Reports initial results of an attempt to introduce and validate a social-psychological construct of romantic love. Starting with the assumption that love is an interpersonal attitude, an internally consistent paper-and-pencil love scale was developed. The conception of romantic love included 3 components: affiliative and dependent need, a predisposition to help, and an orientation of exclusiveness and absorption. The 13-item love-scale scores were only moderately correlated with scores on a parallel 13-item scale of" liking," which reflected a more traditional conception of interpersonal attraction. The validity of the love scale was assessed in a questionnaire study with 158 undergraduate dating couples and a laboratory experiment with 79 undergraduate dating couples. On the basis of the emerging conception of love, it was predicted that college dating couples who loved each other a great deal (as categorized by their love-scale scores) would spend more time gazing into one another's eyes than would couples who loved each other to a lesser degree. The prediction was confirmed.(22 ref.)(PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)