Infatuation and Romantic Love. In other words, the passion is there, along with a small amount of intimacy, but it's utterly lacking in commitment.

Oh, and I've decided on the title for the term paper I'm writing on workplace romances and their affects on productivity, motivation and job satisfaction:

Love in the Time of Cubicles.