The three components of love as proposed by Steinberg bringtogether what is understood as the bedrock of a healthy relationship, intimacy,passion, and commitment (Engel, Olson, & Patrick, 2000). Intimacy dealswith warm feeling of closeness, connection, and bondedness. Passion isunderstood as romantic and sexual desire due to physical attraction. The lastcomponent being commitment comprised of short and long term intentions to loveand grow love (Engel, Olson, & Patrick, 2000).

With all of these aspects putinto place in a relationship, the connection can grow and blossom into ahealthy long-term relationship. In Engel, Olson, & Patrick’s paperdiscussing the components of love; the authors found that conscientiousnessabout the relationship was a predictor of love in close opposite-sexrelationships (Engel, Olson, & Patrick, 2000).  Conscientiousness is understood as theconscious desire to do something well. This was discovered by attempting todetermine what characteristics a person must have that are associated with thethree components of love to allow it to flourish. In this study 126 students(36 male, 90 female) from psychology classes at the Midwestern AmericanUniversity took part in the survey-based study. The Sternberg triangle lovescale measures the degree of commitment, intimacy, and passion it wasdetermined that an individual’s motives and traits when entering therelationship would e a pre-cursor to the success of the relationship (Engel,Olson, & Patrick, 2000).

The motives that an individual has in their mindtowards others around them will explain how they will in turn see the people intheir relationship. The traits speak as to how the person will behave towardsothers showing their motives. If these people are connected to the creation ofthe love triangle then their relationship will grow, as one will show who thereare through their traits.            When itcomes to limitations, the study looked at college students that were inrelationships and tested to see how they viewed others around them and in theirrelationship but the study did not look at their partners.

This study also didnot look at individuals who were not in relationships; these people would beable to give insight as to what caused their previous relationship to end. Itwould be difficult to determine if they are indeed in a healthy relationship orthey just felt that they were. The sample was only that of undergraduates inthe psychology department and cannot be correlated to the greater population.Who is to say that the people studied were not incredibly religious and theysimply did see things differently.