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The Independent
05-05-2025
- Health
- The Independent
Lovestruck! Men are smitten before women are, study finds
Love may be a smoke made with the fume of sighs, according to William Shakespeare. But, it is men that inhale that smoke first, researchers say. While women obsess about their partner more than men, a first-of-its-kind study found that men fall in love slightly more often, and earlier, than women do. 'This is the first study to investigate differences between women and men experiencing romantic love, using a relatively large cross-cultural sample. It is the first convincing evidence that women and men differ in some aspects of romantic love,' Adam Bode, a Ph.D. student at The Australian National University, said in a statement. Bode was the lead author of the study which was published earlier this month in the journal Biology of Sex Differences. The authors said it was the first study to research the difference in romantic love between the sexes with people who described themselves as currently in love. To reach these conclusions, they analyzed more than 800 young adults who professed to be in love across 33 countries in Europe, North America, and South Africa. They used data from the Romantic Love Survey 2022: the world's largest dataset of 1,556 young adults experiencing romantic love. 'We're most interested in whether biological sex influences the occurrence, progression, and expression of romantic love,' Bode explained. They examined how many times they had fallen for another person, when they fell in love, the intensity of that love, how obsessed they felt with that person, and their commitment levels. Based on responses to these questions, they found that men fell in love an average of approximately a month earlier than women, but that women experience romantic love slightly more intensely and think about their loved ones more than men. Bode theorized that the month gap could be because men are 'more commonly required to show their commitment to win over a partner.' Nearly 40 percent of both sexes fell in love after forming a relationship, with 30 percent of men and 20 percent of women, respectively, falling in love before a relationship was 'official.' External factors also have a sizeable impact on falling in love. People living in countries with higher gender inequality, for example, fall in love less often, show less commitment and are less obsessed with their partners, generally speaking. "Romantic love is under-researched given its importance in family and romantic relationship formation, its influence on culture, and its proposed universality," says Bode. "We want to help people understand it."
New York Post
24-04-2025
- General
- New York Post
Scientists find there are four types of lovers — including one that can't stop having sex
Lovers are a lot like hot sauce — they range from 'mild' to 'intense.' Australian scientists have boiled romantic lovers down into four categories — with the most extreme said to make whoopee up to 20 times per week, according to a first-of-its-kind study published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. 'The bottom line is that we don't all love the same,' said Adam Bode, head researcher and PHD student at the Australian National University in Canberra, reported. 3 Libidinous lovers reportedly made love 10 times a week on average, sometimes hitting 20 sessions in the sack. New Africa – Bode, who specializes in romantic love and human mating, felt that this field was woefully 'under-researched given its importance in family and romantic relationship formation, its influence on culture and its proposed universality.' As such, he wanted to blaze a trail in the realm of boudoir scholarship. 'While there is evidence of variation in the psychological expression of romantic love, to our knowledge, no one has attempted to directly empirically investigate this phenomenon,' he wrote. To shed light on the seemingly taboo topic, Bode and his team pulled stats from the Romantic Love Survey 2022, a dataset using data from over 1,500 people spanning 33 different countries. They then categorized 809 young adults who were in love based on commitment, obsessive thinking, emotional intensity, and sex frequency. Participants were also asked about various habits, such as how often they drink alcohol, whether they're on antidepressants or if they drive dangerously. From these results, researchers were able to group the respondents into four very hot sauce-esque categories: mild, moderate, intense, and libidinous. 3 Moderate lovers were the best represented in this carnal quartet, comprising a whopping 40% of all lovers. Vasyl – Mild lovers, who made up 20% of all lovers, displayed the lowest levels of all the romantic love categories, from commitment to sexual activity. Only 25% reported that their partner was in love with them, and they reportedly had sex twice a week on average. 'They have fallen in love the greatest number of times, have been in love for the shortest length of time, and are most likely to be male and heterosexual,' added Bode. Moderate lovers were the best represented in this carnal quartet, comprising a whopping 40% of all lovers. They were defined as 'entirely unremarkable' due to their staid romantic love traits, including 'relatively low intensity and relatively low obsessive thinking, relatively high commitment, and relatively moderate frequency of sex,' per Bode. 3 These findings have implications for the evolution of romantic love,' said Bode (not pictured) Prostock-studio – These hanky panky plain Janes reportedly had sex 2.5 times per week on average. On the other end of the spectrum were 'intense romantic lovers,' making up 29% of the lovers, and described by researchers as 'head over heels' types with high-intensity scores in every category. 'These lovers scored the highest intensity, highest obsessive thinking, highest commitment, and relatively high frequency of sex,' said Bode, who had the highest proportion of people who fell in love before their romantic relationship started. The cohort, which reportedly got frisky three times a week on average, was also the only group with more females (at 60%) than males. Then, of course, there were the libidinous romantic lovers — the proverbial freaks in the sheets. Comprising the smallest cluster (just 9%), these sex fiends reportedly made love 10 times a week on average, sometimes hitting 20 sessions in the sack. Coincidentally, they were the least likely to report being anxious, worried or depressed. Libidinous lovers also demonstrated high levels of emotional intensity, commitment, and obsessive thinking and many were in serious relationships despite not living with their partners. From these findings, researchers deduced that 'variation is a necessary component for evolution' and different groups represent different strategies in terms of mate choice, courtship, sex, and pair bond formation.' 'This study will help facilitate ideas for future research, and these findings have implications for the evolution of romantic love,' said Bode. 'Humans may still be evolving in terms of how they express romantic love.'
The Guardian
28-02-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
Sex 20 times a week? New study identifies four types of romantic lover
New research has identified four types of romantic lover, including one that has sex up to 20 times a week. The research, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, categorised lovers as mild romantic, moderate romantic, intense romantic, and libidinous romantic. Lead author, Australian National University PhD candidate in biological anthropology Adam Bode, defined romantic love as 'a motivational state typically associated with a desire for long-term mating with a particular individual' – and one 'that arose some time during the recent evolutionary history of humans'. 'It occurs across the lifespan and is associated with distinctive cognitive, emotional, behavioural, social, genetic, neural, and endocrine activity in both sexes. Throughout much of the life course, it serves mate choice, courtship, sex, and pair-bonding functions.' Bode said that definition was 'not perfect' but was 'the scientifically most useful and most precise'. He plans to update it to include the age of the onset of romantic love, to note that it 'doesn't have all its features until puberty', and that it is associated with the early stages of a romantic relationship. According to the study, the romantic love stage can be measured through changes in hormones and blood neurotransmitter levels and is thought to last up to two years, after which it transitions to 'companionate love'. Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news email In some cases it persists longer. Bode said this was 'the first paper to empirically show that we don't all love the same'. 'That seems pretty obvious, but science just hasn't shown it before,' he said. The researchers, including experts from the University of Canberra and the University of South Australia as well as ANU, used the Romantic Love Survey 2022 of 1,556 people, the world's largest dataset of people in love. This longitudinal study across 33 countries selected 809 people aged 18 to 25, who self-reported being in love. And among them, Bode's team identified four major 'clusters'. Mild: About one in five – 20.02% – fell into this cluster, characterised by 'the lowest intensity, lowest obsessive thinking, lowest commitment, and lowest frequency of sex'. This group also had the lowest proportion of people who thought their partner was 'definitely' in love with them – just 25.31% – and the lowest proportion having sex, at 82.72%. Moderate: About four in 10 – 40.91% – landed in this category, which Bode described as 'fairly stock-standard' – or in the words of the journal article, 'entirely unremarkable'. Those in this category were more likely to be male, and less likely to have children. This group had 'relatively low intensity, relatively low obsessive thinking, relatively high commitment, and relatively moderate frequency of sex'. Intense: This category described about one in three – 29.42% – of survey respondents, who Bode described as 'crazy in-love' types. They were characterised by 'the highest intensity, highest obsessive thinking, highest commitment, and relatively high frequency of sex'. About six in 10 people in this group were female. Libidinous: About one in 10 – 9.64% – were libidinous romantic lovers, who had sex an average of 10 times a week and up to 20 times. They were characterised as 'relatively high intensity, relatively high obsessive thinking, relatively high commitment, and exceptionally high frequency of sex'. This group were slightly more likely to be male, and had the highest proportion of people in a committed relationship but not living together. The team's research measured people's romantic intensity, obsessive thinking, commitment and sexual frequency to come up with the categories. Bode noted other interesting associations, including that libidinous lovers were also more likely to want to smoke cigarettes, travel and spend more money. The study measured the intensity of romantic love by the Passionate Love Scale (or PLS), a 'robust measure of the cognitive, emotional and behavioural characteristics of romantic love' used cross-culturally, developed in 1986. The research noted that obsessive thinking about a loved one has been recognised in theories about the understanding and mechanisms of romantic love. It cited previous research positing that obsessive thinking helps with bonding and faithfulness, that commitment plays a role in forming bonds, and that sex is a function of romantic love (the 2022 survey participants were told to define sex by 'whatever they thought it meant'). The authors of the new study suggested it might 'be fruitful' to further explore variables of sex, gender and sexual orientation, as well as the impact on mood of romantic love, and its effect on relationships over time. They also recommended future research focus on cultural or ethnic variations in the expression of romantic love, as well as the role of gender inequality. The study noted that the survey at its heart was limited to young, English speaking adults, many of them from Weird (western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic) countries. 'Romantic love is under-researched given its importance in family and romantic relationship formation, its influence on culture, and its proposed universality and we want to help world researchers understand it,' Bode said. 'These findings have implications for the evolution of romantic love. 'Humans may still be evolving in terms of how they express [it].'
