Storge love and what it actually means

Storge gets described two ways online, as friendship love and as familial love, and both are correct in different traditions. That confusion is worth clearing up first, because the version that matters for your relationship is the second one, and it comes from a specific piece of sociology rather than from ancient Greece.

What Storge Love Means:

Storge is love that grows out of friendship. It develops slowly, involves gradual self-disclosure, avoids self-conscious passion, and comes with an expectation of long-term commitment. That definition is from the sociologist John Alan Lee, writing in 1977 [2].

The two traditions get blended constantly. In ancient Greek, storge means love or affection, and in the classical sense it usually refers to the natural affection between family members. In Lee’s framework it means something narrower: a romantic love style built on companionship rather than on intensity [5].

Lee published it in 1973 in a book called Colours of Love, using a color wheel as the organizing metaphor [1][5]. Storge is one of three primary styles, alongside Eros and Ludus, and the three can combine to produce the secondary ones.

Where the Six Love Styles Come From:

Six styles, three primary, three blended. Lee proposed Eros as passionate love, Ludus as game-playing love, and Storge as friendship-based love, then treated Mania, Pragma and Agape as compounds of those [1][3].

Clyde and Susan Hendrick turned it into a measure in 1986, building the Love Attitudes Scale with seven items for each style, forty-two in total, later shortened to a twenty-four item version [3]. The scale has since been used widely and has held up reasonably well across different cultural settings.

Signs Your Relationship Is Storgic:

Six markers show up repeatedly in descriptions of this style. None of them is about how you feel in week two.

1. It started as a friendship, or feels like one that deepened rather than a spark that caught.
2. The closeness arrived gradually, with information about each other coming out over months rather than in one long night.
3. Attraction followed commitment rather than preceding it, which is close to the reverse of how movies describe it [4].
4. The relationship survives separation without drama, because it does not depend on constant intensity [4].
5. You value compatibility, respect and understanding over excitement [2].
6. Neither of you would describe it as mysterious. It reads as a deep friendship with more in it.

The scale items make this concrete. The statements used to measure storge in the Love Attitudes Scale are about love growing out of a long friendship and about the relationship being a deep friendship rather than something mystical [1].

What Storge Is Good At:

Durability is the obvious strength. A relationship that never depended on intensity does not collapse when the intensity fades, which is what happens to most couples somewhere in the first few years anyway.

It handles distance better than the passionate styles do, and dull periods too, because the foundation was companionship rather than a feeling that needs topping up. Our guide to the stages of relationships covers why that matters more at month eighteen than month two.

What Storge Is Not Good At:

Lee was direct about the trade-off. He described storge as producing long-term relationships in which sex may not be especially intense or passionate [1], and that is a real cost rather than a footnote.

There is a second complication worth sitting with. Among couples happily married for over thirty years, the style people commonly identify with is Eros rather than Storge [1]. That looks contradictory until you look at what the scale actually asks, since the Eros items lean more on passionate devotion than on sex. Storge is not automatically the winner, which is how most articles on this subject present it.

Does It Matter If You Match?

Similar styles appear to last longer. Lee’s model argues that relationships often go badly wrong when two people have incompatible styles, and research using the scale found that couples with similar love styles stayed together longer [4].

The practical version is not that you need identical scores. It is that a storgic person with a ludic partner is having a different relationship from the one their partner thinks they are in, and that gap tends to surface as a slow mismatch about pace and commitment rather than as a single argument. Talk about pace explicitly rather than assuming it is shared.

What to Be Careful With Here:

The gender claim is contested, and you will see it stated flatly everywhere. Some work using the scale reported men scoring more ludic and women more storgic and pragmatic, but one analysis found the only clear gender difference was on Eros, with men higher, and several other studies using the same scale found no gender differences at all [1].

Two more caveats. Lee himself noted that a relationship can move from one style to another over time, so this is a description of where you are rather than a fixed type [2]. And the styles are a self-report framework, which means they capture how people describe their love rather than how they behave.

Treat it as vocabulary, not a diagnosis. The useful thing about storge is that it names a real pattern that mainstream romance narratives have no word for, which helps if you have been quietly wondering whether a relationship that grew slowly counts as the real thing.

If You Want a Storgic Relationship:

Prioritize friendship on purpose. That means choosing activities over occasions, letting information come out gradually rather than front-loading everything, and judging someone on months of behavior rather than on the first three evenings.

It also means resisting the pressure to feel a spark immediately. Storgic relationships often develop unexpectedly and without either person planning it [4], which is difficult to reconcile with a dating culture that treats the first-date verdict as decisive. Our advice for couples covers building the companionship half deliberately.

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Storge and Modern Dating:

Fast dating serves this badly. A love that grows out of friendship needs repeated low-stakes contact, and a culture of one drink and a verdict does not provide it.

The workaround is patience: give promising people three or four meetings before deciding, and choose activities rather than interviews. Someone looking for serious dating can afford that patience more easily than someone optimizing for immediate chemistry, and it is the single adjustment most likely to help if this style describes you.

Looking for the slow-burn kind? The filters here narrow by values, lifestyle, and goals rather than photographs. Browse singles in your area.

[1] https://www.psywww.com/intropsych/ch16-sfl/six-types-of-love.html – Psych Web, on Lee’s six types, the Love Attitudes Scale storge items, contested gender findings and long-married couples identifying with Eros
[2] https://www.loveanon.org/2011/09/theory-of-love-pt-1-lees-6-love-styles.html – summary of Lee’s 1977 definition of storge and on relationships moving between styles
[3] https://family.jrank.org/pages/1085/Love-Love-Styles.html – on Lee’s 1973 love styles and the Love Attitudes Scale, 42 items and the 24-item short form
[4] https://motifri.com/love-styles/ – on storge developing unexpectedly, withstanding separation, attraction following commitment, and similar styles lasting longer
[5] https://www.attachmentproject.com/psychology/love-attitudes/ – on the Love Attitudes Scale subscales and Lee’s Colours of Love, 1973

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