An Introduction to Lee's Love Styles

An interesting way to explore romantic communication and the way you love is to explore it through John Lee’s perspective.  Lee developed a typology of love styles that is utilized by many to explain the types of love that humans experience. There are six proposed ideal love styles:

Eros, Storge, Ludas, Agape, Pragma, and Mania.

Lee suggests that there are individual and relational differences that play into how a love is formed and these differences construct how this love is experienced and communicated.
Lee’s love styles are broken into two categories:
primary and secondary love styles.

                                                                                                                                      

Primary styles include:

Eros: where romantic elements of love are valued

Storge: a love that results from long-term, developed friendships

Ludas: the style that focuses on the game playing aspect of love
                                                                                                                                     

Secondary styles are those that combine a mixture of these primary styles. These include:

Agape: a love which is altruistic and selfless

Pragma: which is centered around logical reasoning

Mania: an obsessive style that is focused on dependence jealousy and emotional duress
                                                                                                                                     

These styles can help you form a great basis for analysis and reflection when exploring how love is communicated but it is important to remember that these are ideals and that most people posses a mixture of many love styles, not just one.

  Lee’s love styles are extremely relevant to romantic relationships and how they are communicated because they relate to many other aspects of a relationship such as the way we communicate about sex or our emotional needs and desires.

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Explaining Lee's Love Styles as a Color Wheel

Looking for a quick and easy way to visualize and understand Lee's Love Styles?

 This is the video for you!

Thinking of Lee's Love Styles as a color wheel is an effect way to understand the six love styles. It's also very helping to acknowlegde the blending of primary styles to create secondary styles. As the video states, everyone is different and we are all a mixture of many different styles! With a visual like this, you can see directly how this process represent the mosaic that is your indivual love life!

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Love Styles Chart

This chart can be used to further explain the six love styles
and how you express and communicate love using John Lee's research. 

Use this as a quick refresher when you are confused and looking for guidance or as a way to explore your personal love styles in more depth!

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What's Your Love Style? - Quiz

Now that you have all the background information about Lee's Love Styles, you are ready to further explore this phenomena and find out which love styles
 make up how to you express love!

Always remember, you do not fall into just one of Lee's Love Styles, but portray different characteristics of each. Your results rank the love styles in which are most dominant in to the one(s) you show as less dominant.