Survey Reveals Patterns in Passionate Love Experiences Among U.S. Singles

A large survey of U.S. singles reveals the different ways people experience passionate romantic love. 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.

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. “It’s that first feeling of magnetism to a partner, that feeling of obsession—just this intense longing to be together,” Gesselman says. It also typically fades over time and is often replaced by companionate love—a steadier, “warm and cozy kind of love,” she explains.

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.

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.

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.

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’t 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.

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’s lives, Krems says. “I think that is part of the human repertoire, to feel passionate love” in both romantic and nonromantic relationships, she says.