Who engages in serious and casual sex relationships? An individual differences perspective

Abstract

We examined (N = 281) the role of love styles and personality in people’s choice to engage in serious and/or various kinds of casual relationships (i.e., one-night stands, booty-calls, and friends with benefits) within the last year. Men were more eager than women were to engage in all types of casual relationships, however, love styles and personality traits were more important in accounting for this behavior. For instance, those with secure attitudes about love expressed an aversion to casual relationships; those with casual attitudes about relationships and who were dishonest reported involvement in various casual sex relationships; and conscientiousness was associated with engaging in serious romantic relationships but not one-night stands. The current study documents how an individual difference perspective can provide unique insights into people’s relationship behaviors to compliment work in social and evolutionary psychology.

Full text

Who engages in serious and casual sex relationships? An individual
differences perspective
Peter K. Jonason
a,
⇑
, Elaine Hatfield
b
, Vicki M. Boler
a
a
University of Western Sydney, Australia
b
University of Hawaii at Manoa, United States
article info
Article history:
Received 18 September 2014
Received in revised form 19 November 2014
Accepted 19 November 2014
Keywords:
One-night stands
Booty-call relationships
Friends-with-benefits
Serious romantic relationships
Love schemas
Personality
abstract
We examined (N= 281) the role of love styles and personality in people’s choice to engage in serious and/
or various kinds of casual relationships (i.e., one-night stands, booty-calls, and friends with benefits)
within the last year. Men were more eager than women were to engage in all types of casual relation-
ships, however, love styles and personality traits were more important in accounting for this behavior.
For instance, those with secure attitudes about love expressed an aversion to casual relationships; those
with casual attitudes about relationships and who were dishonest reported involvement in various casual
sex relationships; and conscientiousness was associated with engaging in serious romantic relationships
but not one-night stands. The current study documents how an individual difference perspective can
provide unique insights into people’s relationship behaviors to compliment work in social and
evolutionary psychology.
Ó2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Personality traits and individual differences are important in
understanding various aspects of human sexuality and relation-
ships. Traits like disordered attachment (Fielder, Walsh, Carey, &
Carey, 2013; Garneau, Olmstead, Pasley, & Fincham, 2013), psy-
chopathy, and narcissism (Jonason, Li, Webster, & Schmitt, 2009;
Jonason, Luévano, & Adams, 2012) are related to the engagement
in short-term, sexual relationships. However, recent research has
seen an expansion of the kinds of relationships being investigated
(Jonason, Valentine, & Li, 2012). There now appears to be a number
of middle-ground relationship types individuals can chose from
including (but not limited to) friends-with-benefits
1
(Jonason,
2013; Puentes, Knox, & Sussman, 2008) and booty-call relationships
2
(Jonason, Li, & Cason, 2009; Wentland & Reissing, 2011).
Prior work examining these middle-ground or ‘‘hybrid’’
relationships (Jonason, Valentine et al., 2012) relationships has
examined sociocultural (e.g., Smiler, 2008) and evolutionary
hypotheses (e.g., Jonason, 2013) which, may respectively be
limited by qualitative methods (Manning, Giordano, & Longmore,
2006; Wentland & Reissing, 2011) and an (over) emphasis on sex
differences (Baumeister & Vohs, 2004; Schmitt, 2005). Both bodies
of work tend to examine these relationships in a void, thereby
failing to make important within-subjects comparisons (but see,
Jonason, 2013). Importantly, these studies have examined why
individuals engage in various relationships but with the exception
of a few factors (e.g., sex of the participant, alcohol use), little work
has examined who engages in various relationships. In the current
study, we take an individual differences perspective to see if we
can discriminate whether people engaged in various relationships
within the last year with individual differences in love styles and
personality traits.
Personality traits may bias individuals towards engaging in cer-
tain kinds of relationships. For instance, attachment styles may
create systematic biases in the types of relationships individuals
engage in and how they react to relationship stressors (Fielder
et al., 2013; Garneau et al., 2013; Hazan & Shaver, 1987) but tradi-
tional measures of attachment contain only three or four dimen-
sions. In contrast, Love Styles (Hatfield, Hutchison, Bensman,
Young, & Rapson, 2012; Hatfield, Luckhurst, & Rapson, 2012;
Hatfield & Rapson, 2010; Katz & Schneider, 2013) may capture a
larger range of individual differences in how people orient towards
relationships, capturing individual differences in attachment (i.e.,
secure, clingy, and skittish) and attitudes about love (i.e., fickle,
casual, and uninterested).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2014.11.042
0191-8869/Ó2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
⇑
Corresponding author at: School of Social Sciences and Psychology, University
of Western Sydney, Milperra, NSW 2214, Australia.
E-mail address: p.jonason@uws.edu.au (P.K. Jonason).
1
Friends who also engage in sexual behavior together without any formal
commitment.
2
Sexual relationships that tend to occur among acquaintances.
Personality and Individual Differences 75 (2015) 205–209
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Personality and Individual Differences
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/paid

While we agree that attachment models may help us under-
stand who engages in various relationships, we feel it would better
to adopt a more varied (and perhaps less biased) framework of
individual differences in people’s relationship schemas. This is
important to the current study because we are trying to incorpo-
rate a wider range of relationships than typically investigated
and, therefore, want to provide a more robust picture of who
engages in these relationships. Unlike attachment models, which
may only contain a few as three types, loves styles contain those
three dimensions and three more (Hatfield & Rapson, 2010); creat-
ing a wider net to assess individual difference in love styles. The
secure love style refers to individuals who are comfortable with
both emotional closeness and independence. The clingy love style
refers those who desire a great deal of closeness. The skittish love
style refers to those who desire a great deal of independence.
The fickle love style refers to people who change their mind often.
The casual love style refers to people who prefer easy relationships.
The uninterested love style refers to people who might be consid-
ered anhedonic in reference to relationships and even asexual.
Sexuality is a multidimensional construct requiring more, not
less nuance, in measurement. This might be especially important
when assessing mating behaviors as opposed to mating prefer-
ences. Success in various relationships is likely the result of numer-
ous factors and, thus, a broad-band assessment of love styles will
be essential to capture individual differences in mating behavior
over the course of a year. Having had positive childhood and adult
relationships should predispose people to prefer ‘‘substance’’ over
‘‘triviality’’ in their relationships (Bartholomew & Horowitz,
1991). Therefore, consistent with previous work, we expect those
with a secure love style to have engaged in serious relationships
in the last year (H1a) but also for them actively avoid engaging
in casual sex relationships (H1b). In addition, we expect (H2) those
who desire emotional closeness will be more likely to engage in
serious romantic relationships but may also engage in booty-call
relationships to experience some of the emotional satisfaction they
may provide (Jonason, 2013; Jonason, Li, & Richardson, 2010). Peo-
ple who desire emotional closeness may ‘‘use’’ relationships to sat-
isfy their emotional needs. And lastly, as a defining characteristic of
various short-term relationships, we also expect those with casual
attitudes about love and relationships to engage in various casual
sexual relationships (H3). As attitudes have at least a loose associ-
ation with behaviors, such an association seems reasonable.
In order to assess a similarly wide range of personality (i.e.,
wider than the Big Five) we adopted the HEXACO (i.e., Honesty/
Humility, Emotionality, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscien-
tiousness, and Openness) model (Ashton & Lee, 2009). Importantly,
the inclusion of the traditional Big Five factors allows us to repli-
cate (with a different measure) previous findings but the inclusion
of the Honesty/Humility factor allows for a unique prediction
related to the ‘‘darker’’ side of personality. First, extraversion
may allow for more mating opportunities, given its social nature
(Jonason, Cetrulo, & Ortiz, 2011), and thus, might be associated
with engaging in short- and long-term relationships (H4). Second,
conscientiousness may be associated with a long-term mating
orientation (Schmitt et al., 2004) and thus, we expect it to be
associated with involvement in a serious romantic relationship
within the last year (H5). In contrast, one-night stands may be
linked to increased risk of unwanted pregnancy and sexually trans-
mitted infections, which may partly relate to (1) their extreme
brevity and (2) contextual factors like alcohol use (Johnson,
2013) that may lead to diminished prefrontal lobe functioning
and judgment (i.e., less likely to use sexual protection). Third, we
expect low rates of conscientiousness to be associated with having
a one-night stand within the last year (H6). Last, we expect (H7)
that ‘‘darker’’ aspects of people’s personality (i.e., dishonesty) will
be related to engaging in casual sex relationships as part of an
exploitive/opportunistic mating strategy (Jonason, Li, Webster
et al., 2009; Jonason, Valentine et al., 2012).
In the current study we document who engaged in various
relationships over the last year. However, because there are sex
differences in attitudes (H8a) and behaviors (H8b) related to
various relationships (Buss & Schmitt, 1993; Jonason, Li, & Cason,
2009) and older people may have more relationship experience
than younger people but young people may engage in more casual
sex than older people (H9), we include these in our analyses as
well. In sum, we include these and the aforementioned individual
differences to get a multidimensional assessment of who engages
in serious and casual sex relationships.
2. Method
2.1. Participants and procedure
The sample was composed of 281 American participants (36%
male), aged 17–76 years old (M= 32.26, SD = 11.70), who were
paid US$1 for their completion of a series of measures on MTurk.
Five percent self-identified as African American, 80% as European
American, 9% as Asian American, and the remainder (6%) reported
belonging to an ‘‘other’’ ethnic group. Participants were informed
about the nature of the study, completed a series of self-report
measures (the order of which was randomized), reported their
demographic details, and upon completion were debriefed and
thanked for participation.
3. Measures
3.1. Relationship-choice
Participants were provided with definitions taken from prior
work (Jonason, 2013) of the four different kinds of relationships
being studied: one-night stands (i.e., ‘‘a one-night stand is a rela-
tionship where you meet someone and you have sex that night
and only that night’’), booty-call relationship (i.e., ‘‘a booty-call
relationship is one where you have repeated sexual encounters
with someone else but have little more than that in terms of a rela-
tionship’’), friends-with-benefits (i.e., ‘‘a friends-with-benefits rela-
tionship is one where you have sex with the person but also do
nonsexual things in a more social/public context’’), and serious
romantic relationships (i.e., ‘‘a serious romantic relationship is
one that involves social and sexual monogamy and has high levels
of commitment and might include marriage’’). They were then
asked to indicate (yes/no) which of these relationships they
engaged in within the last year. They were permitted to select
more than one option. This was done because people could
possibly engage in any combination of activities sequentially or
concurrently (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000) and also to increase
the power of our tests given restrictions imposed by asking only
about relationship experience within the last year.
3.2. Love styles
The Love Styles Questionnaire (Hatfield et al., 2007) was
designed to assess attitudes about romantic and sexual relation-
ships. Participants were first given lay-person definitions of these
styles (Appendix A). Then they were asked to what extent
(0–100%) these six definitions reflected their feelings and experi-
ences in romantic and passionate affairs. Participants were also
given slightly different and shorter descriptions of these schemas
and asked to pick the one schema that best described them from
a list (i.e., I am comfortable with closeness and/or independence;
I need a great deal of closeness; I need a great deal of
206 P.K. Jonason et al. / Personality and Individual Differences 75 (2015) 205–209

independence; I am not quite sure what I need; I am fairly casual
about relationships; I am uninterested in relationships). The use
of both methods allowed for better clarity and nuance than simply
asking normative or ipsative questions and was done as this was
the primary focus of our investigation (cf., Jonason, 2013).
3.3. Personality traits
Personality was assessed by the 60-item HEXACO-PI-R (Ashton
& Lee, 2009). Participants were asked their agreement (1 = strongly
disagree;5=strongly agree) with the statements. For instance, as an
indicator of the Honesty/Humility factor, participants were asked
to what extent they agreed with the item, ‘‘I’d be tempted to use
counterfeit money if I were sure I could get away with it’’. The
corresponding items were averaged to create indexes of Honesty/
Humility (Cronbach’s
a
= .78), Emotionality (
a
= .78), Extraversion
(
a
= .85), Conscientiousness (
a
= .79), Agreeableness (
a
= .85), and
Openness (
a
= .80).
4. Results
4.1. Descriptive statistics
In Table 1 we report the overall rates of engaging in various
relationships in the last year and sex differences. Relationships that
had a greater potential to involve emotional intimacy (e.g., serious
romantic relationship) occurred more frequently than those that
promised less emotional intimacy (i.e., booty-call relationships).
Women were more likely than men were to indicate they engaged
in serious romantic relationship (
v
2
(1) = 3.26, p< .05,
U
= .07), but
were less likely to participate in a booty-call relationship
(
v
2
(1) = 18.50, p< .01,
U
=.26) or a one-night stand
(
v
2
(1) = 17.33, p< .01,
U
=.26) within the last year than did
men (H8b). There were no significant differences between the
sexes for friends-with-benefits (
v
2
(1) = 1.76, ns,
U
=.08).
In Table 2 we report descriptive data on forced-choice love
schema data. There were two sex differences (
v
2
(5) = 13.21,
p< .05,
U
= .22) in the way men and women described themselves
(H8a). Women labeled themselves as more comfortable with close-
ness/independence than did men. They were also more likely than
men to indicate they were unsure as to what they wanted.
4.2. Love styles
We ran a Stepwise Discriminant Function Analysis
3
to see how
participant’s age, sex, and scores on the Love Schemas questionnaire
predicted engagement in the four different types of relationships
while controlling for any shared variance within the group. Being
casual about relationships (Standardized Canonical Discriminant
Function Coefficients = .52;
K
= .88, F(1, 265) = 35.42, p< .01) and a
man (SCDFC = .79;
K
= .85, F(1, 265) = 24.16, p< .01) was associated
with (65% accuracy) having had a one-night stand within the last
year (H3, H8b). Being casual about relationships (SCDFC = .51;
K
= .90, F(1, 265) = 28.74, p< .01), being a man (SCDFC = .46;
K
= .86, F(1, 265) = 21.57, p< .01), and wanting closeness
(SCDFC = .75;
K
= .83, F(1, 265) = 17.99, p< .01) was associated with
(71% accuracy) having a booty-call relationship within the last year
(H2, H3). Being casual about relationships was the only factor related
(51% accuracy) to engaging in a friends-with-benefits relationship
within the last year (SCDFC = 1.00;
K
= .88, F(1, 265) = 35.87,
p< .01; H3). Being low on the disinterested love schema
(SCDFC = .42;
K
= .81, F(1, 265) = 63.61, p< .01) and high on
wanting closeness (SCDFC = .35;
K
= .76, F(1, 265) = 40.64, p< .01)
but also having casual attitudes about relationship (SCDFC = .64;
K
= .74, F(1, 265) = 30.48, p< .01) was related (81% accuracy) to
having a serious romantic relationship within the last year (H2).
We next analyzed the forced-choice data to improve the resolu-
tion of the extent to which the six love schemas predicted engaging
in four relationship-types (Table 3). We found one strong pattern.
Those who reported being open to both independence and close-
ness—an ostensible measure of secure attachment—indicated they
did not have a booty-call relationship (
v
2
(5) = 14.22, p< .05,
U
= .23) or a friends-with-benefits relationship (
v
2
(5) = 18.57,
p< .05,
U
= .26) within the last year (H1a, H1b). The effect was
not significant—albeit just—for those who reported having a
one-night stand in the last year (
v
2
(5) = 10.41, p< .07,
U
= .19)
and fully reversed for those who had a serious romantic relation-
ship within the last year (
v
2
(5) = 56.04, p< .01,
U
=.45).
4.3. Personality traits
We repeated the analyses above but replaced love styles with
personality traits. The engagement in one-night stands was corre-
lated with (69% accuracy) with being a man (SCDFC = .47;
K
= .82, F(1, 265) = 15.69, p< .01; H8b), dishonesty (SCDFC = .58;
K
= .91, F(1, 265) = 25.05, p< .01; H7), extraverted (SCDFC = .53;
K
= .88, F(1, 265) = 18.73, p< .01; H4), and un conscientiousness
(SCDFC = .42;
K
= .85, F(1, 265) = 15.73, p< .01; H6). Engaging in
a booty-call relationship within the last year was correlated with
(73% accuracy) with dishonesty (SCDFC = .53;
K
= .92, F(1,
265) = 23.36, p< .01; H7), being a man (SCDFC = .49;
K
= .88, F(1,
265) = 18.55, p< .01; H8b), extraversion (SCDFC = .52;
K
= .85,
F(1, 265) = 16.00, p< .01; H4), and youth (SCDFC = .36;
K
= .83,
F(1, 265) = 13.63, p< .01; H9). Engaging in a friends-with-benefits
relationship within the last year was related (63% accuracy) to
dishonesty (SCDFC = .45;
K
= .98, F(1, 265) = 6.57, p< .05; H7),
unemotionality (SCDFC = .68;
K
= .96, F(1, 265) = 5.83, p< .01),
and agedness (SCDFC = .62;
K
= .94, F(1, 265) = 5.87, p< .01; H9).
The engagement in a serious romantic relationship was associated
with being conscientious (SCDFC = 1.00;
K
= .98, F(1, 263) = 4.33,
p< .05; H5).
Table 1
Rates (%) participants overall and by participant’s sex engaged in various relationships
within the last year overall and across the sexes.
Total (%) Men (%) Women (%)
One-night stand 18 62 38
Booty-call relationship 17 64 36
Friends-with-benefits 32 42 58
Serious romantic relationship 71 32 68
Note. Participants were free to say they engaged in more than one of the relation-
ships within the last year.
Table 2
Descriptive statistics for forced-choice assessments of love styles.
Love Styles Total (%) Women (%) Men (%)
Comfortable with closeness and/or
independence
52 68 32
I need a great deal of closeness 10 61 39
I need a great deal of independence 15 56 44
I am not quite sure what I need 15 74 26
I am fairly casual about relationships 6 29 71
I am uninterested in relationships 2 50 50
3
This analysis is mathematically equivalent to a MANOVA but allows one to have a
categorical dependent variable. It is a more conservative test than a binary logistic
regression, with more assumptions that must be met. Given the large number of tests,
we felt this was the best test. The goal was to determine what love styles and
personality traits (continuous IVs) predicted involvement in various relationships in
the last year (categorical DVs) and this this was an appropriate statistical technique
(see Lachenbruch, 1975).
P.K. Jonason et al. / Personality and Individual Differences 75 (2015) 205–209 207

5. Discussion
While most research on relationships focuses on social or
evolutionary models (Buss & Schmitt, 1993; Smiler, 2008), we have
adopted the perspective of personality psychology. In so doing, we
have provided a number of unique insights of how individual
differences can account for whether people engage in various rela-
tionships in the last year. For instance, in contrast to prior work
that has accentuated the role of sex of the participant, we found
sex of the participant was a significant predictor of the engagement
in casual and serious relationships in a minority of cases but
individual differences in love styles and personality were more
important. In addition, while we confirmed contentions (H1a,
H1b), based on attachment research (e.g., Bartholomew &
Horowitz, 1991), that securely attached people will have serious
romantic relationships and avoided booty-call and friends-
with-benefits relationships (i.e., both are variants of casual sex
relationships). This is distinct in that prior research often has
focused on preferences over behavior and did not make the
distinction between seeking and avoiding. However, we also con-
firmed contentions by evolutionary psychologists (e.g., Schmitt,
2005), that those with insecure attachment styles did not necessar-
ily report having had one-night stands in the last year. We have
also reinforced the role of personality traits in understanding sex-
uality by showing (1) conscientiousness was correlated with
involvement in serious relationship (Schmitt et al., 2004), (2) dis-
honesty was associated with involvement in casual sex relation-
ships (Jonason, Li, Webster et al., 2009), and (3) extraversion was
associated with involvement in relationships in general (Jonason
et al., 2011). Importantly, by using multivariate tests with
broad-band measures of personality and love styles we were able
to better isolate the important predictors than previous research
but also to cover a wider nomological area for understanding
who engages in various relationships.
We found discriminating between various forms of casual sex
problematic. People characterized by the casual love style and dis-
honesty reported engaging in all three casual sex relationships
(H3). In contrast, conscientious people (H5) were inclined towards
serious romantic relationships (Schmitt et al., 2004). It seems as
though we were able to differentiate only short- and long-term
relationships, which might mean the boundaries between various
forms of ‘‘casual’’ relationships are not as well defined as we hoped
they would be or that the research on these various relationships is
splitting hairs unnecessarily. Indeed, an attempt at defining casual
sex relationships by their perceived functions was met with mixed
support (Jonason, 2013). However, two possibilities exist. First, it is
possible we were insufficiently powered to discriminate between
the relationships. Second, it is possible that hopes of putting each
relationship into distinct boxes may be naïve in that the relation-
ships may co-occur (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000). For instance,
one might have a friends-with-benefit and serious relationship
partner who they make booty-call requests of occasionally. People
may not define and operate in relationships in clean, categorical
ways. Future research should explore these possibilities.
6. Limitations and Conclusions
The current study has a number of limitations. First, it was con-
ducted with a small, WEIRD (i.e., western, educated, industrialized,
rich, and democratic; see Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010),
online sample. We did not rely on college-aged participants like
most research on sexuality (e.g., Smiler, 2008). Second, while the
sample size is commonly found in personality research, given the
nature of the dichotomous dependent variables, we may have
suffered from some diminished power. Although we tried to
maximize our sensitivity (and ecological validity) by allowing
participants to indicate they had engaged in more than one
relationship within the last year, targeted sampling might be
warranted in the future. Third, we measured individual differences
with a short questionnaire (in the case of the HEXACO) and a
single-item measure (in the case of the love styles measure). Short
measures have reduced sensitivity and, therefore, may have
attenuated our findings. Fourth, some might criticize our use of
Discriminant Function Analysis as opposed to simpler tests (e.g.,
t-tests, ANOVAs) or logistic regression. The former tests would
force us to treat our DVs as IVs and they lack the ability to easily
control for shared variance among our predictors. While logistic
regression would be a reasonable test, it is relatively more liberal
(i.e., requires fewer assumptions to be met) than our tests; as there
was an exploratory element to our paper we wanted to avoid this.
Fourth, the possibility exists that our terms ‘‘sex’’ or ‘‘sexual’’
were interpreted differently in men and women (Sanders &
Reinisch, 1999). Despite these limitations, we have provided new
details about who engages in four relationship-types from a
hitherto under-used perspective: personality, trait, or differential
psychology.
In conclusion, we have created profiles of individuals who
engage in various types of relationships based on individual differ-
ences in love styles and personality traits. We have shown how the
engagement in serious relationships may be about the active
avoidance of relationships that lack substance whereas the engage-
ment in casual sex relationships may be facilitated by having a
casual approach to relationships in general. We have reinforced
the utility of personality traits to capture individual differences
in relationship behavior; drawing new attention to the role of dis-
honesty. Importantly, we have studied (self-reported) relationship
experiences over preferences (Jonason, Luévano et al., 2012) which
may offer a more ecologically valid way of understanding the role
of personality in relationships.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Emma Richardson, Jennifer Shukusky, Laura
Mansfield, and Holly Baughman for reviewing this paper prior to
Table 3
Rates (%) of whether someone had various relationships within the last year as a function of love styles (forced-choice).
Love styles ONS (%) BCR (%) FWB (%) SRR (%)
Yes No Yes No Yes No Yes No
Comfortable with closeness and/or independence 6 45 6 46 13 38 0 7
I need a great deal of closeness 2 9 2 9 2 8 8 3
I need a great deal of independence 4 11 3 12 5 10 9 5
I am not quite sure what I need 4 11 3 11 7 8 6 8
I am fairly casual about relationships 2 4 3 4 4 2 3 4
I am uninterested in relationships 1 2 0 2 0 2 0 3
Note. ONS = one-night stand; BCR = booty-call relationship; FWB = friends-with-benefits; SRR = serious romantic relationship
208 P.K. Jonason et al. / Personality and Individual Differences 75 (2015) 205–209

submission. Participants and the HEXACO data was used previ-
ously (Jonason, 2014) and was funded by a seed grant.
Appendix A. Definitions of different love styles
Secure: These individuals are comfortable with both
emotional closeness and independence. They may be swept
up in romantic love affairs, but they know that if things fall
apart, they will survive. Some attachment theorists have
labeled such people as securely attached.
Clingy: These people desire a great deal of closeness and feel
uneasy when they have to be independent. Such people, in
attachment terms, are labeled as anxious, preoccupied, and
fearful.
Skittish: The skittish desire a great deal of independence and if
forced to be close may run. Such people have been labeled
as dismissing and avoidant.
Fickle: Fickle people fall in love with those who do not love
them. They change their mind often. They will doggedly
pursue someone only to lose interest when they have won
their target’s affection. In attachment terms, one might
describe them as ambivalent.
Casual: These are people looking for relationships that lack
drama or problems; easy relationships.
Uninterested: Some people lack any interest in relationships
whatsoever and might be considered anhedonic in
reference to relationships and even sexual.
For detail about the psychometrics of the Love Schemas scales see
Hatfield and Rapson, 2010.
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