Beyond the Ludic Lover: Individual Differences in Playfulness and Love Styles in Heterosexual Relationships

This study examines how adult playfulness relates to love styles among heterosexual couples, challenging the classic view of the "ludic lover" from Lee's love-styles typology as a noncommittal, deceptive, pleasure-seeking partner. The authors argue that contemporary playfulness is distinct from this older construct and that playful partners actively use play to strengthen their relationships. Using the four-facet OLIW model (other-directed, lighthearted, intellectual, whimsical) and a newly developed Playful Love Checklist, the researchers assessed 77 couples, drawing on both self-ratings and partner ratings.

The findings show that playfulness is robustly and positively associated with the eros love style, with the strongest overlap of roughly 21 percent of shared variance in men and 17 percent in women. By contrast, ludus, the closest match to Lee's original ludic lover, shared only 5 to 7 percent of variance with playfulness. Partner ratings converged strongly with self-ratings, supporting the validity of the measures, and other-directed and whimsical playfulness showed meaningful partner similarity. Lighthearted playfulness stood out as the facet least connected to relationship-building behaviors, and several associations differed between men and women, with correlations generally stronger among women.

The authors conclude that the ludic lover should be conceptually separated from the playful lover, though they caution that the results are preliminary given the modest sample size and limited validation of the Playful Love Checklist. The study also notes that the associations were consistent but were drawn only from heterosexual couples, so replication with same-sex couples is needed. Cultural context may further shape how playfulness is valued, as prior work indicates it is prized more as a partner trait in the United States than in German-speaking countries, a difference that remains to be systematically examined.