Measuring love in romantic relationships: A meta-analysis

The present study identifies the higher-order factors underlying the most popular measures of love in use today through meta-analytic factor analysis. Eighty-one studies representing 103 samples and 19,387 individuals provided data for the meta-analysis. The reported correlations between several commonly-used measures of love were aggregated across studies to form a meta-analytic correlation matrix, which was then subjected to principle components analysis. Factors suggesting general love, romantic obsession, and practical friendship emerged. Love was positively and obsession was negatively associated with relationship satisfaction and length. The results corroborate recent conceptualizations of love and point toward the need for measurement methods other than global self-report in the field of love research.