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Critical thinking assignment Marital Research on Compassionate Love 10/4/06 1) A definition of compassionate love, according to the authors is a globally positive view of one partner that is linked to an accurate understanding of the partners’ specific strengths and weaknesses. In addition, compassionate love is a love that recognizes the partner’s specific positive and negative qualities, while simultaneously affirming the partners overall worth.
In retrospect, this understanding and accepting of a partner’s specific strengths and weaknesses may represent a selfless act, in that spouses endure the costs of their partner’s faults, weaknesses, and limitations-but love them anyway. 2) I think critically evaluating the authors’ definition of compassionate love is difficult. From experience and being in the attendance of many self-improvement classes, I have understood compassionate to be characterized by mutual respect, attachment, affection, and trust.
Compassionate love usually develops out of feelings of mutual understanding and shared respect for each other. It can be defined as the selfless desire to enhance the well-being of another in a marriage or any other relationship. 3) The authors may believe it to be important to study compassionate love in newlyweds because couples who fit this definition of “compassionate love” will, in fact have longer, more supportive marriages. Compassionate love will be a way of reconciling elements of selflessness and self interest and this is a crucial element of successful marriage over time.
In addition, the authors may want this research to promote compassionate love to humanity as a whole. 4) Based on marital stability over time it was found that marriages seemed to benefit when wives understood their partners specific qualities. This does not conclude that husbands significantly failed to understand their wives specific qualities, but that their understanding of their spouse may not be associated with the spouse support abilities or the couples’ likelihood of divorce.
Therefore, gender differences associated with gender roles or other factors could come into play. Behavioral skills (not in this study) may be enhanced and other factors could be enhanced in husbands when they understand their wives specific traits. Understanding of different qualities can pose certain gender differences. 5) An alternative explanation for the finding that a husband’s understanding of his wife’s traits and abilities did not predict marital stability across the first four years of marriage is because men and women experience emotions differently.
I think women are naturally more nurturing and emotional than their male counterparts. In a marriage, I would think that women understand their husbands more and have a stronger need for this emotional connection. I do not think men experience emotion and the need to understand traits and abilities the same way. From personal experience and throughout my years of education I have learned that wives have always had a stronger need to be more emotionally involved with their spouses than their husbands. ) A) Compassionate love should be more instrumentally measured, such as, head nods for “understanding” a spouses point in a discussion or certain verbal indications for support. In effect, this can lead to a more clear cute measurement of compassionate love. B) When following couples over time, I would also recommend giving self report inventories to the couples to also measure stability over time and not so much if the marriage dissipitated or not. This would help get an idea of sustained compassion and its consistency over time.