You have full access to this open access article. Love is a phenomenon that occurs across the world and affects many aspects of human life, including the choice of, and process of bonding with, a romantic partner. Thus, developing a reliable and valid measure of love experiences is crucial. Here, aiming to achieve scientific consensus and improve the reliability, comparability, and generalizability of results across studies, we developed a short version of the scale—the TLS—comprised of 15 items with 5-point, rather than 9-point, response scales.
The overall results provide support for the reliability, validity, and cross-cultural invariance of the TLS, which can be used as a measure of love components—either separately or jointly as a three-factor measure. What is love? Millions of people have asked this question, as exemplified by popular songs, best-selling books, and informal exchanges of opinions and love experiences with close friends de Rougemont, ; Werner, The matter becomes even more complex when we consider that there may be many types of love beyond romantic love, such as parental, sisterly, brotherly, platonic, or friendly love Fehr, Herein, we narrow the scope of our investigation to romantic love—that is, overly simplifying, love felt for a romantic partner or mate, whether actual or desired.
It contends that love consists of three components: intimacy, passion, and commitment. Intimacy is associated with feelings of warmth, communication, and connectedness. Passion refers to feelings of excitement, desire, attraction, and physical arousal felt in the presence of a loved one. It is worth noting that there are several other overarching theories of romantic love. This is complemented by two recent theories.
Fletcher et al. Bode and Kushnick aimed to inform various scientific fields e. With so many theories of love for a review, see Karandashev, , numerous scales to measure love have been created. One of the first love scales was developed by Rubin , who differentiated liking from loving, with the latter consisting of caring, dependence, and mutual exclusiveness for further discussion of the differentiation between liking and loving, see Sternberg, Hatfield and Sprecher developed a scale measuring passionate love the passionate love scale, PLS.
Another scale the love attitudes scale, LAS measures the six distinct love styles described above i. Sprecher and Metts created the Romantic Beliefs Scale RBS , which tests the romantic ideology of love, consisting of four beliefs about love: 1 love finds a way, 2 one and only, 3 idealization, and 4 love at first sight. For a fuller review of more than 30 different love scales, see Hatfield et al. The original TLS captures the three components of love proposed in the triangular theory of love Sternberg, —that is, intimacy, passion, and commitment—each measured by 15 items.
