Love Styles

Love styles

Susan Hendrick and Clyde Hendrick developed a Loves Attitude Scale based on John Alan Lee's theory called Love styles. Lee identified six basic theories that people use in their interpersonal relationships:

• Eros — a passionate physical love based on physical appearance
• Ludus — love is played as a game; love is playful
• Storge — an affectionate love that slowly develops, based on similarity
• Pragma — pragmatic love
• Mania — highly emotional love; unstable; the stereotype of romantic love
• Agape — selfless altruistic love; spiritual

Hendrick and Hendrick found men tend to be more ludic and manic, whereas women tend to be storgic and pragmatic. Relationships based on similar love styles were found to last longer.

Phases

Helen Fisher suggests three main phases of love: lust, attraction, and attachment. Generally love will start off in the lust phase, strong in passion but weak in the other elements. The primary motivator at this stage is the basic sexual instinct. Appearance, smells, and other similar factors play a decisive role in screening potential mates. However, as time passes, the other elements may grow and passion may shrink — this depends upon the individual. So what starts as infatuation or empty love may well develop into one of the fuller types of love. At the attraction stage the person concentrates their affection on a single mate and fidelity becomes important.

Likewise, when a person has known a loved one for a long time, they develop a deeper attachment to their partner. According to current scientific understanding of love, this transition from the attraction to the attachment phase usually happens in about 30 months. After that time, the passion fades, changing love from consummate to companionate, or from romantic love to liking.

Love vs. Insanity?

Studies have shown that mental scans of those in love show a striking resemblance to those with a mental illness. Love creates activity in the same area of the brain that hunger, thirst, and drug cravings create activity in. New love, therefore, could possibly be more physical than emotional (though drawing a clear line between physical and emotional is difficult when discussing the brain).

Over time, this reaction to love mellows, and different areas of the brain are activated, primarily ones involving long-term commitments.

Dr. Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist, suggests that this reaction to love is so similar to that of drugs because without love, humanity would die out.

William Shakespeare wrote in A Midsummer Night's Dream that, "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet/ Are of imagination all compact."