Love Styles

For whatever reason, we were talking about marriage today when I was hanging out with my friends, and I've had relationship stuff (both romantic and platonic) on my mind lately, so I recalled a blog post I'd read before. It was about "Love Styles", and you could liken it to a kind of personality test grouping (though there's no actual test, just the categories). Naturally, you have to take any such grouping with a grain of salt, especially when you're dealing with such an abstract & loaded concept such as love.

But basically, there are six groupings, or styles: Eros, Ludus, Storge, Agape, Mania, and Pragma. If you want to read about the various ones, you can do so here. I think that even though the article calls them styles of love, you can still be a little loose with that definition. I think it does an interesting job of just categorizing how people are in serious relationships, regardless of whether you're "falling in love" or already "in love".

When I first read this, what really jumped at me was how well I fit one of the categories. I am very much a 'Storge':

Storge – some people experience love as a gradual and slow process. When love is based on Storge, getting to know someone comes before having intense feelings for that person. Love based on Storge takes time, it requires genuine liking and understanding of a partner, and it develops slowly over time. Love based on Storge is often compared to the love that one has for a friend. In fact, people who experience love as Storge often fall in love with their friends.

It really struck me, because this is something I've come to notice. My most recent relationships have either become strong friendships even after they ended, or sprung up from existing strong friendships. One thing I've heard from exes is that they felt like they were "more like a friend". This was always a rough thing for me to hear, because while I genuinely cared, and felt strongly attracted to them emotionally (and physically, but that's not relevant to this point), I also always thought of them as friends as well. That's how I am. But it appears that the distinction between being "just a friend" or something more got blurred at times.

The other type that I pull from is 'Agape', which is a kind of caregiving approach to love. And it's pretty easy to see how when you combine elements of that with the strong friend bonds, it can cause problems.

The problem gets compounded when you factor in the fact that I tend to fall for people who are 'Eros'es - those who see love in the very romantic way. I'm bad at being romantic. And so it makes it even harder to keep things going with an Eros, because I show my feelings differently than how they look for them, and this miscommunication causes problems. Knowing all of this now, I'm more aware of it, and I know what things I need to work on in future relationships. So that's a good thing at least.

I'm not really sure why I wrote this. I've written a variant of it my personal journal/writing collections, but for whatever reason felt like typing it up here. I know that people I've dated do read my blog on occasion, so if any of you see this, and it clears something up, then that's good. The point of this was more for my own benefit though, and to share the link for others to peruse. Take what you will from this; I'm off to bed.