Six ways to love, and what the Love Attitudes Scale can actually measure
John Alan Lee argued in 1973 that love comes in colours. Three primary styles, three secondary ones made by blending them, arranged like a colour wheel: Mania is Eros mixed with Ludus, Pragma is Storge mixed with Ludus, Agape is Eros mixed with Storge.
Clyde and Susan Hendrick turned that idea into something measurable in 1986 with the Love Attitudes Scale. The full version has 42 items, seven for each of the six styles, and that is what you answer here.
The six styles
| Style | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| Eros | Passionate and physical. Attraction arrives fast, sometimes on first sight. |
| Ludus | Love as a game. Multiple partners, low commitment, keeping options open. |
| Storge | Friendship first. Affection that grows slowly out of shared history. |
| Pragma | Practical. Background, career, family fit and life plans get weighed. |
| Mania | Possessive and anxious. Strong feelings, jealousy, fear of losing the person. |
| Agape | Selfless. Your partner's wellbeing comes before your own wishes. |
All six are legitimate ways to love. The scale does not rank them.
How scoring works here
Each item is rated 0 to 4, from strongly disagree to strongly agree. The official scoring keeps the six styles separate: average the seven items in a style and you get its mean, with no overall total and no clinical cutoff anywhere in the instrument.
This site reports two things instead. One is the sum of all 42 items, running from 0 to 168 and split into four bands. That total says how much you agreed with the items overall, nothing more, so read it as a rough indicator rather than a style profile. The other is a per-style pattern read: when a style's seven items add up to 21 or more, that style gets flagged as strongly endorsed.
One number in the article is worth watching before you compare your result with anything published. The Fetzer version of the full scale runs 1 to 5 with 1 meaning strongly agree, so on that form a lower mean means stronger endorsement. Here the direction is flipped: 0 is strongly disagree, so a higher score means the style fits you better. Published means and site scores are not directly comparable.
What the published numbers look like
The short form's reference sample is 444 men and 646 women, mostly psychology undergraduates:
| Style | Men | Women |
|---|---|---|
| Eros | 2.08 | 1.98 |
| Ludus | 3.42 | 4.00 |
| Storge | 2.76 | 2.48 |
| Pragma | 3.30 | 3.00 |
| Mania | 2.91 | 2.88 |
| Agape | 2.27 | 2.38 |
Remember the direction on this form: lower means stronger agreement. Men in that sample endorsed Ludus least and Eros most; women were the same on Eros but pushed further from Ludus. These are student means from one country, and the gender gaps do not replicate consistently.
Reliability and structure
Internal consistency for the short form runs from .75 (Mania) to .88 (Agape). A 2024 Portuguese validation with 1,153 participants tested the six-factor structure and it held up: chi-square 967.39 with 237 degrees of freedom, CFI 0.91, GFI 0.93, SRMR 0.057, RMSEA 0.052 with a 90% interval of 0.048 to 0.055. Factor loadings sat between 0.50 and 0.79, averaging 0.66. Portuguese subscale alphas landed between .71 and .78.
For Chinese readers there is a Taiwan validation from 1999, 460 participants, using an 18-item short form, and the six-factor pattern came out the same. That is a point in the scale's favour: the structure travels across languages better than most relationship measures do.
Where it is weak
Self-report on love invites social desirability, and it bites hardest on Ludus and Mania, the two styles nobody wants to admit to. The published norms come from undergraduates, so they say little about people in long marriages. Some items assume a heterosexual relationship with children in the picture. And the instrument has no cutoffs at all, so a high Mania score is not a diagnosis of anything.
One item deserves a direct mention. Item 30 asks whether a breakup has ever left you so low that you thought about suicide. If you answer agree or higher, the report flags it, and it does so on purpose: that answer says more about your current state than any of the six style scores do. Relationship distress and suicidal thinking travel together often enough that it is worth naming rather than smoothing over. If that item lands, talking to someone qualified matters more than finishing this page.
None of this is a verdict on how you love. The scale describes patterns, and patterns shift with the relationship you are in. This test is not a diagnosis and does not replace professional help.