Over the last several decades, researchers of love have shifted from Lee’s comprehensive understanding of “love styles” to Hendrick’s variable-driven “love attitudes” for psychometric convenience—and in the process, lost the rich, hierarchical structure of individual orientations in love. This synthesis highlights how bridging this conceptual gap with advanced latent-profile modeling allows researchers to move past isolated variables and construct comprehensive, culturally grounded models of modern style of love.

From Comprehensive Styles of Love to Linear Variables of Love Attitudes: Transforming the Research Context

Despite decades of research on love and relationships, a fundamental gap remains in how psychology measures the modern ways of how people love: Are we assessing comprehensive styles of love, or merely linear attitudinal variables?

By tracing the evolution of John Alan Lee’s qualitative “love styles” into Clyde and Susan Hendrick’s quantitative “Love Attitude Scale” (LAS), this article reveals how a shift toward psychometric convenience fundamentally altered our understanding of individual orientations in love—abandoning Lee’s dynamic, hierarchical color-wheel framework in favor of linear variables. Bridging this historical and methodological divide offers modern researchers an exciting opportunity: by applying advanced latent-class statistical modeling to continuous survey data, we can finally construct true, individual, and cultural typologies that reflect the real complexity of people’s love.

From Qualitative Paradigms to Survey Research

In the late 1970s, Canadian sociologist John Alan Lee investigated a variety of love styles that men and women employ in romantic relationships (Lee, 1973, 1976). This framework established an individual typology of love styles that became central to modern relationship research (Karandashev, 2022). Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Lee’s theory gained widespread recognition among scholars, prompting numerous researchers to adopt the typology to explore individual and cross-cultural variables associated with love style preferences (Karandashev, 2019).

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.

To capture the true complexity of human loving, Lee developed an innovative qualitative-quantitative methodology known as the Love Story Card Sort (Lee, 1973, 1977).

I have provided a detailed description of each of these love styles in other articles, such as the Eros, Ludus, Storge, Agape, Mania, Pragma love styles. 

Building upon Lee’s foundational research, Clyde Hendrick and Susan Hendrick developed the Love Attitude Scale (LAS) to operationalize these concepts (Hendrick & Hendrick, 1986; Hendrick et al., 1998). While the LAS retained Lee’s original terminology—classifying romantic orientations into Eros (passionate), Storge (friendship), Pragma (practical), Agape (selfless), Mania (obsessive), and Ludus (game-playing)—it fundamentally altered the conceptual and methodological framework.

Methodological Shift: Styles vs. Attitudes

How does the Love Attitude Scale differ from Lee’s original method? The primary distinction lies in transforming a qualitative, holistic assessment of love styles into a quantitative, variable-driven measure of love attitudes.

Lee’s original methodology utilized structured, in-depth interviews examining feelings, expressions, and actions across various relationship stages. This content analysis yielded a comprehensive and context-related depiction of the way people love. In Lee’s model, an individual was classified into one of six distinct love styles based on a complex fit to a set of qualitative descriptors. While comprehensive in description, this method was highly time-consuming and difficult to standardize across large samples.

By contrast, the LAS assesses continuous attitudesrather than discrete, all-encompassing styles. Rather than forcing individuals into a single, qualitative category, the Hendrick and Hendrick approach evaluates the degree to which an individual is predisposed toward each dimension based on how high or low they score across salient variables (Hendrick & Hendrick, 1986; Hendrick et al., 1998).

Love Attitude Profiles and the Typological Gap

Rather than identifying a single love style, the LAS yields a combination of responses across all six dimensions, effectively creating an individual love “profile.” The proportions of these variables define a person’s orientation, which can fluctuate depending on the partner and the situational context. As Hendrick and Hendrick observe:

“The ‘amount’ of each love style that an individual manifests can literally be plotted on a graph. The shape of the profile, its change over time, and its relationship to other variables become potential empirical questions to be answered by research guided by hypotheses. To date, our research has not dealt with profiles per se, but with each of the six dimensions individually.”

— Hendrick & Hendrick (2006, p. 151)

Despite creating an efficient tool to collect continuous variables, Hendrick and Hendrick—like many subsequent researchers—did not establish formal psychometric criteria for categorizing a person’s profile into distinct typological profiles. Exploring such profile-based categorization remains an important task for future research, moving beyond simply correlating isolated love attitude scores with demographic or outcome variables (Karandashev, 2022).

The Fate of Secondary and Tertiary Love Styles

One major theoretical loss resulting from this psychometric transition was Lee’s original concept of secondary and tertiary love styles. Lee originally conceptualized love styles through a primary/secondary color analogy (where primary styles blend to form complex compound styles). However, this structural hierarchy received limited empirical support in initial studies.

When Hendrick and Hendrick converted love styles into the LAS, they abandoned the color-wheel structural model entirely. Instead, they treated the six dimensions as separate, independent variables. In doing so, Lee’s vision of love as a complex, hierarchical conceptual structure was largely set aside.

Key Theoretical Insight: Characterizing contemporary love research as relying on Lee’s “color wheel theory” is misleading. Until the complex, hierarchical architecture of secondary and tertiary blends is empirically confirmed, researchers are measuring independent psychometric dimensions rather than a typological color spectrum (Karandashev, 2022). Advanced statistical techniques better suited for categorization can be far more productive in regenerating true typologies.

International Popularity and Psychometric Limitations

Despite these theoretical shifts, the Love Attitude Scale successfully popularized Lee’s core ideas worldwide. Available in both its long version (Hendrick & Hendrick, 1986) and short form (Hendrick, Hendrick, & Dicke, 1998), the LAS has been widely translated and administered across diverse cultural samples (Karandashev, 2019).

However, decades of cross-cultural administration have highlighted distinct empirical limitations:

• Incomplete Cultural Models: While the LAS facilitated widespread cross-cultural studies, it has not yet provided sufficiently robust data to build comprehensive, culturally grounded models of love.
• Content Validity Issues: Traditional psychometric evaluations often report satisfactory internal reliability while overlooking deeper content validity problems within specific subscales (e.g., the conceptual overlap and item phrasing within the Eros subscale; see Karandashev, 2019).
• Measurement Invariance: Cross-cultural studies frequently fail to evaluate or report cross-cultural measurement invariance, leaving open the question of whether the scale measures identical constructs across different linguistic and social traditions.

Conclusion and Future Perspectives for Researchers

The shift from John Alan Lee’s qualitative interview methodology to Clyde and Susan Hendrick’s Love Attitude Scale represented a classic trade-off in psychological science: trading depth, context, and structural complexity for efficiency, reliability, and scale. While the LAS successfully made the study of love styles popular, it transformed a comprehensive typology into isolated attitudinal variables, leaving Lee’s hierarchical “color wheel” model largely unverified.

For contemporary and future relationship researchers, several promising avenues can reconcile these historical inconsistencies:

• Leveraging Person-Centered Statistical Methods: Future studies should move beyond variable-centered analysis (such as simple linear correlations) toward person-centered statistical approaches, such as Latent Class Analysis (LCA), Latent Profile Analysis (LPA), and cluster modeling. These techniques can empirical identify distinct profiles and categorization criteria within LAS data, reviving Lee’s vision of holistic love types.
• Establishing Cross-Cultural Invariance: Scholars conducting cross-cultural research must rigorously test for measurement and structural invariance before drawing comparative conclusions. Ensuring that subscales function equivalently across diverse cultural settings is essential for building valid international models of love.
• Re-evaluating Subscale Content Validity: Researchers should re-examine subscale items—particularly within subscales like Eros—to address underlying validity concerns (Karandashev, 2019). Modernizing item formulations ensures they capture contemporary relationship dynamics without losing theoretical integrity.
• Empirically Testing Hierarchical Structures: Rather than assuming independent dimensions, future empirical work should explicitly test whether primary love attitudes combine hierarchically into secondary or tertiary configurations, as Lee originally hypothesized.

By uniting modern psychometric approach with Lee’s comprehensive theoretical foundations, future research can move past simple linear measurement to build a truly comprehensive, culturally sensitive, and typologically sound typologies of love.

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.
• 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.

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

Karandashev, V. (2026, July 22). The evolution of love typologies: From Lee’s love styles to Hendrick’s love attitudes. The Diversity of Love Journal. https://love-diversity.org/what-does-the-love-attitude-scale-evaluate/