A、Which of them is considered most important. B、Whether it is true love without commitment. C、When the absence of any one doesn’

Okay. So let’s get started. And to start things off I think what we need to do is consider a definition.(16)I’m going to define what love is but then most of the experiments I’m going to talk about are really focused more on attraction than love. And I’m going to pick a definition from a former colleague, Robert Sternberg, who is now the dean at Tufts University but was here on our faculty at Yale for nearly thirty years. And he has a theory of love that argues that it’s made up of three components: intimacy, passion, and commitment, or what is sometimes called decision commitment. And these are relatively straightforward. He argued that you don’t have love if you don’t have all three of these elements.
    Intimacy is the feeling of closeness, of connectedness with someone, of bonding. Operationally, you could think of intimacy as you share secrets, you share information with this person that you don’t share with anybody else. Okay. That’s really what intimacy is, the bond that comes from sharing information that isn’t shared with other people. The second element is passion. Passion is the drive that leads to romance. You can think of it as physical attraction. And Sternberg argues that this is a required component of a love relationship. The third element of love in Sternberg’s theory is what he calls decision commitment, the decision that one is in a love relationship, the willingness to label it as such, and a commitment to maintain that relationship at least for some period of time.(17)Sternberg would argue it’s not love if you don’t call it love and if you don’t have some desire to maintain the relationship. So if you have all three of these, intimacy, passion and commitment, in Sternberg’s theory you have love.(18)Now what’s interesting about the theory is what do you have, if you only have one out of three or two out of three. What do you have and how is it different if you have a different two out of three? What’s interesting about this kind of theorizing is it gives rise to many different combinations that can be quite interesting when you break them down and start to look them carefully. So what I’ve done is I’ve taken Sternberg’s three elements of love, intimacy, passion and commitment, and I’ve listed out the different kinds of relationships you would have if you had zero, one, two or three out of the three elements.
Questions 16 to 18 are based on the recording you have just heard.
16. What does the speaker say about most of the experiments mentioned in his talk?
17. What does Robert Sternberg argue about love?
18. What question does the speaker think is interesting about Sternberg’s three elements of love?