The Language of Love
Love — we speak it, feel it, ache for it, and yet sometimes misunderstand it the most.
This month, we dive into the quiet complexities of love and relationships — from how we express affection to why we struggle with intimacy, and what healing partnerships actually look like.
Whether you’re loving another or learning to love yourself, this space is for your heart.
Highlights from the Newsletter
- Robert Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love
- A must-watch movie that explores modern love
- A book recommendation to deepen your understanding
- A heartfelt original poem about loving beyond fear
- A quote that captures the essence of it all
- Fun facts about love from psychology and history
- FAQs about relationship doubts, fears, and growth
- A note from Dr. Niharika Thakkar (our founder)
- Team PsychLine.in
- Upcoming workshops
Robert Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love
According to psychologist Robert Sternberg, love isn’t just one feeling — it’s a blend of three core components that form the triangle of love:
Intimacy – Emotional closeness, trust, connection, and warmth.
Passion – Physical attraction, desire, and romantic excitement.
Commitment – The decision to love someone and the effort to maintain it over time.
Different combinations of these three create different kinds of love:
- Liking is when only intimacy is present — the kind of emotional closeness you feel in deep friendships.
- Infatuation is fueled by passion alone — intense attraction without emotional depth or commitment.
- Empty Love is based solely on commitment — often found in stagnant relationships where the connection has faded.
- Romantic Love blends intimacy and passion — there’s emotional closeness and spark, but no long-term commitment yet.
- Companionate Love is a mix of intimacy and commitment — a deep bond without the heat of passion, often seen in long-term friendships or marriages.
- Fatuous Love combines passion and commitment — a whirlwind romance where emotional depth may be missing.
- Consummate Love is the most complete form — a beautiful balance of intimacy, passion, and commitment. It’s the kind of love many aspire to, where the emotional, physical, and decision-based dimensions align.
Movie of the Month
Tamasha (2015)
Tamasha is not just a love story between two people — it’s a love story between a person and their truest self. It captures how love can both liberate and confront us, especially when we’re hiding behind versions of ourselves we’ve created for the world.
It portrays how love isn’t about fixing someone, but inviting them home to themselves.
Poem of the Month
“Safely” — By Chhavi Passan
I’ve loved you like I was still bleeding,
like the wound didn’t matter if you were the bandage.
But now—
I want to love you safely,
without shivering at silence,
without mistaking chaos for passion.
I want to hold your hand
without clinging for life.
I want a love that feels like staying
without begging to be chosen.
I want a home, not a high.
And maybe this time,
we both get to be whole.
Book of the Month
“The Bridges of Madison County” By Robert James Waller
This brief but intense love affair between Francesca and Robert explores the tension between overwhelming passion and existing commitment to empty love, examining what happens when two components of love conflict. The story questions whether love requires all three elements or if intense passion and intimacy can be enough.
From the Founder
Dr. Niharika Thakkar
Love: The Long Game
I was seven when I thought I knew what love was. I was a chess player at that age. One tournament, I was playing a cute boy with glasses, who I apparently ended up offering a draw to even though I was 2 moves away from winning. This story also made it to the newspapers in Bombay. Not that I remember this accurately at all, but I have been told that’s what happened, and over the years I came to believe it, and still claim him to be my first, well, crush. When I was 8, I again thought I knew love- we had taken a vacation with some family friends, where I met the sweetest, cutest one of them all, who brought me back “Fruity’s” to share when he went on adventurous store expeditions with the other boys (yes, it was all very gendered unfortunately), whose smile gave me goosebumps, who had the deepest brown eyes, and who had hair like silk, all of which I love till date. This boy, from age 8 was a part of my heart. I even stole a picture of him from the vacation album and kept it in my diary for years. After that vacation, we split into our own immature young lives, went back to our own homes, and hardly met again until our late teens. As life turned out, he’s my husband today- but I am getting ahead of myself.
When I was 16/17, I dated my “first boyfriend”. He was actually a friend, who liked my other friend, and I liked one of his other friends, but for some reason we ended up liking each-other in all these discussions about others. Messy but cute. Over the years, I had chaotic crushes in my school, in my building group, in my chess circle, and ofcourse in junior college. I have to preface all this by first admitting that I was a bit lucky in the sense that my parents “didn’t mind” all this, and I was sort of free to discuss my crushes and love life at home. My friends would even joke that I had a crush for every occasion, so I wouldn’t feel bored ever. And to my delight and good fortune, I also had multiple other free-thinkers around who reciprocated the extra eye contact, the “accidental” hand touching, and gave “missed calls” on my home landline constantly.
Sadly though, my first true relationship was a disaster, or at least felt like that back then. At age 18, right in my first year of Bachelors, I thought, once again, that I was finally in love! Heart racing, palms sweating, unable to think about anything but them. That breathless, all-consuming feeling that made me write terrible poetry and stare at my phone waiting for texts and calls. This relationship ended within a year or two of dating with cheating, jealousy, insecurity, resentment, ego, friends getting involved, lots of crying, heartbreak and heartache, and basically DRAMA. Back then, if someone had told me then that real love was actually about arguing over mortgage rates and whose turn it was to walk the dog or take the trash out, I would have laughed!
But why am I telling you all this about my journey? Because here’s the thing about love – it’s not static. It grows, shifts, and deepens in ways our teenage selves couldn’t possibly imagine. Psychologist Robert Sternberg gave us a framework that makes sense of this journey. His triangular theory suggests love has three components: 1. passion (that electric attraction), 2. intimacy (emotional closeness), and 3. commitment (the choice to stick around). What’s fascinating is how these three elements dance together differently at various life stages.
Up until my teens and early twenties, passion ruled everything. Love felt like a lightning strike- intense, overwhelming, and frankly, a little dangerous. I mistook butterflies for depth and thought drama meant devotion. That wasn’t wrong, exactly. It was just… incomplete.
In my 20s came the commitment phase (I am a millennial, this was normal back then!). After the nuisance that I dealt with in my first teenage romance, I was determined to seek something, let’s just call it, less bollywoody. I had one more, rather really good, stable relationship for a couple of years, before I reconnected with my old crush, and new boyfriend, today’s husband. With him, it didn’t start off with rock solid commitment, but passion quickly started meaning lots and lots of promises. We moved in together, started talking about informing families and how, and conversations involved a lot of future-building content. But to quote Shakespeare “the course of true love never did run smooth”, right? How do you expect two 20 year olds to know what these promises mean? It didn’t work. It was chatt love, patt break-up (quick love, quicker break-up). But this time, we broke up not because of passionate insecurity or immaturity, but because we couldn’t figure out the commitment right. How much time given to each-other counts as commitment? How many promises? How much family involvement? It took us years, and multiple more on and off relationships to get this right. This is where we learned that love isn’t just a feeling, it’s a choice we make every day. We got back together again after a few years. This time around we started talking about practical things: career goals, family planning, whether we squeeze toothpaste from the middle or the end of the tube, and before we knew it, we wanted to move to another country together and found ourselves getting married. Great end to a nice love story, right? Little did we know, this was only the beginning.
It’s the third stage, the intimacy and companionship years, where love reveals its true face. This is love stripped of its Hollywood costume, and it’s more beautiful than any movie scene. This is the love that shows up at 3 AM when your parent is dying, holding your hand through the funeral. It’s the person who learns to change diapers alongside you, both of you completely clueless and sleep-deprived but figuring it out together. It’s whose family becomes your family, whose nephews and nieces your children will grow up calling cousins, whose parents will become grandparents to your kids. In the Instagram language, it’s the one who you learn to “do life with”.
This mature love isn’t about grand gestures. It’s about the thousand small ways two people decide to keep choosing each other. It’s splitting the mental load of remembering birthdays and scheduling doctor appointments. It’s handling finances as well as social calendars together. It’s the person who will sit with you through your midlife crisis, who will help you navigate caring for aging parents, who will grow old alongside you and still find you interesting enough to talk to over morning coffee.
There’s something profound about reaching the point where love becomes less about what someone does to you and more about what you build together- a life, a family, a shared story that’s richer than either of you could have written alone. Today I understand the kinds of Love as referred to by Sternberg much better. Here they are, through my journey:
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Non-love: Simply the absence of all 3 components of love, characterizing the large majority of our personal relationships.
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Liking: One experiences only the intimacy component, without passion or commitment, characterizing most of our friendships.
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Infatuated Love: This is “love at first sight”, extreme passion in the absence of intimacy and commitment. All those crushes through my teens!
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Empty Love: Look around, it is not difficult to find this kind of love in our culture. In this kind, there is a decision and commitment to love one-another, in the absence of passion or intimacy.
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Fatuous Love: This is a combination of passion and commitment in the absence of intimacy. It’s the “movie love” that I felt for my husband the first time we started dating- whirlwind relationship, meet, fall in love, move-in, break-up. The commitment was made on the basis of passion without the stabilizing intimacy component.
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Romantic Love: Combination of intimacy and passion. Kind of what happened the second time around when I started dating my husband.
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Companionate Love: Evolves from romantic love, but refers to a long-term, committed friendship. We are getting there..
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Consummate Love: Ah! Nirvana. This is complete love. It results from the full combination of passion, intimacy, and commitment. This is the true quest- Thank you Sternberg!
That’s the long game of love. And honestly? It’s totally worth it!
The best thing to hold onto in life is each other…
Fun Facts About Love
- People with secure attachment styles tend to have longer, more fulfilling relationships.
- The brain releases dopamine and oxytocin when we’re in love — similar to chocolate or roller coasters.
- Writing or receiving love letters activates the same pleasure centers in the brain as hugging!
FAQs
Q1: Why do I feel anxious when someone loves me too much?
→ This could be a sign of anxious or avoidant attachment. Sometimes, love feels unsafe when we’re not used to being held gently.
Q2: Is it normal to have doubts in a relationship?
→ Yes. Doubts don’t always mean something’s wrong — they often point toward parts of us that need clarity, not necessarily escape.
Q3: Can love survive long distance?
→ Absolutely — when there’s trust, communication, shared goals, and effort, distance can deepen emotional intimacy.
Q4: How do I know if it’s real love?
→ Real love often feels safe, steady, and respectful — it doesn’t need to be dramatic to be deep.
