Kruglanski et al. frame romantic love as a quest for significance. This commentary expands their model by integrating an evolutionary perspective, linking significance to mating and reproductive success. It highlights how additional psychological needs – such as emotional security, arousal, and sexual satisfaction – also shape romantic love. By situating these needs within evolved functions, the commentary clarifies how significance interacts with other motivational systems in the emergence and dynamics of romantic love.

Does romantic love always depend on trade-offs between significance quests, partner appreciation, and partner merit? The compensatory logic of the love formula may better apply to romantic relationship initiation than maintenance. Personal quests for significance are more tied to the success/failure of established than new relationships. This makes it harder to keep partner appreciation and merit mentally separate, limiting compensation.

Because not all romantic relationships are loving and not all romantic love happens within a romantic relationship, it would be good to specify whether Kruglanski’s model applies to falling in love, initiating a romantic relationship, or both. In addition, the model seems less applicable to one-sided love phenomena such as unreciprocated love, love at first sight, and parasocial love.

This commentary responds to Kruglanski et al.’s paper, which theorizes that love is one means that can result in significance. The commentary’s first focus is whether love is well conceptualized as an instrumental activity (a means-end relation) and concludes that a constitutive-ends conceptualization is necessary (love helps to constitute significance). Secondly, the evidence base for their hypotheses appears thin.

The idea that romantic relationships are rooted in satisfying the need for significance reflects a broader principle: people are drawn to those who support their goals. This desire for goal support extends beyond the quest for significance, shaping friendships, family bonds, and even parental love, which many consider the greatest love of all.

We concur with the authors’ hypothesis that romantic love serves the quest for significance. However, we propose that (a) this quest also involves an intersubjective process of meaning co-construction within the couple and (b) love should be conceptualized as a dynamic process through which partners mutually shape and transform each other’s sense of significance over time.

Kruglanski et al.’s love model rightly highlights motivation and meaning as core to love, aligning with current research. However, this commentary expands the view, emphasizing love’s biological basis in brain systems and evolving different types of motivation. Love fulfills both individual and species-level needs, promoting health, connection, and generativity. True love transcends ego, growing into unconditional, spiritually rich connectedness over time.

We agree that people seek social significance and that falling in love can be a means to attaining significance. However, we suggest there are differences between people in how they construe and seek significance and how they fall in love.

Are there measurable predictors for falling in love? Kruglanski et al. provide three. Their novel model includes a drive to feel socially significant: the Quest for Significance. This adds an important dimension to basic survival drives that others have proposed for the experience of love. It also adds to the tools available to those seeking intimacy and slow love.

Kruglanski et al.’s love formula – partner merit, appreciation, and the quest for meaning – offers a novel perspective but overlooks key evolutionary insights. It oversimplifies mating preferences, neglects contextual flexibility, and downplays reproductive signals crucial to partner selection. While innovative, the model fails to account for the complexity of human romantic behavior shaped by ecological, social, and developmental factors.

We elaborate on importance of expressing appreciation in the formation of maintenance of romantic love. Reciprocal expression of appreciation may be a vital mediator of assortative mating, particularly insofar as human sexual mating forges lasting cooperative bonds essential for co-parenting.

Kruglanski et al.’s significance-based model overlooks fundamental biopsychological mechanisms driving romantic love. The Tie-Up Theory reveals how women’s subconscious biological compatibility assessments through physical, chemical, and behavioral signals operate independently of conscious significance calculations. Their gender-neutral framework ignores how men’s receptive emotional orientation differs from women’s active emotional competence. By reducing love to significance enhancement, the model cannot explain irrational attractions, persistent relationships despite low “merit,” or gendered dissolution patterns determined by reward cycle breakdowns.

We offer a model of romantic love as a means to the end of feeling significant and worthy. According to this model, the partner’s perceived merits and their appreciation of the actor combine with the actor’s magnitude of significance quest to determine the likelihood of the actor falling in love with the partner. Our model affords a broad account of diverse love phenomena and the derivation of specific hypotheses supported by prior and new data and offers novel avenues for further research on classic issues in romantic love. The discussion considers our model’s unique implications and its relation to other theories of love.