Romantic passion as output from a self-regulating, intimacy-seeking system: a model for understanding passionate love.

This article presents a model of why individuals experience the feeling of passionate love in intimate relationships. Previous models have been limited because they do not describe the purpose and function of passionate love, do not incorporate basic emotion and personality theory, or are not applicable to help couples in distress. The present model reinterprets and integrates previous findings. New predictions are made about the functioning of passionate love in relationships by hypothesizing a self-regulating, intimacy-seeking system that produces passionate love as its outcome. A self-regulation model proposed by Carver and Scheier in 1998 is the template on which this model is based.