Love and Temperament

Every person has a temperament, a collection of qualities that set their baseline emotional tone. Temperament varies little throughout our lives, but we learn to manage our own in ways that exploit its strengths and minimize or compensate for its weaknesses. Temperament interacts with life experience to determine how we respond to circumstances, particularly emotionally-laden situations such as those involving loved ones.

Some people are inherently shy, inhibited, fearful, or difficult to comfort. Many others are fundamentally outgoing and agreeable, curious, and easily calmed when distressed. Whether the qualities of an innately difficult temperament develop into defensiveness, hostility, and anxiety, or those of the easy temperament develop into friendliness, warmth, and generally pleasant character traits depends on experience, especially early-life attachment experience. A nurturing, stable, safe, and secure environment will ameliorate a child’s fearfulness just as surely as a rejecting or indifferent one will create guilt, shame, and abandonment anxiety or fear of engulfment in previously calm children. Adult attachment relationships that hurt, engulf, or reject can undermine a fortunate combination of temperament and a nurturing childhood.

Love Styles

Everyone who loves has a style of loving, composed of temperamental emotional tone and learned patterns of intimate relating. Love styles reflect how much interest, enjoyment, compassion, trust, love, guilt, shame, and abandonment anxiety people are likely to experience in love relationships.

For example, some people experience the self as loving and worthy of love: "I'm lovable, and you will find my love worth having."

Some view the self as disorganized and unworthy of love while holding great value for others: "I'm not lovable, but I'll do anything to get you to love me."

Some view the self as stable but see others as unreliable: "I'm lovable, but you're either too insensitive to see it or you're just not worthy of my love."

If they see themselves as unworthy and others as rejecting, they eschew close relationships completely:"I'm unlovable, and you'll reject me anyway, so why bother?"

Clinicians recognize four dysfunctional love styles: compulsive self-reliance (the loner or distancer); compulsive caregiving (the nurturer or rescuer); compulsive care-seeking (the pursuer or emotionally needy); and resentful attack-or-withdrawal (the abuser)

How to Alter a Love Style

• Loner or Distancer. Some loners are content without love, but many become loners as a defense against rejection, abandonment, or failure. Distancers want some closeness but are easily overwhelmed by it. The only way to discover yourself fully is to love someone and hold onto your sense of self in an intimate connection. Begin to open your heart in small doses and observe what you learn about yourself. You may notice that you like yourself better when connecting than when distancing, and then you’ll want to do more of it.
• Nurturer or Rescuer. They require neediness in partners and feel rejected or lose interest when partners set boundaries or become self-regulating. If this is your love style, practice respect for boundaries and self-regulation as a form of nurturance and expression of love.
• Pursuer or Needy: Develop self-validation skills. You might prefer more closeness than your partner can tolerate, but you don’t need it. Think in terms of desire rather than need. Desire empowers, and neediness augers powerlessness. You can be disappointed and still feel OK about yourself. The pursuer-distancer dynamic in relationships is somewhat paradoxical: If you maintain a mental state of connection and reduce your pursuit of interactive intimacy, it will likely come to you.
• Attack or Withdrawal. Abusive patterns of behavior tend to be entrenched habits of emotional regulation and dysfunctional coping mechanisms. Left on their own, these tend to worsen over time and eventually require intensive interventions for emotional abuse or domestic violence education groups.

Although love styles emerge largely from temperament, they are more changeable than other temperamental qualities. But change won’t happen on autopilot. It takes reflection on the kind of person and partner you most want to be and the kind of relationship you want to have. It requires the practice of self-regulation skills, which enable you to act on your values rather than your temporary feelings and unconscious coping mechanisms. If you act on your feelings, you’ll violate your values. If you act on your values, your feelings will change for the better.