Far greater minds than I have succumbed to the urge to dream up elaborate categorisation schemes, sorting and systematising stuff into a magnificent tapestry of trees and circles. So let’s for a minute indulge in one of mine.

Love songs come in many different flavours, but in my proposed taxonomy they come in nine. Here we categorise based on the grammatical persons of the love-giver (is it I or you or she who is doing the loving?) and the love-recipient (is it me or you or her who is being loved?).

Type I (1–1). I love me. Self-love! Here are the songs where the singer asserts that she loves herself. These tend to be very empowering. A recent example would be Demi Lovato’s “I Love Me” (2020), self-explanatory. I think Ariana Grande’s “thank u, next” (2018) falls here too in the second verse, as she sings about how she’s found someone to love and it’s herself: ‘cause her name is Ari, and I’m so good with that.

Type II (1–2). I love you. By far the most common type of love song. The singer is asserting her love for the listener. For most people, this is the reference example of a love song. Non-examples are harder to come by than examples, but apropos of nothing I nominate the Kern/Hammerstein “All the Things You Are” (1939) for the sake of completeness. You are the promised kiss of springtime….

Type III (1–3). I love her. The singer asserts her love for a third party, with no implication that the listener is also the third party. Less common than Type II but still not out of the ordinary. Whether the third party reciprocates the love or not is probably important but outside the scope of this essay. In “Maria”, from Act I of West Side Story (1957), Tony sings, “Maria! I’ve just met a girl named Maria!” In fact, I would guess that a lot of love songs whose title is someone’s name probably fall into Type III, unless the listener is implied to have that name, as in “Oh, Susanna!” (1848).

Type IV (2–1). You love me. The listener loves the singer, and for some reason it’s the singer that’s asserting this. Bit boastful to assert something like this, but there are songs that say, I can tell you love me, or You love me and I know it. Maybe a more reasonable kind of Type IV song asks If you love me, and the exemplar here would be Brownstone’s “If You Love Me” (1994): If you love me (say it!) if you trust me (do it!) …. I don’t know how to categorise Baby I want your lovin’ songs, but they’d probably be Type II if not Type IV.

Type V (2–2). You love you. Another self-love empowerment-fest! This time, the singer goes beyond exemplifying self-love and takes the extra step of exhorting her audience to do the same. It’s a bit hard to find pure examples of Type V, because in accordance with the adage Show, don’t tell, Type I seems to be a more compelling way to convey self-love. Here the message is You can (and should) love yourself. Most of the time. The rest of the time it’s You’re so full of yourself. Justin Bieber’s “Love Yourself” (2015) is complicated but probably falls in this category. I wonder if Carly Simon’s You’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you… (1972) counts.

Type VI (2–3). You love her. Now we’re scraping around in strange unvisited parts of the barrel. Here the singer is considering the love that the listener has for a third party. Sometimes this comes with an attitude of resentment (you love her, but not me!), but sometimes it’s more wholesome. Divorced from its context, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Some Enchanted Evening” would be a Type VI song. Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger. One could argue that because Émile is singing this to himself, it qualifies as type III instead. Oh well.

Type VII (3–1). She loves me. The singer relates how a third party loves her. When I think of this category, I think of “When Somebody Loved Me”, as sung by Sarah McLachlan for Toy Story 2 (1999). When somebody loved me, everything was beautiful.

Type VIII (3–2). She loves you. The singer relates how a third party loves the listener. There’s probably a more straightforward example of this, but what comes to mind right now is Frankie Lymon’s “I Put the Bomp (in the Bomp, Bomp, Bomp)” (1961), a response song to Barry Mann’s “Who Put the Bomp (in the Bomp, Bomp, Bomp)” (1961), where Frankie asserts I made your baby fall in love with you.

Type IX (3–3). She loves her. The singer relates how a third party loves another third party (or herself). Type IX songs are third-person love stories. In Pink Martini’s “Sunday Table” (2009), China Forbes sings, He looks at her, she looks at him, For a moment they could almost fall in love. Pure and simple. The implication that the speaker and listener could be involved whatsoever is unnecessary, but it is deployed in the last verse of Tommy Edwards’ “Morning Side of the Mountain” (1951). The rest of the song is about how she lived on the morning side of the mountain and he lived on the twilight side of the hill, but the last verse asserts that you and I are just like they. A sneaky Type II!

Like most categorisation schemes, my taxonomy has its flaws. It is neither mutually exclusive (any given song ought to fall into at most one category) nor exhaustive (any given song ought to fall into at least one category).

Olivia Rodrigo sings about a love triangle in her breakthrough single, “drivers license” (2021). She relates that you love her but I still love you (where you is probably Joshua Bassett and she is probably Sabrina Carpenter), so her song qualifies for both Type II and Type VI.

And we could throw in a Type X for songs that don’t really fit anywhere else here. Sometimes folks just want to ruminate about love in the abstract, without worrying about who exactly is loving whom. Huey Lewis and the News’s “The Power of Love” (1985) has many things to say about love, but nothing about the identities of the love-givers or love-recipients. And if the Fain-Webster “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” (1955) didn’t mention Then your fingers touched my silent heart, then it would also fall in Type X.

But one useful effect of declaring a taxonomy is that it raises an obvious question: How many songs fall into each category? What’s the distribution across buckets? And all I know so far is that Type II, the I love you songs, are probably a supermajority of all love songs. Someone ought to do a study on this.