Love

Romantic Love Styles

John Alan Lee proposed that there are three primary styles of love—eros, ludus, and storge—and three secondary styles of love that result from mixtures of the three primary styles—pragma, mania, and agape. Eros is an erotic kind of love that comes with strong passionate emotions and physical attraction. Ludus is a game-playing love that is uncommitted and tends to realize itself with a variety of partners. Storge is a friendship kind of love that does not come with emotions as strong as those of eros; in contrast to eros, it is relatively calm and unobtrusive. Pragma is a kind of calculating love that sees the partner in terms of attributes that are desired (or not desired) in a relationship. Mania is a highly emotional secondary style of love that alternates between euphoria and desperation or even agony. The third secondary love style is agape, which is a kind of communal and altruistic love that is very giving and compassionate but that usually does not appear in a pure form in romantic relationships.

Susan Hendrick and Clyde Hendrick used these love styles as the basis for their research program and suggested that those six love styles can be depicted in a six-dimensional matrix in which every person gets assigned a certain point on all of the six love styles to describe the “amount” of each love style. These styles are largely independent of each other. People can be especially high on one style or moderately high on several of them. Also, it is possible to experience different love styles with different partners. The love styles, therefore, are dependent not only on the individual but also on the partner, as well as on demographic factors like age, life stage, and so forth.

The Duplex Theory of Love

The duplex theory of love, developed by Robert J. Sternberg, has two parts. One part specifies the structure of love, the other part, how this structure comes to be. The two parts are called the triangular subtheory and the subtheory of love as a story.

The Triangular Subtheory of Love. The triangular theory of love holds that love can be understood in terms of three components that together can be viewed as forming the vertices of a triangle. These three components are intimacy, passion, and decision/commitment. Intimacy refers to feelings of closeness, connectedness, and bondedness in loving relationships. It thus includes within its purview those feelings that give rise to the experience of warmth in a loving relationship. Passion refers to the drives that lead to romance, physical attraction, sexual consummation, and related phenomena in loving relationships. Decision/commitment refers, in the short term, to the decision that one loves a certain other and, in the long term, to one's commitment to maintain that love.

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