The 6 Love Attitudes and Attachment Styles: Our Findings

Have you ever started a relationship with someone, only to find that they have a completely different approach to love than you do? Or, do you find that your relationships all seem to follow a similar pattern?

This could have something to do with your love attitude. Everybody has a different way of experiencing love and relationships, and the 6 love attitudes, or love styles, describe the different categories we might fall into. We wanted to know whether these love attitudes had any relationship with your attachment style – and it turns out, they do!

Keep reading to find out more about the 6 different love styles, what we found when we compared them with attachment styles, and what this could mean for your own relationships.

What Are the 6 Love Attitudes?

Your love attitude describes how you approach love. The 6 love styles were first described by Canadian psychologist John Alan Lee in 1973, consisting of 3 primary love styles and 3 secondary styles.¹ This theory was later expanded on by Clyde and Susan Hendrick in 1986, with the development of the Love Attitudes Scale.²

The primary styles are:

• Ludus: “Game-playing” love. People with the Ludus love style tend to enjoy playful flirting and place less importance on serious commitment.
• Storge: “Friendship” or “familial” love. This love style is associated with respect and gradual bonding. People with this love style are open to love, but not too interested in looking for it. Their relationships tend to grow slowly, but steadily.
• Eros: “Passionate” love. People with the Eros love style find love and intimacy exciting. Their relationships can be intense, and they are more likely to choose partners based on chemistry.

The secondary styles are combinations of the primary styles:

• Mania (Ludic Eros): As a combination of passionate and game-playing love, Manic love is intense and often accompanied by anxiety and possessiveness.
• Pragma (Storgic Ludus): Combining familial and game-playing love, Pragma is a practical approach to love. People with the Pragma love style choose partners based on common goals and values.
• Agape (Storgic Eros): Pronounced “aga-pay”, the combination of familial and passionate love creates a selfless love driven by care and kindness. People with the Agape love style enjoy giving in relationships and are quick to forgive.

The 6 Love Attitudes and Your Attachment Style

We decided to find out whether love styles were connected to attachment styles. We surveyed almost 36,000 people around the world and found 2 statistically significant results:

• People scoring higher on Eros were less likely to score highly on romantic avoidance.
• People scoring highly on Mania were more likely to score highly on romantic anxiety.

FIND OUT YOUR ATTITUDE TO LOVE

This means that those with high romantic avoidance are less likely to look for intimate, ‘fated’ relationships, while those with high romantic anxiety are more likely to have intense, dramatic relationships.

We also found the following correlations, though they may not be strong enough to draw reliable conclusions from:³,⁴

Interestingly, Agape is the only love style that correlated with avoidance and anxiety in different directions; people with high avoidance were less likely to have the Agape love style, while people with high relationship anxiety were more likely to. This might be because people with high relationship anxiety can sometimes put their partner’s needs before their own, which is characteristic of the Agape love style.

How Love and Attachment Styles Connect

Previous research has found that your genetics can play a role in your love style, and while your attachment style is related to your life experience, genetics do seem to have an influence on this too.⁵,⁶ Specifically, the genes associated with love styles affect your dopamine and serotonin systems – so is it possible that these affect your predisposition to your attachment style too? If this is the case, it could change the way we understand and respond to attachment styles – but we need much more research in this area before we can draw any conclusions.

If you have attachment anxiety or avoidance, looking at these love styles could help you to gain a deeper understanding of yourself within relationships. Could taking a leaf out of the Eros love style’s book help you to work on reducing avoidance? Or, could leaning into the Storgic approach oppose the Mania love style and help to reduce attachment anxiety?

Conclusions

Understanding the relationship between your love style and your attachment style can give you an even deeper understanding of your approach to romantic relationships. The results of our own Attachment Project research echoed previous findings, and the huge size of our global survey helps us to understand the true scale of these associations.

Now that you know about love styles and their connection to attachment styles, do you know your attachment style? Find out with our Attachment Quiz, then head to our blog to learn more about your attachment style.

References

1. Lee, J. L. (1973). The colors of love: The exploration of the ways of loving. Ontario, Canada: New Press.
2. Hendrick, C. & Hendrick, S. (1986). A theory and method of love. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 392-402.
3. Fourmanov, I. Love Attitudes of Students with Different Attachment Styles. Journal of the Belarusian State University. Philosophy and Psychology. 2022;3:84.
4. Fricker J, Moore S. Relationship satisfaction: The role of love styles and attachment styles.
5. Emanuele E, Brondino N, Pesenti S, Re S, Geroldi D. Genetic loading on human loving styles. Neuroendocrinology Letters. 2007 Dec 1;28(6):815-21.
6. Erkoreka L, Zumarraga M, Arrue A, Zamalloa MI, Arnaiz A, Olivas O, Moreno-Calle T, Saez E, Garcia J, Marin E, Varela N. Genetics of adult attachment: An updated review of the literature. World journal of psychiatry. 2021 Sep 19;11(9):530.