On average, single adults in the U.S. report they have fallen in passionate love twice in their life so far, according to a new survey. And 14 percent of the 10,036 respondents said they had never fallen in passionate love at all.
The results highlight the diversity of people’s experiences with love, says the study’s lead author Amanda Gesselman, a psychologist at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute. “There’s a lot more variation than we really know about,” she says.
Stories of passionate love are everywhere—in movies, books and the narratives 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 this is and how everyone feels it,” Gesselman says. Despite this, researchers have relatively little data about how common the experience is across the population.
Gesselman and her team analyzed data from 2022 and 2023 studies of singles in the U.S. Respondents between 18 and 99 years old were asked to report how many times during their life so far they had experienced passionate love. The average was 2.05 times across the whole sample and increased slightly with participants’ age.
Cool, so at twice, I’m disturbingly average.
Not everyone experiences passionate love, the results show… … Heterosexual men also reported feeling passionate love more times on average than heterosexual women, but no such differences appeared between men or women who were gay, lesbian or bisexual.
That’s interesting.
Is this separate from infatuation?
They are wildly different. First off, infatuation is generally unrequited. I’ve certainly been infatuated way more than twice. In many cases, they’d help guide me though difficult times as friends.
Passionate love? That’s on an entirely different level. It’s what you never chose because there was no choice to make. You’re helpless. This is now happening, and the best you can do is attempt to steer.
