Love style test: the six styles of love
Answer eighteen statements to see, as scores, how much each of sociologist John Alan Lee’s six love styles shows in the way you date: Eros (passion), Ludus (play), Storge (friendship), Pragma (practical), Mania (all-consuming) and Agape (selfless). No style is a better way to love.
About 3 min · 18 questions · For self-reflection, not diagnosis · Results stay in your browser
For something to turn into romance, I need to feel a strong pull the first time we meet.
Not dating right now? Answer from a past relationship, or from how you would be in one.
Before You Start
A guide to reading six love-style scores as tendencies in how you date, not as a compatibility verdict or a ranking of good and bad ways to love.
Useful For
The love style test helps you put into words what matters to you in love, and where your expectations and a partner’s might differ.
Answer Honestly, Read Carefully
Answer from how you have actually dated rather than how you wish you did. If you are not dating now, think of a past relationship or how you are when you are in one.
Related Tests
The six love styles at a glance
All six are scored from 0 to 100, and the highest is shown as your main love style.
- Eros · Passionate
- Ludus · Playful
- Storge · Friendship
- Pragma · Practical
- Mania · All-consuming
- Agape · Selfless
How to read your results
Overview
The love style test is based on John Alan Lee’s “colours of love” theory (Lee, 1973, 1977). Lee drew on love as portrayed in fiction and non-fiction, and on interviews with people in love, to describe distinct ways of loving.
Hendrick and Hendrick (1986) later built a 42-item scale for the six styles, and data from several continents showed a similar six-factor structure (Neto et al., 2000). This test does not use that scale: mind.io wrote its own statements, turning the same theory into everyday dating situations.
How It Works
You score all 18 statements from 1 to 5 by how closely each one fits the way you love, with 1 meaning strong disagreement and 5 strong agreement. Each style has three statements, all worded toward that style, so none is reverse-scored, and the order is mixed so that two statements of the same style never come one after the other.
A style’s score is the average of its three answers converted to 0–100, so answering 1 to all three gives 0 and answering 5 to all three gives 100. Each one-point change in the sum of the three answers moves the score by about 8 points, and the highest score is your main style. When two or more styles share the top score, they are shown together.
Score Interpretation
The scores show the relative shape of your six styles. If your top style is at 67 and the next at 58, read them as two styles of nearly equal weight in your mix.
No style is a good or a bad way to love. Studies have repeatedly linked Eros and Agape with higher relationship satisfaction and Ludus with lower satisfaction (Levy & Davis, 1988; Morrow et al., 1995), but these are group averages and do not decide how any one person’s relationship will turn out.
If all your scores are low, dating may not be on your mind right now, or the situations in the statements may be far from your experience. If they are all high, a habit of answering on the “agree” side may play a part, so look at the order of the styles before their height.
Limits
The statements are not taken from the Love Attitudes Scale used in research; mind.io wrote them for self-reflection. Three statements per style make the measure rough, and without standardized norms the scores cannot be set against other people’s averages.
Many of the studies behind this test sampled university students and heterosexual couples, so the findings may not hold in the same way for other ages, cultures or kinds of relationship. If a partner’s control or violence is making things hard, a support service or counsellor will help more than this result.
Guides to read alongside
- The six love styles: Eros to Agape, and what research says about themWhat Lee’s six love styles (Eros, Ludus, Storge, Pragma, Mania, Agape) mean, how research measures them, what they are linked to and how to use your result.
- Attachment styles in dating: how secure, anxious, and avoidant partners love differentlyWhy do slow replies sting or closeness feel stifling? See how secure, anxious, avoidant, and fearful-avoidant styles show up in dating and what helps each.
- MBTI love styles: how all 16 types show love and what hurts themHow do the 16 MBTI types show love, what do they need, and where do they clash? A group-by-group guide to dating tendencies, and why talking beats type.
Frequently asked questions
What are the six love styles in the love style test?
They come from John Alan Lee’s 1973 book Colours of Love. Lee treated passionate Eros, playful Ludus and friendship-based Storge as three primary colors, which blend into three secondary ones: Mania (Eros + Ludus), Pragma (Storge + Ludus) and Agape (Eros + Storge). Clyde and Susan Hendrick, who built the research scale, saw all six as equally valid ways of loving, so none ranks above another.
How accurate is the love style test?
Think of it as a light self-reflection tool rather than a measurement: you rate 18 statements about how you love, which takes about 3 minutes. mind.io wrote the statements from Lee’s theory, and unlike the Love Attitudes Scale used in research (Hendrick & Hendrick, 1986), they have not been tested for reliability and validity. With only three statements per style, one or two answers can reshuffle the order, so look at the shape of all six scores rather than the top one alone.
Does your love style change over time or from one relationship to the next?
It can. Lee did not see love styles as fixed traits: the same person can lean toward one style in one relationship and toward quite a different one in another. In one study, students who were in love scored higher on Eros and Agape and lower on Ludus than those who were not (Hendrick & Hendrick, 1988), and a study of couples linked love styles to relationship status, age and how long people had been together (Morrow et al., 1995). Retake the test after a few months or in a new relationship and compare.
Do love styles differ by gender?
Early American studies of college students repeatedly found men higher on Ludus and women higher on Storge and Pragma (Hendrick et al., 1984; Hendrick & Hendrick, 1986). Yet a later study by the same team also found many similarities between women and men (Hendrick & Hendrick, 1995), and some of the gender differences seen in the US did not show up in Japanese or Russian samples (Sprecher et al., 1994). So read your own result rather than guessing your style from your gender.
How is love style different from attachment style?
Attachment style describes how much you worry that a partner will leave (anxiety) and how uneasy closeness makes you (avoidance); love style describes what you believe love is and how it should go. When both were measured together, Mania grouped with anxious attachment and Eros with secure attachment (Levy & Davis, 1988), and avoidant attachment has been linked to Ludus (Feeney & Noller, 1990). They are related but not the same thing, so taking the attachment style test as well shows you a different side.
What should I do with my love style result?
Look at the shape of the six bars rather than the top style alone, and share the result with a partner to talk about what each of you reads as a sign of love. In one study of couples, partners tended to have matching styles, but relationship quality was tied more strongly to each person’s own style than to their partner’s (Morrow et al., 1995). Use the result as a clue to habits you can change, not as a compatibility verdict.