Am I in Love Quiz

Love, infatuation or friendship? Find out which kind of love you feel

8 min · Free · No account

Am I in Love Quiz: A person on a sofa holding an eTestor mug, smiling down at a phone that has just lit up with a new message

How do I know if I'm in love?

Psychologist Robert Sternberg's answer is to look at three things separately: intimacy (feeling close and understood), passion (attraction and longing) and commitment (deciding it's love and wanting it to last). Passion on its own is infatuation. Passion with intimacy is what he called romantic love, the usual meaning of being in love, and all three together is consummate love. This quiz scores all three for the person you have in mind and tells you, free, which of his eight kinds of love your answers resemble.

About this test

This quiz scores the three parts of love in Sternberg's triangular theory: Intimacy (closeness, trust, feeling understood), Passion (attraction, longing, a physical pull) and Commitment (calling it love and wanting it to last). The pattern of strong and weak parts names one of eight kinds of love: nonlove, liking, infatuation, empty love, romantic love, companionate love, whirlwind love (Sternberg's fatuous love) and consummate love. It describes your feelings, not the other person's.

What you'll discover

Intimacy
Closeness: how much you trust this person, confide in them and feel understood by them.
Passion
Attraction and longing: how much you think about this person, want to be near them and feel a physical pull.
Commitment
Decision and commitment: whether you'd call it love, and how much you want it to last and will work for it.

Understanding the Am I in Love Quiz

This am I in love quiz asks you to pick one person, a partner, a crush, someone you can't stop thinking about, and then rate 48 statements about them, 16 for each part of love. It takes about 8 minutes. The kind of love your answers resemble is free when you finish. The full report shows your three scores, so you can see whether passion clearly leads or commitment sits just under the line.

The model is Robert Sternberg's triangular theory of love (Psychological Review, 1986, doi:10.1037/0033-295X.93.2.119). He argued that the amount of love depends on how strong the three parts are, and the kind of love on how they compare with each other. Present or absent, the three combine into eight kinds. We count a part as present when your answers average 3.5 or more out of 5, so mild, unsure answers don't read as love. Each part also has four statements phrased the other way round, which limits how much a habit of simply agreeing can raise your scores.

We like this model because it separates the feeling people most often mistake for love, passion, from the parts that take time. Sternberg himself called his eight kinds limiting cases and wrote that "Most loving relationships will fit between categories, because the various components of love are expressed along continua, not discretely." So read your three scores, not only the label. The quiz also has clear limits: it measures your side only, it can't tell you how the other person feels, and it can't predict whether things will last. The theory itself holds up well. A study of 7,332 people in 25 countries found the same three parts across cultures, using Sternberg's own questionnaire, which this quiz does not use (Sorokowski and colleagues, Journal of Sex Research, 2021, doi:10.1080/00224499.2020.1787318).

Where the Am I in Love Quiz comes from

Robert J. Sternberg, then at Yale University, set out the triangular theory of love in Psychological Review in 1986. Love has three components: intimacy (feelings of closeness, connectedness and bondedness), passion (the drives that lead to romance, physical attraction and sexual consummation) and decision/commitment (in the short term, deciding that you love someone; in the long term, committing to maintain that love). Present or absent, the three combine into eight kinds of love: nonlove, liking, infatuated love, empty love, romantic love, companionate love, fatuous love and consummate love.

How the Am I in Love Quiz is scored

Three scores of 16 statements each, four of them reverse-worded, each from 16 to 80. A component counts as present from 56, an average answer of 3.5, and the pattern of present and absent components names one of Sternberg's eight kinds; we call his fatuous love whirlwind love. Sternberg described the eight as limiting cases, with most relationships falling between them, so the three scores say more than the label. The statements are eTestor's own, not Sternberg's Triangular Love Scale, and the cut-off of 56 is our choice, not a published norm. Sternberg's scale has held up across 25 countries (Sorokowski and colleagues, 2021, doi:10.1080/00224499.2020.1787318); an early independent test found mixed support for some of the theory's predictions, with commitment the strongest predictor of satisfaction (Acker and Davis, 1992, doi:10.1177/0265407592091002).

Based on a published, peer-reviewed model

Sternberg, R. J. (1986). A triangular theory of love. Psychological Review, 93(2), 119–135.

Questions people ask

Is the am I in love quiz free?

Yes. The quiz and your kind of love are free, with no account needed: just your email at the end. Every score, the written analysis and the certificate are in the full report: $1.99$2.41 in the first 30 minutes after you finish, $3.99$4.83 after that, or included in eTestor Unlimited.

What is the difference between love and infatuation?

In Sternberg's model, infatuation is passion on its own: strong attraction and longing without real closeness or commitment. He called it love at first sight and noted that it is often easier for other people to spot than for the person feeling it. His point is that passion can appear almost instantly, while intimacy cannot. If your passion score is high and your intimacy score is low, the feeling is real, but you may be partly in love with who you imagine the person to be.

Is it love or lust?

Lust is close to what this quiz calls passion: physical attraction and wanting to be near someone. In Sternberg's model passion is one of the three parts of love, not its opposite. What separates lust from love is whether the other two parts are there as well: closeness and trust, and a decision that this person matters beyond the attraction. Your three scores show which ones are present.

What are Sternberg's eight kinds of love?

Nonlove (none of the three parts), liking (intimacy only), infatuation (passion only), empty love (commitment only), romantic love (intimacy and passion), companionate love (intimacy and commitment), fatuous love (passion and commitment, which we call whirlwind love) and consummate love (all three). Sternberg set them out in his 1986 paper as pure cases; most real relationships sit somewhere between two of them.

Can I take it about my boyfriend, my girlfriend or a crush?

Yes. Answer about any one person: a partner of many years, someone you've just started dating, or a crush you barely know. Expect different patterns. With a crush, passion can run well ahead of intimacy and commitment, which is what infatuation means in Sternberg's model. In a long relationship, Sternberg wrote, companionate love is frequent once the physical attraction has died down. The quiz measures your feelings only, so if you want to compare, each of you can take it about the other.