Love hurts: explorations of love, validation, and conflict

This paper considers how love may be conceptualised from a personal construct theory perspective, particularly in relation to experiences of validation and invalidation. This model is applied to writings about love, and the findings of a repertory grid and interview exploration of love, indicating differences in students’ construing of romantically and platonically loved figures and relationships between grid scores and a measure of love styles, are presented. Illustrations are provided from the clinical setting indicating how clients’ relationship problems may be explained in terms of their constructions concerning love