Love styles are modus operandi of how people love, originally developed by John Lee (1973, 1988). He identified six basic love styles—also known as "colours" of love—that people use in their interpersonal relationships:
- Eros – a passionate physical and emotional love based on aesthetic enjoyment; stereotype of romantic love
- Ludus – a love that is played as a game or sport; conquest; may have multiple partners at once
- Storge – an affectionate love that slowly develops from friendship, based on similarity (kindred to Philia)
- Pragma – love that is driven by the head, not the heart; undemonstrative
- Mania – obsessive love; experience great emotional highs and lows; very possessive and often jealous lovers
- Agape – selfless altruistic love
Clyde Hendrick and Susan Hendrick of Texas Tech University expanded on this theory in the mid-1980s with their extensive research on what they called "love styles". They have found that men tend to be more ludic, whereas women tend to be storgic and pragmatic. Mania is often the first love style teenagers display. Relationships based on similar love styles were found to last longer. People often look for people with the same love style as themselves for a relationship. These styles are akin to the Greek types of love.
Read more about Love Styles: Eros, Ludus, Storgic, Pragma, Manic, Agape, Measurement, Biological View
Famous quotes containing the words love and/or styles:
“Nae living man I’ll love again,
Since that my lovely knight is slain.
Wi ae lock of his yellow hair
I’ll chain my heart for evermair.”
—Unknown. The Lament of the Border Widow (l. 25–28)
“... it is use, and use alone, which leads one of us, tolerably trained to recognize any criterion of grace or any sense of the fitness of things, to tolerate ... the styles of dress to which we are more or less conforming every day of our lives. Fifty years hence they will seem to us as uncultivated as the nose-rings of the Hottentot seem today.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)