Love

Definition

Love is often thought of as an intense and positive emotion that can be experienced for a variety of close others, including a romantic partner or spouse, close friends, children, parents, and other relatives. For more than three decades, social psychologists and other social scientists have been studying love. The type of love that has been most frequently measured and studied is the love experienced for a romantic partner. However, when social scientists began measuring love, they realized that there were many different types or subtypes, even in regard to a romantic partner.

Types

An initial distinction was made between liking and love. One of the first psychologists to study love, Zick Rubin, discovered that people could distinguish between attitude statements that measured liking (items that referred to respect, positive evaluation, and perceptions of similarity) and attitude statements that measured love (items that referred to dependency, caring, and exclusiveness). His liking and love scales have been used in several research studies that have generated a number of interesting findings including (1) liking and loving are only modestly associated; (2) those who have higher scores on the love scale spend more time eye-gazing with their partner; and (3) higher scores on love are predictive of staying together over time.

[Page 538]Social psychologists next distinguished between various types of love. The first distinction was between passionate love and companionate love. Passionate love is intense, exciting, and has the potential for both ecstasy (when things are going well) and despair (when things are not going well). Companionate love, however, is less intense and is referred to as affection that develops between two people whose lives are intertwined. Research suggests that in most dating and newly married relationships, both types of love exist. Passionate love tends to develop first, although it is also likely to dissipate first over time. Companionate love may take longer to develop but is likely to remain stable and not erode with the passage of time. Passionate love, as the more intense type of love, may sometimes increase because of misattribution of arousal. A person can become aroused because of an extraneous source such as consumption of caffeine or a frightful experience and then mistakenly attribute the arousal to passionate love for another, especially if the other is physically attractive. Although passionate love declines over years of marriage, research has revealed that if couples engage in exciting and novel activities together, the passion can be rekindled.

In a more recent typology, six types or styles of loving have been identified. These are eros (intense, passionate love), ludus (game-playing love), storge (friendship love), pragma (practical love), mania (obsessive, dependent love) and agape (selfless love). These love styles may be considered to be attitudes or orientations toward a particular person (e.g., a romantic partner) but also may be considered to be stable orientations toward relationships. For example, some people may be thought of as erotic lovers, likely to experience this particular style of love regardless of the partner. However, people's lovestyle experiences also may change as a function of the partner's style of loving and how he or she behaves toward the other partner. The two types of love that are experienced to the greatest degree, especially among young adults, are eros and storge. In fact, most romantic relationships may have a combination of these two types of love. People experience a low level of ludus, which is good because this type of love does not lead to healthy and long-lasting relationships. Consistent gender differences have been found in the experience of love styles. Ludus is experienced to a greater degree by men than by women, and storge and pragma are experienced to a greater degree by women.

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