‘Love is a story’

Robert J Sternberg

Oxford University Press,

1998

Review by

Kevin Baldeosingh

Books on improving romantic relationships are amongst the bestsellers on the self-help section in bookstores. But psychologist Robert Sternberg, who is among the world’s leading researchers on love, warns that he is not providing any magic bullet in this book. In spite of this — or, more likely, because of it — Love is a Story provides an explanation as to why romantic relationships succeed or fail which seems more cogent than the numerous other theories out there.

“Relationships at their core are not rational: they are stories,” Sternberg says. “Not only does each person have a personal relationship, but each person also has a conception of a joint story that he or she believes the couple shares.”

This, he argues, means that people who have different stories will interpret the same behaviour in different ways. Someone who has a Garden Story (conceiving a relationship as something to be tended and grown) might see their partner as not affectionate, if that person has a Travel Story (seeing a relationship as a journey taken by two people). And the travel story partner might see their garden story partner as also lacking interest in the relationship. Similarly, a person who has a War Story, paradoxical as it may seem, sees conflict as essential to a good relationship.

“It is the story that gives rise to destructive behaviour, rather than the behaviour itself that is the cause of the dissolution,” says Sternberg. “The story view leads us away from focusing on behaviour and toward focusing on the story through which behaviour is interpreted.”

Sternberg identifies 25 stories, but warns that these by no means exhaust the gamut of possible stories. The 25 he uses are those that he has discovered in his research. He divides them into six categories. The first set is “Asymmetrical stories”. These include The Teacher-Student Story, The Sacrifice Story, The Government Story, The Police Story, The Pornography Story, and The Horror Story. The second set of stories is Object Stories: The Science-Fiction Story, The Collection Story, and The Art Story. Then there is the Relationship as Object set, which includes The House and Home Story, The Recovery Story, The Religion Story, and The Game Story.

The fourth set is Coordina-tion Stories: The Travel Story, The Sewing and Knitting Story, The Garden Story, The Business Story, and The Addiction Story. The Narrative Stories set are The Fantasy Story, The History Story, The Science Story and The Cookbook Story. The last set is Genre Stories: The War Story, The Theatre Story, The Humour Story, and The Mystery Story.

“Typically, each of us has multiple stories about love, not just one,” Sternberg advises. “The stories underscore the fact that not only is love not quite the same thing for different people, but it is not even one simple thing for us individually.”

In his research, Sternberg has found that the garden story is the most popular, while the horror story is the least. The horror story is when one person is terrorising, or being terrorised, by their partner.

“People with horror stories typically view themselves as having anything but a horror story,” Sternberg notes. Instead, the terroriser sees themselves as having a little fun, making the relationship interesting, or liking rough sex. The person being terrorised tends to see themselves as unlucky in relationships.

There are also some gender differences in the kinds of stories people prefer.

Men favour art, collection, and porn stories; women favour the business story. The Art Story has to do with placing great importance on your partner’s looks; the Collection Story sees different partners as fulfilling different needs; and the Porn Story is exactly what you expect (but Sternberg notes that degradation is a key element in it).

The Business Story is when the individual chooses a partner because of economic considerations, social status, and business sense. Sternberg also found that certain stories were associated with a lower degree of emotional satisfaction: business, collection, government, mystery, police, science-fiction, and theatre.

He also observes that most people are unaware of their stories. Thus, what we think we want in a romantic partner might not be what we actually want. “Most ‘wish lists’ we carry around with us are not worth much,” he says. “They are as likely to be based on what we feel we SHOULD want as what we REALLY want. But we can figure out what we really want only if we understand our ideal story.”

And this is the usefulness of Sternberg’s theory. “Once we understand the ideas behind the stories we accept as our own, we are in a position to do some replotting. We can ask ourselves what we like and don’t like about our current (or past) story, and how we would like to change it,” he says.