Love, Typologies

If one or more types of love or any similar construct can be described in a systematic way, we can say that it forms a typology or categorization. In fact, there are many types of love, and this entry deals with how these various types are organized into typologies, primarily typologies of romantic love. A typology of romantic love is a description that divides love into two or more qualitative categories. Each category of a typology has its own verbal description, and the category may have properties that can be measured. The differences between the categories can in most cases not only be given verbal descriptions, but also quantitative descriptions. Thus, categories within a typology may be discriminated from one another and therefore compared with each other. Further, typologies may be compared with other typologies.

During the past few decades, several typologies of romantic love have been developed. The first relevant social-psychological scientific work distinguished loving from liking. The next approach proposed two types of romantic love: passionate and companionate. From the 1970s to the present, typologies in most cases became more complex, with each new one generally proposing several categories.

It may be helpful to contrast a typology of love with a process theory of love. As an example of the latter, Arthur and Elaine Aron proposed that people have a basic need to grow or expand the self. As life's journey proceeds, self-expansion may include such things as obtaining physical possessions, attaining occupational success, and forming close relationships. For example, falling in love provides a pleasurable, rapid expansion of the boundaries of self. As two people fall in love, they each metaphorically expand the self to include the other, creating a new entity called “us.” The self-expansion theory, as applied to romantic love, is quite versatile in generating testable predictions. It is a theory about the process of change in the self in response to love or how love proceeds. A typology of love is rather about types or categories of love or what love is.

The following are some of the most researched typologies of love. The concluding section of the entry provides some comparisons of the typologies, as well as a few applications of the typologies to couples in real life.