Rubin’s Scales of Liking and Loving

Key Takeaways

• Zick Rubin created a scale from “liking” to “loving” to show the differences between these close feelings we have for the other people in our lives.
• Loving includes attachment, caring, and intimacy, while liking includes feelings of closeness and respect.
• Rubin’s scales showed people love their partners but only like their friends.

Researchers have proposed different theories to explain the nature of love. Some have attempted to come up with ways to measure feelings of love. The first to develop an instrument to empirically measure love was social psychologist Zick Rubin.

This article discusses Rubin’s scales for measuring liking and loving and his theories of the main components of love. You’ll learn how the scale shows the difference between liking and loving.

Rubin’s Elements of Love

According to Rubin, romantic love is made up of three elements:

1. Attachment: Needing to be cared for and be with the other person. Physical contact and approval are also important components of attachment.
2. Caring: Valuing the other person’s happiness and needs as much as your own.
3. Intimacy: Sharing your private thoughts, feelings, and desires with the other person. 

The Difference Between Liking and Loving

Loving is characterized by feelings of attachment, caring, and intimacy. Liking is characterized by feelings of closeness, admiration, warmth, and respect.

Based on this view of romantic love, Rubin developed two questionnaires to measure the variables of “like” and “love.” At first, Rubin came up with about 80 questions to assess the attitudes a person holds about others.

The questions were sorted according to whether they reflected feelings of liking or loving. The two sets of questions were administered to 198 undergraduate students.

Rubin first introduced his liking and loving scale in a 1970 article published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

After analyzing the responses, Rubin identified 13 questions for liking and 13 questions for loving that he believed were reliable measures of these two variables.

Questions in Rubin’s Liking and Loving Scale

These examples are similar to the questions used in Rubin’s Liking and Loving Scale:

Items Measuring Liking

1. I feel that ____________ is a very stable person.
2. I have confidence in ______________’s opinions.
3. I think that ______________ is usually well-adjusted.
4. __________ is one of the most likeable people I know.

Items Measuring Loving

1. I feel strong feelings of possessiveness towards ____________.
2. I like it when __________ confides in me.
3. I would do almost anything for _____________.
4. I find it easy to ignore __________’s faults.

For each item, people rate their response on a scale from 1 (not true) to 9 (definitely true). If you are interested in taking the original test designed by Rubin, it is available here.

Rubin’s Research on His Theory of Love

Rubin’s scales of liking and loving provided support for his theory of love.

In a study to determine if the scales could show the difference between liking and loving, Rubin asked participants to fill out his questionnaires based on how they felt about their partner and a good friend. The results revealed that good friends scored highly on the liking scale, but only significant others rated highly for loving.

Rubin identified several characteristics that distinguished degrees of romantic love. For example, he found that participants who rated highly on the love scale also spent more time gazing into each other’s eyes compared to people who rated only weakly in love.

Other Theories of Love

Other researchers introduced other theories related to the concept of love.

Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love suggests that romantic love is composed of passion and intimacy. This theory suggests that when romantic love also includes commitment, it becomes consummate love—the ideal type of relationship.

John Lee’s Color Wheel Model of Love suggests that there are three main love styles: eros (passionate), ludus (playful), and storge (family love). Later, Lee introduces Styles of Loving, which combines the elements of his model into three styles: mania (eros and ludus, a kind of obsessive love), pragma (ludus and storge, a realistic and practical love), and agape (eros and storge, a selfless kind of love).

Cindy Hazan and Philip Shaver proposed that love is similar to the attachments we form with our parents when we are very young. These styles come from John Bowlby’s attachment theory and include anxious/ambivalent, avoidant, or secure attachments. The kind of attachment style adults have influences how they love.

Psychologist Harry Harlow also believed that our early attachments to caregivers influenced our later relationships. His experiments with monkeys emphasized the importance of close, safe, and loving contact between caregivers and offspring.

Harlow may have come to believe that science couldn’t fully capture the wonder and complexity of love, saying that “so far as love or affection is concerned, psychologists have failed in their mission. The little we know about love does not transcend simple observation, and the little we write about it has been written better by poets and novelists.”

Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read our editorial process to learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.

1. Kapusta ND, Jankowski KS, Wolf V, et al. Measuring the capacity to love: Development of the CTL-Inventory. Front Psychol. 2018;9:1115. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01115

2. Rubin Z. Measurement of romantic love. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 1970;16(2):265-273. doi:10.1037/h0029841

3. Sternberg RJ. A triangular theory of love. Psychol Rev. 1986;93(2):119-135. doi:10.1037/0033-295x.93.2.119

4. Cramer K, Marcus J, Pomerleau C, Gillard K. Gender invariance in the Love Attitudes Scale based on Lee’s color theory of love. Test Psychomet Methodol App Psychol. 2015;22(3):403-413. doi:10.4473/TPM22.3.6

5. Hazan C, Shaver P. Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process. J Personal Social Psychol. 1987;52(3):511-524. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.52.3.511

6. Harlow HF. The nature of love. American Psychologist. 1958;13(12):673-685. doi:10.1037/h0047884

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the “Everything Psychology Book.”

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