This article reassesses John Alan Lee’s seminal typology of love styles, examining how the original depth of the Eros archetype—defined by intense sensuality, physical attraction, and aesthetic alignment—was lost as holistic narrative methods gave way to simplified survey metrics like the Love Attitudes Scale. By reviewing Lee’s theoretical foundations, structural color taxonomy, and empirical profile of the secure, sensual lover, the paper evaluates the methodological trade-offs of modern relationship research and calls for a return to Lee’s nuanced conceptualization of physical and sensual love.
Re-Examining Lee’s Primary Styles of Love
In the 1970s, Canadian sociologist John Alan Lee (1933–2013) introduced a theoretical framework that transformed the social-scientific study of love and relationships: the typology of love styles (Lee, 1973, 1976). Prior to Lee’s work, psychological and sociological literature lacked a systematic, empirical method to categorize how individuals experience, express, and enact love. While scholars across North America were beginning to explore relationship typologies (Lasswell & Lasswell, 1976; Lasswell & Lobsenz, 1980), Lee’s model stood out for its phenomenological breadth. He conceptualized love not as a single, uniform emotion, but as a diverse set of distinct styles across several experiential planes—including personal beliefs, attitudes, relationship identities, and concrete behaviors.
Over the decades, Lee’s original framework inspired a vast body of empirical research. However, as these ideas were distilled into brief survey measures and popular summaries, Lee’s nuanced descriptions were often reduced to truncated attributes or oversimplified shortcuts. In many cases, these shortcuts distorted his original conceptualization.
To restore the depth of Lee’s original vision, this article provides a comprehensive review of the Eros love style as it was originally conceptualized and investigated by John Lee—examining its theoretical origins, empirical identification through qualitative narrative methods, structural placement within his color taxonomy, and critical distinctions from modern assessment measures (Hendrick & Hendrick, 1986, 1998; Karandashev, 2019, 2022).
Eros is one of the three primary love styles identified by John Alan Lee.
Historical Context and Theoretical Foundations
Lee’s taxonomy emerged during a transformative era in social science when researchers sought to bridge the gap between qualitative humanistic narratives and empirical classification. A primary catalyst for Lee’s investigation was a “puzzling contradiction between the opinions which subjects said they held about true love and the behaviour they reported enacting when actually in a love relationship” (Lee, 1977, p. 176). To resolve this discrepancy between abstract ideology and lived reality, Lee developed a theoretical framework that captured love across its total phenomenological scope.
John Lee grounded his theory of love styles in the context of the socio-cultural frameworks and explained how cultural ideologies framed modern styles of love.
The Color Analogy: Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Components of Love
To communicate the taxonomic structure of his model, Lee (1973, 1976, 1977) introduced an illustrative analogy based on the color wheel:
- Primary Love Styles: Eros (sensual love of physical attraction), Ludus (playful, game-playing love), and Storge (friendship-based, companionate love) serve as the fundamental building blocks of romantic expression—analogous to the primary colors red, yellow, and blue.
- Secondary Love Styles: Constructed from combinations of two primary styles, much like secondary colors:
- Pragma (logical, practical love) = Storge + Ludus
- Mania (obsessive, possessive love) = Eros + Ludus
- Agape (altruistic, duty-bound love) = Eros + Storge
- Additional combinations: Storgic Eros, Storgic Ludus, and Ludic Eros.
- Tertiary Love Styles: Complex mixtures incorporating manic elements, such as Manic Eros, Manic Storge, and Manic Ludus.
Lee emphasized that the colors themselves carried no intrinsic psychological symbolic meaning; rather, the color wheel served as a taxonomy to explain how distinct, pure styles could combine into intricate, overlapping human experiences. While secondary and tertiary mixtures demonstrate the structural complexity of the model, Eros stands as a foundational, unmixed primary style within Lee’s typology.
Lee’s Theoretical Description of the Eros Love Style
At its core, the Eros love style is defined by an intense, immediate fascination with the physical appearance and total presence of a potential partner. Rather than a superficial vanity, Eros reflects a profound alignment between a real-world partner and an internal archetype:
“Individuals with the Eros love style are very interested in and fascinated by the physical appearance of a potential partner. The lovers see in their beloved the physical characteristics that match their ideal image of the beautiful. Physical romantic attraction is a central tenet of their love.”
(Excerpt from Karandashev, 2022, p. 78).
Within Lee’s overall taxonomy (1973, 1976), Eros stands as one of the three primary love styles alongside Ludus (playful, uncommitted love) and Storge (slow-burning, companionate love). Whereas Ludus avoids emotional involvement and Storge grows gradually out of friendship, Eros is immediate, intense, and deeply expressive from its inception.
The Love Story Card Sort: Empirically Identified Characteristics
To capture the true complexity of human loving, Lee did not rely on brief self-report questionnaires. Instead, he developed an innovative qualitative-quantitative methodology known as the Love Story Card Sort (Lee, 1973, 1977).
Researchers presented participants with 1,500 cards arranged across 170 sequential sets. Each card contained a concise statement detailing a specific idea, behavioral choice, physical symptom, or emotional reaction within a romantic relationship. The items covered a wide range of individual experiences and relational phenomena:
- Somatic and physiological reactions: Changes in appetite, sleep disruption, or visceral sensations of excitement.
- Intimacy behaviors: Speed of self-disclosure, desired frequency of contact, and physical touch.
- Cognitive patterns: Preoccupation with the partner, expectations of reciprocity, and attitudes toward exclusivity.
- Conflict and communication: Methods of resolving disagreements and expressions of jealousy or anxiety.
Participants selected cards that best matched their actual relationship experiences, effectively assembling a quantifiable, yet deeply personal “omnibus love story” (Lee, 1977, p. 176). This method bridged qualitative depth and quantitative rigor, allowing researchers to capture complex emotional narratives while recording standardized units of data. From in-depth interviews with 120 participants, Lee gathered approximately 100,000 discrete data points. Using Guttman scaling and factor analysis, he identified 32 distinct factors that reliably differentiated the primary and secondary love styles.
Empirical Profile of the Eros Lover
From Lee’s empirical factor analysis emerged a vivid profile of the Eros lover. Far from being an uncontrolled or purely hedonistic physical attraction, the true Eros style reflects a specific psychological and behavioral integration:
“Participants with eros style usually have had a happy childhood, a warm relationship with siblings and parents. They feel content with their life and work. They are ready for love, yet do not look anxiously for it. The erotic lovers typically clearly know which physical type is attractive to them. They can express it verbally, or by quickly selecting that type among a set of photographs (Lee,1973, p. 248). Participants with the eros love style are quite demanding and specific in their expectations that a beloved must conform to their ideal image. They openly and promptly communicate their recognition and appreciation to the beloved which fulfil their ideal expectation of a physical type.
The lovers of eros style are inclined to quickly disclose themselves and expects the disclosure of the beloved. They frequently discuss the topics of involvement with a partner to magnify these feelings. From the beginning of a relationship, they are willing to meet the beloved as frequently as possible. They are looking forward to building up an extensive and deep understanding. They are yearning for sexual intimacy. They enjoy experiencing intensive sensations and emotions. They are self-confident in love, and therefore, neither anxious and demanding, nor obsessively possessive.”
(Excerpt from Karandashev, 2022, p. 81).
Key Characteristics of the Eros Style of Love
1. Developmental Foundations and Psychological Readiness:
Participants categorized within the Eros style generally reported a warm, secure family origin—recalling a happy childhood and supportive relationships with parents and siblings. In adulthood, they expressed baseline satisfaction with their personal circumstances, careers, and social standing. Crucially, while Erotic lovers are emotionally open and ready for love, they do not search for it out of anxiety, loneliness, or a desire for external validation (Lee, 1973; Karandashev, 2022).
2. Visual Recognition and Aesthetic Specificity:
Eros is defined by an immediate, highly specific awareness of physical preference. The Erotic lover maintains a detailed internal “ideal image” of physical beauty. When encountering a potential partner who embodies this ideal, recognition is rapid and definitive. In Lee’s (1973) card sort experiments, Erotic lovers easily articulated their aesthetic preferences verbally or selected matching individuals instantly from photographic arrays. Physical attraction serves as the explicit gateway for their romantic engagement.
3. Rapid Communication and Reciprocal Disclosure:
Upon identifying a partner who meets their aesthetic ideal, Erotic lovers do not play hard-to-get or engage in deceptive relationship tactics. They openly, promptly, and warmly communicate their admiration. Furthermore, Eros is characterized by a drive for rapid, deep self-disclosure. Erotic lovers share their inner lives early in the relationship, expect reciprocal openness, and intentionally discuss their mutual feelings to intensify the emotional bond from the outset.
4. Sensual Passion Without Obsessive Possessiveness:
Erotic lovers yearn for sexual intimacy and deeply enjoy intense physical and emotional sensations. However, what distinguishes pure Eros from secondary styles like Mania (Eros + Ludus) is its foundation of psychological security. Erotic lovers exhibit strong self-confidence within romantic contexts. Because their desire stems from authentic appreciation rather than internal insecurity, they are neither obsessively possessive nor driven by pathologically anxious jealousy. They seek a profound, comprehensive understanding of the beloved built on mutual freedom and passionate engagement.
Methodological Evolution: Love Styles vs. Love Attitudes
The conceptualization of Eros underwent a major shift in the late 1980s when Clyde Hendrick and Susan Hendrick adapted Lee’s framework to develop the Love Attitudes Scale (LAS) (Hendrick & Hendrick, 1986; Hendrick et al., 1998). This evolution fundamentally altered how romantic love was operationalized and measured within academic literature..
| Feature / Dimension | Lee’s Original Love Styles Model (1973, 1976) | Hendrick & Hendrick’s LAS Model (1986, 1998) |
| Primary Focus | Holistic, multi-systemic case categorization (Type of person/love) | Continuous variable scores across subscales (Attitudinal strength) |
| Data Collection | Deep structured “Love Story Card Sort” interviews | Standardized Likert-scale questionnaire surveys |
| Scope of Phenomena | Behaviors, somatic responses, history, identity, beliefs, and emotions | Cognitive attitudes, conscious beliefs, and self-reported preferences |
| Taxonomical View | Interdependent structure (Primary, Secondary, Tertiary overlaps) | Six psychometrically independent, orthogonal dimensions |
| Classification Rule | Qualitative pattern-matching to complex factor profiles | Quantitative score thresholds on individual subscales |
The Eros Love Style is a Love Type
The Eros love style represents a distinct cluster of personal beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and individual identity that men and women exhibit in love. These characteristics define lovers’ attitudes, experiences, expressions, actions, and interactions. They are empirically distinguishable and related to each other in a typical combination that defines the Eros typological structure.
This conceptualization of Eros as a love style differs fundamentally from Eros as a love attitude assessed in the Love Attitude Scale (Hendrick & Hendrick, 1986, 1998). In Lee’s framework, Eros is an integrated type of love; in the LAS framework, it functions as a continuous attitude variable.
Theoretical Consequences of the Shift from Eros Love as a Type to Eros Love as a Variable
While the Love Attitude Scale made love research far more accessible and psychometrically scalable—enabling large-scale survey research across samples—it fundamentally changed the nature of the construct:
- Reduction from Style to Variable: In Lee’s model, a love style represented a complete case categorization—a holistic profile combining childhood history, communication patterns, physical symptoms, and relational dynamics. Under the LAS, Eros was streamlined into a continuous attitude variable. An individual was no longer classified as an “Erotic lover” based on an integrated lifestyle pattern; instead, they received a numerical score reflecting their level of agreement with Erotic attitudes (Hendrick & Hendrick, 2006).
- Abandonment of Complex Hierarchical Structure: Lee’s conceptual color wheel—where secondary styles derived directly from combinations of primaries—proved difficult to validate through standard factor analysis. Psychometric scale development favored factorially distinct, independent subscales. As a result, the secondary and tertiary structural connections were largely set aside in empirical practice, turning what was once an integrated, hierarchical taxonomy into six isolated linear dimensions (Karandashev, 2019).
- Loss of Phenomenological Richness: Standardized Likert scales easily capture conscious attitudes and cognitive opinions, but they often miss the rich contextual cues, emotional re-experiencing, and subtle behavioral choices captured by Lee’s interactive card-sort methodology.
Methodological Evaluation: Strengths, Pitfalls, and Validity
Evaluating Lee’s seminal inquiry into love styles reveals significant methodological strengths alongside key analytical limitations:
Analytical Strengths
- Comprehensive Phenomenological Scope: By employing the feature-and-exemplar approach through the card sort method, Lee captured a wide array of human experience—integrating somatic symptoms, emotional intensity, cognitive expectations, and real-world behavioral choices.
- Rich Narrative Capture: The card sort allowed participants to reconstruct complex personal narratives without forcing their experiences into rigid, predefined survey choices, preserving the nuance of real romantic relationships.
- Empirical Confirmation of Mutually Exclusive Primary Profiles: Subsequent spatial analyses (e.g., Lasswell & Lasswell, 1976) supported the empirical distinctiveness of the primary love styles, confirming that styles like Eros, Ludus, and Storge capture fundamentally different approaches to human bonding.
Critical Pitfalls & Methodological Caveats
Imposed Categorization Concerns: Although Lee’s descriptors were derived from historical and literary analyses, critics note that the initial collection of descriptors was guided by six predefined categories. The theoretical necessity and sufficiency of precisely these six styles were not fully demonstrated prior to data collection (Karandashev, 2022).
Unclear Factor Hierarchy: The initial factor analysis yielded 32 distinct factors used to distinguish the love styles. However, Lee provided limited technical documentation regarding how these 32 factors were structurally grouped or hierarchically combined to establish the boundaries of the main styles.
Dichotomous Sorting vs. Overlapping Theories: While Lee argued theoretically that love styles overlap and merge like colors on a wheel, his primary diagnostic tool—the Love Story Card Sort—forced participants into binary choices during card selection, creating a methodological mismatch between overlapping theory and discrete measurement.
Cross-Cultural Validity Limitations: Although researchers have translated the LAS and investigated love attitudes internationally, few true cross-cultural replications of Lee’s original qualitative card-sort methodology have been conducted (Karandashev, 2019). As a result, many cross-cultural claims reflect variations in surface-level love attitudes rather than deep structural love styles.
Conclusion: Rediscovering the True Essence of Eros
John Lee’s empirical categorization of the Eros love style remains one of the most vibrant contributions to the social psychology of relationships. By grounding Eros in empirical narratives rather than abstract speculation, Lee demonstrated that intense physical attraction and romantic passion—when paired with emotional security and open communication—constitute a distinct, healthy, and cohesive way of loving.
Understanding Eros in its full conceptual form requires looking beyond simplified survey metrics. Erotic lovers combine an exacting clarity regarding their ideal partner with an open capacity for emotional vulnerability, swift self-disclosure, and deep sensual commitment. Unstrained by obsessive possessiveness or anxious insecurity, the Eros love style stands as a primary archetype of confident, passionate, and authentically expressed human connection.
Explore the other 5 styles in Lee’s Typology in other articles: Storge, Ludus, Mania, Pragma, and Agape.
References
- Hendrick, C., & Hendrick, S. (1986). A theory and method of love. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50(2), 392–402.
- Hendrick, C., & Hendrick, S. S. (2006). Styles of romantic love. In R. J. Sternberg & K. Weis (Eds.), The new psychology of love (pp. 149–170). Yale University Press.
- Hendrick, C., Hendrick, S. S., & Dicke, A. (1998). The love attitudes scale: Short form. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 15(2), 147-159.
- Karandashev, V. (2022). Cultural typologies of love. Springer Nature.
- Karandashev, V. (2019). Cross-cultural perspectives on the experience and expression of love. Springer.
- Lasswell, T. E., & Lasswell, M. E. (1976). I love you but I’m not in love with you. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 2(3), 211-224.
- Lasswell, M., & Lobsenz, N. M. (1980). Styles of loving: Why you love the way you do. Doubleday.
- Lee, J. A. (1973). Colours of love: An exploration of the ways of loving. New Press.
- Lee, J. A. (1976). The colors of love. Prentice-Hall.
- Lee, J. A. (1977). A typology of styles of loving. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 3(2), 173-182.