8 New Findings on Love and Its Fragility

Love is a highly complex and diverse emotion that is difficult to assess experimentally. Nevertheless, psychologists conduct clever experiments to better understand this very personal experience. A new study, now published in the scientific journal Psychological Science focused on investigating how couples experience love (Bhargava, 2023). The study, authored by scientist Saurabh Bhargava from Carnegie Mellon University, consisted of two experiments.

The first experiment was based on an electronic diary approach. Overall, 3,867 volunteers had to complete a few questions every 30 minutes while awake for 10 days. At the end of each day, the volunteers also had to fill out a longer questionnaire. The questions were mainly targeted at time use, hedonic and emotional experiences, and well-being.

The second experiment was an online questionnaire in which volunteers had to answer whether they had experienced worry, love, excitement, or anger in the hour before they filled out the questionnaire. Those people who had reported that they had felt love then proceeded to answer further questions regarding the type and target of love.

The results of the study provided several interesting insights into how people experience love:

1. Partner love is the most common type of experienced love.

In experiment 2, partner love was the most common type of love (53.3%), followed by love towards one of the own children (20.9%), love towards another family member (13.8%), love towards any other person (9.3%), and love toward a place or a thing (2.8%).

2. Women feel love more often than men.

In experiment 1, women reported feeling love 4% of the time they filled out the questionnaires, significantly more often than men (2.3% of the time they filled out the questionnaires).

3. Men are more likely to be with their romantic partner when feeling love than women but less likely to be with their children or with friends.

The scientist then further analyzed the data of experiment 1 by considering towards which person the volunteers felt love (partner, children, other family members, friends). Men reported less love in all 4 categories, but the gender gap was largest for friends and children, and the smallest for romantic partners. When feeling love, men were 28% more likely to be with a romantic partner than women, but 52% less likely to be in the presence of their children than women. This pattern of results was also found in Experiment 2. Here, the male-female love deficit was 9.4% for partner love, 43.7% for love towards a child, and 38.1% for love towards another family member. Thus, women experience love towards their children more often than men.

4. Couples that are married for a longer time experience romantic love less often.

To explore the experience of love across people who were married for different durations, several groups of couples were compared. People who were married for 3 years or longer reported 36.7% less partner love than people who were married for 2 years or less.

5. Romantic love fades away more strongly in women than in men.

Interestingly, the loss of love effect in couples married for a longer time was mainly driven by women. While men showed a 9.2% reduction between couples married for a short or a long time, women showed a much larger reduction of 55.2%. Thus, romantic love fades away more strongly in women than in men.

6. After marriage, passion fades away more strongly in women than in men.

A similar effect was also found for passion in Experiment 2. Compared to unmarried women, married women showed a 55.3% reduction in passion for their partner. In men, this reduction was only 22.7% and did not reach significance for the comparison between married and unmarried men.

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7. Experienced love increases if we do not see our partners for a while.

A further analysis performed in the study was after which time of separation the feeling of love for the partner increases. So, is the old proverb “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” really true? Experienced partner love showed a trend to increase after separations of 8 hours or longer, with women showing an increase of 37% and men an increase of 15%.

8. Feeling love makes us feel better.

It was also analyzed whether experiencing love had a positive effect on mood and happiness. Overall, people who felt more love were happier and in a better mood. This association was the same for men and for women.

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