Culture and Society
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From Inanna and Dumuzi to Tristan and Isolde; from Romeo and Juliet to Rose and Jack – history abounds with examples of those great and epic stories where one person finds the other: the love of their life. And it is always the love of their life, rather than a: that passionate love, we are implicitly taught, is at most a once-in-a-lifetime experience. But a new study from researchers at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute is issuing a challenge to that idea.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.“For most people, passionate love turns out to be something that happens […] a few times across their entire life,” said Amanda Gesselman, a scientist at the Institute and lead author of the study, in a statement.
How does she know? Thanks to the survey answers of more than 10,000 single US adults, all asked a simple question: “In your lifetime, how many times have you been passionately in love?”
“The average number of passionate love experiences reported was 2.05,” the paper reports. Two was also the modal answer: almost one in three people reported having experienced passionate love twice in their life, which is about twice as many as those who had felt it either thrice or never at all. A minority of people had felt it four times – about one in nine respondents – and the “one big love” experience came second, being reported by about two in seven respondents.
Importantly, these numbers were pretty stable across almost all characteristics of respondents – straight people fell into passionate love about the same amount as gay, lesbian, and bisexual people; older respondents reported only very slightly higher numbers than younger ones. The only notable difference was a very specific one: young, straight men reported having fallen in this kind of love more times than young, straight women – though even in this, the effect was “very small,” the paper notes.
“This gender-based disparity may reflect differences in how men and women, or boys and girls, are socialized to feel, pursue, or initiate romantic connection,” the researchers suggest. “Still, it should be noted that the associated effect size was small, indicating that while statistically significant, the practical difference between men’s and women’s experiences may be minimal.”
“Furthermore, this gender difference appears exclusively in heterosexual men and women,” they point out; “there were no gender-based differences between gay, lesbian, or bisexual men and women.” We’re no scientists, but this sounds like evidence for the cooties-based theory of sociology.
Overall, it is perhaps reassuring news for some. “The finding that most participants had experienced passionate love an average of twice suggests that passionate love is common,” the paper points out. “It is experienced at least once by most people,” it explains, even if “it occurs infrequently on an individual basis.”
Equally, it’s confirmation that even if you never find The One – or indeed The Two or Three or even Four or more – you’re far from alone. “This study could be used as evidence to support the understanding that never having been passionately in love is not inherently unusual or pathological,” the researchers write. “Instead, lack of experience with passionate love appears to be relatively common. Practitioners could use this finding to […] reduce feelings of shame or catastrophizing among clients who feel ‘behind’ in their romantic lives.”
Now, it’s important to know what this study can and cannot tell us. It’s cross-sectional – it captures a snapshot in time – so it can’t be used to infer any causation or explanations of how or why passionate love develops. It’s self-reported, which is never great for accuracy. And it’s also a sample that, while large and fairly inclusive of age and sexuality, comprised only single people – not all that representative. There were no ace, aro, pan, demi, and suchlike people included; nor were there polyamorous people, so certain nuances might have been missed.
But as a first step, it’s an important and pretty wide-ranging resource, ripe for other researchers in the field of love to jump of off.
“People talk about falling in love all the time,” Gesselmen said. “But this is the first study to actually ask how many times that happens across the lifetime.”
The study is published in the journal Interpersona: An International Journal on Personal Relationships.
