A Formula for Love: Partner Merit and Appreciation Beget Actor Significance

We offer a novel motivational account of romantic love, which portrays it as a means to the end of feeling significant and worthy. From that perspective, we present a multiplicative tri-factor model whereby a partner’s perceived merits and their appreciation of the actor combine with the actor’s magnitude of significance quest to determine the likelihood of the actor falling in love with the partner. Our model affords a broad account of diverse love phenomena, allows the derivation of several specific hypotheses supported by prior and new data, and offers novel avenues for further research on classic issues in romantic love. The discussion considers our model’s unique implications and examines its relation to other theories of love.