Abraham Maslow on Keeping Romantic Love Alive

This article, "Abraham Maslow on Keeping Romantic Love Alive" by Dr. Edward Hoffman, was first published on Psychology Today.

In this 50th anniversary year of Abraham Maslow’s death, the time seems right to highlight an important but little-known area of his concern: namely, romantic love.

Though famous for his influential ideas on enlightened management, synergy, and other aspects of organizational flourishing, Maslow also sustained a long interest in romantic ardor—and particularly, how to keep its flame alive. Because he seldom wrote directly on this topic, his insights have remained obscure.

As Maslow’s biographer, I’d therefore like to focus here on two facets of romantic love that he regarded as important: idealization and gratitude; a future blog will examine his emphasis on tenderness.

While studying the personality traits of self-actualizing men and women, Maslow became intrigued by the question: what are their romantic relations like?

In 1953, he published a book chapter titled “Love in healthy people” on his preliminary findings, and the following year, developed his thinking in an unpublished essay.

For the rest of Maslow’s life, he sought to refine his notion of what he called “Being-love”—with insights scattered amidst his analyses on the wider subjects of “Being-psychology” and “Being-cognition.”

Essentially Maslow stated that because self-actualizers are free of neurotic needs for ego-stroking, flattery or dominance, they’re capable of more empathic and caring love relations.

Later, influenced by Sidney Jourard’s ground-breaking studies on self-disclosure, Maslow also asserted that psychologically healthy people are more comfortable with being “naked” with their beloved — emotionally as well as physically.

Thirdly, because self-actualizers had fulfilled their basic needs for esteem and respect, they were able to focus more wholeheartedly on their loved one. In today’s positive psychology terminology, they possess greater mindfulness.

Beginning in the mid-1960s and influenced by Eastern thought, Maslow called this mindset “Taoist receptivity”— which he regarded as paradigmatic among lovers gazing blissfully into each other’s eyes or a mother staring in wonderment at her newborn baby.

In Maslow’s view, the psychological state of “Being-love” entails seeing one’s romantic partner as not only wonderful and extraordinary but as essentially perfect. Though conceding that such a mindset is certainly unrealistic from the perspective of ordinary life, he viewed it as vital for romance to exist and thrive.

For once an individual sees one’s partner solely from “Deficiency-love” consciousness — that is, as only a flawed, ordinary human being, romantic ardor vanishes. And then, Maslow observed darkly in Religions, Values and Peak-Experiences, “It can get very ugly both for men and women, and can deprive them of all the great pleasures of life.”

It’s fascinating to note that Maslow’s emphasis on the importance of idealizing or sacrilizing (to use his term), one’s romantic partner foreshadowed today’s psychological research on the role of positive illusions in love.

For example, a longitudinal study of married couples by Dr. Sandra Murray at SUNY-Buffalo and her colleagues found that newlyweds who most idealized their partner showed no decline in marital satisfaction after three years compared to other newlyweds, whose marital satisfaction declined sharply during this period.

A considerably longer-term longitudinal study led by Dr. Paul Miller at the Ontario HIV Treatment Network found that newlywed couples who idealized each other were more in love with each other than other newlyweds and also less likely to experience loss of love after thirteen years of marriage.

In short, idealizing or even sacrilizing one’s partner seems vital to maintaining passion.

Although Maslow didn’t say so explicitly, he regarded self-actualizing people as both feeling and expressing ample gratitude in marriage. This outlook stemmed from his seminal studies on peak-experiences, in which gratitude was a frequent concomitant of moments of intense happiness and meaning.

In an unpublished essay likely written a year before his death, Maslow stated, “The quality of gratitude is important for emotional health. Both to prevent possible devaluing of daily life and to help retrigger peak-experiences, it is vital that people `count their blessings:’ to appreciate what they possess without having to undergo its actual loss.”

In the decades since Maslow wrote that essay, gratitude has become the focus of increasing psychological research. In particular, there’s mounting evidence that gratitude helps to maintain and enhance social relationships, including friendships and romantic involvements.

Research shows that spousal gratitude is linked with experiencing frequent “small” acts of kindness rather than bombastic but rare kindly acts — and intriguingly, also mediates financial distress in marriage.

The takeaway? The more grateful you feel toward your romantic partner and the more you experience "Being-love" together, the better your relationship.