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February 14, 2026<\/p>\n
3 min read<\/p>\n
Add Us On Google<\/span>Add SciAm<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n How often do people fall passionately in love? The answer may be less than you think<\/p>\n A large survey of U.S. singles reveals the different ways people experience passionate romantic love<\/p>\n By Allison Parshall edited by Tanya Lewis<\/span><\/p>\n Anna Vereshchak\/Getty Images<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The results highlight the diversity of people\u2019s experiences with love, says the study\u2019s lead author Amanda Gesselman, a psychologist at Indiana University\u2019s Kinsey Institute. \u201cThere’s a lot more variation than we really know about,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Researchers have proposed many ways to understand romantic love. One popular model is the triangular theory of love, which divides romance into three pieces: passion, intimacy and commitment. The balance of these factors typically changes throughout the life cycle of a relationship, with passionate love happening earliest. \u201cIt\u2019s that first feeling of magnetism to a partner, that feeling of obsession\u2014just this intense longing to be together,\u201d Gesselman says. It also typically fades over time and is often replaced by companionate love\u2014a steadier, \u201cwarm and cozy kind of love,\u201d she explains.<\/p>\n If you’re enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.<\/p>\n Stories of passionate love are everywhere\u2014in movies, books and the narratives we tell ourselves about what it means to live a fulfilling life. These stories often \u201creally center the experience of passion and talk about how universal this is and how everyone feels it,\u201d Gesselman says. Despite this, researchers have relatively little data about how common the experience is across the population.<\/p>\n 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\u2019 age.<\/p>\n Not everyone experiences passionate love, the results show, but the chances increase with age. More than a quarter of people aged 18 to 19 reported never having felt it, and the number decreased to 7.6 percent for those older than age 70. 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.<\/p>\n The results suggest that passionate love is a widespread but infrequent experience for individuals, the authors write. But a big question remains unstudied, Gesselman says: How do people’s appraisals of these experiences change across the life cycles of their relationships and across their own life? People likely reevaluate their past romantic experiences as time goes on, a phenomenon that is crucial for understanding survey data like these.<\/p>\n A key limitation of the study is the fact that it included people of all age groups, who would have had different amounts of time to accumulate relationship experience. Furthermore, the study only included single people, which make up about 31 percent of the adult U.S. population. The results of a similar survey of all adults, including those with romantic partners, would likely look very different. Partnered people are likely to have experienced passionate love at least once, so a survey that excludes them can\u2019t reveal the full picture of this phenomenon, notes Jaimie Krems, a social psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved with the study.<\/p>\n Passionate love could also exist outside of romantic relationships. As the proportion of the U.S. population that is single continues to grow, it is increasingly important to understand the role these platonic relationships play in people\u2019s lives, Krems says. \u201cI think that is part of the human repertoire, to feel passionate love\u201d in both romantic and nonromantic relationships, she says.<\/p>\n If you enjoyed this article, I\u2019d like to ask for your support. 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I hope it does that for you, too.<\/p>\n If you subscribe to Scientific American<\/span>, you help ensure that our coverage is centered on meaningful research and discovery; that we have the resources to report on the decisions that threaten labs across the U.S.; and that we support both budding and working scientists at a time when the value of science itself too often goes unrecognized.<\/p>\n In return, you get essential news, captivating podcasts, brilliant infographics, can’t-miss newsletters, must-watch videos, challenging games, and the science world’s best writing and reporting. You can even gift someone a subscription.<\/p>\n There has never been a more important time for us to stand up and show why science matters. I hope you\u2019ll support us in that mission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" February 14, 2026 3 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm How often do people fall passionately in love? The answer may be less than you think A large survey of U.S. singles reveals the different ways people experience passionate romantic love By Allison Parshall edited by Tanya Lewis Anna Vereshchak\/Getty Images On average, single<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44484,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[835,1600,1253,23084,364],"class_list":{"0":"post-44483","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-answer","9":"tag-fall","10":"tag-love","11":"tag-passionately","12":"tag-people"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44483\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/44484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}On supporting science journalism<\/h2>\n
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