The theory of six love styles became well-known among love scholars in the 1980s. Multiple researchers embraced these ideas and investigated the love styles that Canadian sociologist John Alan Lee proposed and explored in the 1970s (Lee, 1973, 1976). His theory and research on love styles made significant and original contributions to this area of research (Karandashev, 2022).
John Lee theoretically conceptualized and empirically identified six love styles. The original author’s descriptions of the six love styles he proposed have been condensed and simplified over the years of love research and publication. These abbreviated characteristics have slightly altered Lee’s original meanings of the love styles.
Because of this, I have provided a more in-depth description of each of these love styles in this article as well as in other articles. In previous articles, I described the Eros, Ludus, and Storge love styles. Here are some excerpts from my books where I discuss the Mania love style in greater detail.
Lee’s Theoretical Description of the Mania Love Style
“Individuals with the Mania love style are emotionally intense, very obsessive and preoccupied with the beloved, and therefore frequently jealous. They crave repeated reassurance of being loved.”
(Excerpt from Karandashev, 2022, p. 78).
This Is What the Mania Love Style Looks Like
In-depth interviews with 120 people generated approximately 100,000 data points using the “love story card sort” method. The basic form of factor analysis discovered 32 factors that clearly distinguished the six love styles. Lee used this analysis to depict the following characteristics of the Mania love style:
“Participants with the Mania style of love generally recall their childhood as unhappy. They often do not enjoy their work, have few friends, and feel lonely. They are anxious to fall in love, yet they are not aware for sure which physical type of a potential partner they perceive as attractive. They frequently fall in love with someone who they initially dislike.
Lovers with Mania style typically experience intense emotions of attraction and preoccupation with a loved one. These feelings of intense attraction resemble the Eros love style. However, they want to restrain their feelings. They tend to manipulate a partner in a relationship. This resembles the Ludus love style. Therefore, they experience contradictory emotions of ambivalence and tension, love and hate, closely intertwined. They are torn on two sides. The lovers of mania style are obsessively preoccupied with the beloved, experiencing and expressing jealousy. They can imagine various rivals and disasters but tend to ignore the warning signs of relationship difficulties until it is too late. “
(Excerpt from Karandashev, 2022, p. 81).
The Mania Love Style is a Love Type rather than a Variable
This descriptive portrayal shows that the Mania love style is a unique combination of characteristics that men and women exhibit in romantic relationships. They represent their values and love attitudes, emotional experiences and expressions, actions and interactions. The data from the interviews evidently indicates these distinguishing characteristics. The manner in which they are connected exemplifies the typological structure of the Mania style. So, the Mania love style is a type of love rather than a variable, how it is measured with the Love Attitude Scale (Hendrick & Henrick, 1986, 1998).