“The type of love that has everything” sounds like the kind of phrase that means whatever the listener wants it to mean. Psychology has an actual, decades-old answer to what “everything” is built from, and it comes with a name most people have never heard despite having spent a fair amount of their lives looking for exactly what it describes.
The framework comes from a 1986 paper by Robert Sternberg, published in Psychological Review, called the triangular theory of love. Sternberg proposed that love is built from three distinct components: intimacy, the closeness, connectedness, and bondedness felt in a relationship; passion, the drive behind romance, physical attraction, and sexual desire; and decision or commitment, the choice to love someone in the moment and the resolve to maintain that love over time. According to the theory, how much love someone feels depends on the combined strength of these three components, while what kind of love it is depends on their strength relative to each other. Different combinations produce different, specifically named experiences. Intimacy alone is described as liking. Passion alone is infatuation. Commitment alone is what Sternberg called empty love. Intimacy and passion together make romantic love. Intimacy and commitment together make companionate love, the kind often associated with long, stable marriages that have cooled in passion. Passion and commitment without intimacy make what Sternberg called fatuous love, the whirlwind kind. Only one combination includes all three components at once: consummate love, the complete form, and by Sternberg’s account, the type most people pursuing a long-term romantic relationship are ultimately after, whether or not they’d ever describe it in those exact terms.
A later study put Sternberg’s framework to a direct empirical test rather than leaving it as theory alone. In a 2009 study by Sandra Madey and Lauren Rodgers, published in Individual Differences Research, the researchers surveyed 55 university students currently in romantic relationships, measuring their levels of intimacy, passion, and commitment alongside their overall relationship satisfaction. All three components turned out to independently predict how satisfied participants felt in their relationship. That result matters for a specific reason: it means consummate love isn’t simply a clean box on a theoretical diagram. The underlying ingredients Sternberg proposed actually track with how happy real people report being in their real relationships, which is a meaningfully different claim than a taxonomy that merely sounds tidy on paper.
Put together, the two pieces of research describe something more specific than the vague sense that some love “has everything.” They describe three separate, nameable ingredients, each doing measurably different work, and a single combination among eight possible ones that puts all three to work at once. That combination has a name because researchers found it worth distinguishing from love that’s warm but not exciting, or exciting but not steady, or steady but missing the spark that got two people together in the first place.
It’s worth being honest about where this framework is more limited than a tidy eight-box chart suggests. Sternberg’s original 1986 paper was primarily theoretical, proposing and organizing the model rather than presenting a large empirical test of it, and later researchers working with his 36-item measurement scale have identified real psychometric problems with it, meaning the tool built to measure these three components hasn’t always held up cleanly under scrutiny. Madey and Rodgers’ validation study, meanwhile, worked with a small sample of 55 college students, a group that differs in age, relationship length, and life stage from, say, a couple married for twenty years, so how well the pattern holds across different populations remains an open question their study alone can’t settle. Their data is also correlational, which means it can’t fully rule out the reverse explanation, that people who are already satisfied in their relationship are simply more likely to rate their intimacy, passion, and commitment highly, rather than those three ingredients single-handedly producing the satisfaction. And in real relationships, love rarely sorts cleanly into one of eight fixed boxes the way a theoretical model does; most relationships likely sit somewhere in between, with all three components present to varying, shifting degrees rather than fully on or fully off.
Within those limits, what the research offers isn’t a guarantee or a formula so much as a more precise vocabulary for something that’s usually left vague. “The type of love that has everything” turns out to have an actual answer, built from three separate, identifiable parts that researchers have spent decades trying to measure, test, and understand, rather than a feeling too big or too mysterious to ever pin down.
