How often do people fall in love passionately? The answer may be lower than you think
A large survey of American singles reveals how people experience passionate romantic love.
Anna Vereshchak/Getty Images
On average, single adults in the US report having experienced passionate love twice in their lives so far, According to a new survey. And 14 percent of the 10,036 respondents said they had never fallen in passionate love.
Amanda Gesselman, the study’s lead author and a psychologist at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute, says the results highlight the diversity of people’s experiences with love. “There is more diversity than we really know,” she says.
Researchers have proposed several ways to understand romantic love. One 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 occurring earliest. “It’s that first feeling of magnetism to a partner, that feeling of passion—this intense longing to just be together,” says Gesselman. This usually fades over time and is often replaced by partner love—a steady, “warm and comforting kind of 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 fulfilled life. These stories, says Gesselman, often “really center the experience of passion and show how universal it is and how everyone feels it.” Despite this, researchers have relatively little data about how common this experience is across the population.
Gesselman and his team analyzed data from 2022 and 2023 studies of single people in America, asking respondents between the ages of 18 and 99 to rate how many times they had experienced passionate love so far during their lives. The average across the entire sample was 2.05 times and increased slightly with participants’ age.
As the results show, not everyone experiences passionate love, but the chances increase with age. More than a quarter of 18 to 19-year-olds reported that they had never felt it, and that number dropped to 7.6 percent for people over 70. Heterosexual men also reported feeling passionate love on average more often than heterosexual women, but no such difference appeared between gay, lesbian or bisexual men or women.
The results suggest that passionate love is a widespread but rare experience for individuals, the authors write. But a bigger question is still unresolved, Gesselman says: How do people’s evaluations of these experiences change over the life cycles of their relationships and their own lives? People are likely to reevaluate their past romantic experiences as time passes, a phenomenon that is important for understanding survey data like this.
A major limitation of the study is the fact that it included people of all ages, who would have had different amounts of time to accumulate relationship experience. Furthermore, the study only included single people, who make up approximately 31 percent of the adult US population. The results of a similar survey of all adults, including adults with romantic partners, would likely look very different. People with partners are likely to have experienced passionate love at least once, so a survey that excludes them may not reveal a complete picture of the phenomenon, says Jamie 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. Krems says that as the proportion of the single population in the US continues to grow, it has become increasingly important to understand the role of these ideal relationships in people’s lives. “I think feeling passionate love is part of the human repertoire, in both romantic and non-romantic relationships,” she says.
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