Are you consistent in how you love people? Probably! Maybe you’re aware of it or maybe it’s known only by the people you love, but chances are you tend to love people in a certain way. We all do. Our ways of loving might echo how we moved through childhood and early adolescence; they may align with our personalities and goals; they might respond to our cultural context. Critically, the way you love is no accident. It is a reflection of who you are.
Recently, how the field of psychology is thinking about love is changing. New evidence (García del Castillo-López et al., 2025) suggests that if we want to understand the way people love, we need to move beyond thinking of the variables that are used to characterize love styles, and instead honor the naturally occurring complexity in how people love.
New love profiles offer nuanced insight into critical relationship dynamics. But, a bit of history first.
Traditional Love Styles Highlight Specific Factors
In 1973, researcher John Lee introduced six love styles that have since permeated the field’s understanding of how we love. You may be familiar with them:
- Eros, a style defined by passion and romance
- Ludus, a style marked by game playing or playful love
- Storge, a friendly, companionate love style
- Mania, an obsessive style
- Pragma, a rational and logical style of love
- Agape, an unselfish, altruistic love style
Correlates of these styles offer important insights. For example, stronger eros and stronger agape tend to be linked to positive relationship experiences, like stability and greater relationship satisfaction, whereas ludus is generally associated with risk factors like distrust and a lack of intimacy and commitment (Raffagnino & Puddu, 2018).
But what if you don’t fall perfectly into one style? In fact, what if most people don’t?
New Analytic Techniques Reveal the Multidimensionality of Love
Recently, a team of researchers in Spain shifted the paradigm of how we’ve been thinking about love styles (García del Castillo-López et al., 2025). Instead of focusing on the variables themselves, such as how one dimension, like eros, might predict certain aspects of relationship functioning, the researchers took a person-centered approach, using an analytic technique called latent profile analysis (LPA).
LPA allowed the researchers to examine their participants’ data holistically: How did individuals score across all six styles? Do some people share a similar pattern across all six styles? Do these people also tend to have relationships that operate in the same way? If so, what do their relationships look like?
Yesterday’s Love Styles Are Today’s Love Profiles
If we call Lee’s original six variables “styles,” then looking at individuals and how they fall across all six variables creates a new way of thinking: These love “profiles” capture complexity and are quite revealing. Initial work, based on survey responses of over 800 Spanish individuals, showed four key love profiles and offered a first look at how they might experience relationships (García del Castillo-López et al., 2025).
The four profiles, constructed using participants’ responses, capture subgroups of people who vary in similar ways across the traditional love styles. They are (García del Castillo-López et al., 2025):
- The Unfriendly Non-Players. Most people (almost exactly 50 percent) fall into this category, which describes people who are higher than average on passion (eros) and generally low on both the risky playful/distrustful love (ludus) and low on companionate love (storge). People in this group tend to be “average” on aspects of relationship conflict and emotional intelligence, but their sexual satisfaction is generally about average.
- The Friendly Non-Player. About one quarter of people look like this category, showing the highest levels of romantic love (eros), friendly love (storge), and rational love (pragma), coupled with the lowest game-playing ludus love and selfless love (agape). Having this profile sets people up for success in their relationships. In general, people in this category have low conflict, experience less emotional flooding, and are happier in their sex lives than all other groups.
- The Slightly Unstable Players. These individuals, who represented about 20 percent of this initial sample, are higher on both game-playing love (ludus) and mania. Based on the composition of this profile, it’s no surprise that these individuals tend to struggle in relationships. Findings suggest that people in this group often experience more frequent and intense conflicts, lower sexual satisfaction, and less emotional intelligence.
- The Non-Passionate Selfless Players. A small segment of people are best captured by this profile, which is low on romantic or passionate love (eros) and higher than average on altruistic love (agape). Compared to other profiles, this profile has lower rationality (pragma) when it comes to love. Conflict and emotional flooding are familiar experiences to people in this group, who experience the lowest sexual satisfaction and emotional intelligence compared to the other groups.
Love Profiles Respect Complexity, Offering Better Help
Do you approach relationships with trust or mistrust? Friendliness or passion? Selfishness or altruism? Now we no longer need to focus on these questions separately. Love profiles capture common patterns across these questions, revealing subgroups of people with similarities across multiple dimensions of love.
Relationships Essential Reads
Because love profiles honor the complexity of love more than one-dimensional styles, we’re able to gain stronger insights into how people operate in their relationships, and also, stronger insights into how we might support their specific challenges. Imagine a couple is struggling with conflict: Understanding their profiles gives us much more context than knowing where they fall on a specific style.
Overall, this initial self-report study, limited to one sample of Spanish adults (mostly higher SES women; García del Castillo-López et al., 2025), provides an important first step. Future work will need to see if these specific profiles are reproducible in other samples. We might then be able to see how couples in crisis can gain better help for their problems through a more precise understanding of how they love.
