Extensive survey of American singles reveals the different ways people experience romantic and passionate love
By Allison Parshall edited by Lewis asked.
Anna Vereshchak/Getty Images
On average, single adults in the United States report falling passionately in love twice in their lives so far, according to a new survey. And 14% of the 10,036 people surveyed said they had never fallen in passionate love.
The results highlight the diversity of people experiences with lovesays the study’s lead author, Amanda Gesselman, a psychologist at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute. “There’s a lot more variation than we actually think,” she says.
Researchers have proposed many ways to understand romantic love. A popular model is the triangular theory of love, which divides romance into three parts: passion, intimacy, and commitment. The balance of these factors typically changes throughout the life cycle of a relationship, with passionate love manifesting itself sooner rather than later. “It’s that first feeling of magnetism toward a partner, that feeling of obsession, just that intense desire to be together,” Gesselman says. It also usually fades over time and is often replaced by companionate love – a more stable, “warm and comfortable” love, she explains.
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Stories of passionate love are everywhere: in movies, books, and the stories we tell ourselves about what it means to live a fulfilling life. These stories “often really center the experience of passion and talk about how universal it is and how everyone feels it,” Gesselman says. Despite this, researchers have relatively little data on how common this experience is in the population.
Gesselman and his team analyzed data from 2022 and 2023 surveys of single people in the United States. Respondents aged 18 to 99 were asked to indicate how many times in their lives they had experienced passionate love so far. The average was 2.05 times across the entire sample and increased slightly with participant age.
Not everyone experiences passionate love, as the results show, but the chances increase with age. More than a quarter of people aged 18 to 19 said they had never felt it, and that figure fell to 7.6% for people over 70. Heterosexual men also reported feeling passionate love more times on average than heterosexual women, but no such differences emerged between gay, lesbian, or bisexual men or women.
The findings suggest that passionate love is a widespread but infrequent experience among individuals, the authors write. But a big question remains unstudied, Gesselman says: How do people’s appreciation of these experiences change over the life cycles of their relationships and their own lives? People likely reevaluate their past romantic experiences over time, a phenomenon crucial to understanding survey data like this.
One of the main limitations of the study is that it included people of all ages, who would have had different periods of time to accumulate relationship experience. Additionally, the study only included single people, who represent approximately 31 percent of the American adult population. The results of a similar survey of all adults, including those with romantic partners, would likely be very different. People in relationships are likely to have experienced passionate love at least once, so a survey that excludes them may not reveal the full picture of this phenomenon, notes Jaimie Krems, a social psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the study.
Passionate love can also exist outside of romantic relationships. As the proportion of single people in the U.S. population continues to grow, it’s increasingly important to understand the role these platonic relationships play in people’s lives, Krems says. “I think it’s part of the human repertoire to feel passionate love” in romantic and non-romantic relationships, she says.
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