A quirky look at experienced love

If you're anything like us, yesterday's Valentine's love-fest might have left you wondering what we really know about love. Research certainly shows that it supports our physical and mental health, and can even help us to live longer. However, there are still lots of different theories about everything from why we love to how many different types of love there are. There are also plenty of unresolved questions — about whether or not men and women experience love differently, for example. 

What there's much less of, writes Saurabh Bhargava of Carnegie Mellon University in a new paper in Psychological Science, is actual empirical evidence on love. 

Much of the research on love to date has been done on small, non-representative samples, writes Bhargava. His new work was designed to address this problem — and it has produced some findings that support current theories of love, and others that challenge popular ideas. 

Bhargava analysed data from almost 4,000 nationally representative US adults who responded to phone-based surveys that asked about what they were doing and how they were feeling every half an hour during the day for ten days. 

To indicate their emotions over the past half hour, the participants could click on 15 distinctly labelled emotion emojis — such as a smiling emoji with hearts, labelled 'loving'. They also rated their mood, on a scale from bad to good. This study tapped, then, into love as an in-the-moment emotion, rather than as a broader, background state. 

Bhargava's analysis revealed that, overall, the participants didn't feel 'loving' that often. In fact, they only clicked the love emoji in 3.2% of the half-hour periods. There was a clear gender gap in reported feelings of love, however, with men reporting feeling loving for about a third less time than the women did — a difference that is perhaps illustrative of how men are socialised to express loving feelings, rather than an innate difference. The analysis also revealed, however, that, for married or engaged participants, men and women reported similar frequencies of love for a romantic partner. The biggest gender–love difference related instead to parenthood: mothers reported more feelings of love directed towards their children than fathers did. 

A few other notable differences between groups of participants also emerged. Black participants reported love far more often than people from other racial categories, as did lower income participants compared with those with a higher household income. Also, people in their thirties shared that they felt love about a third more often than 18-29-year-olds, and 36% more often than people in their forties. (Whether or not a participant was married or a parent didn't affect how often they reported feeling love.) 

Bhargava then looked at feelings of love among long-standing versus fairly recently married couples, and found a significant decline in reports of partner-directed love over time. This wasn't due to partners who'd been married for longer spending less time together than the relatively newly-weds, he adds. Rather, they were less likely to report feelings of love when with their partner, and this was more the case for women than men. 

This finding fits with theories that passionate love diminishes over time, he notes, but that didn't account for the differences between genders. The data did show that women who'd been married for longer spent more time doing chores and cooking, Bhargava notes, while men in longer-standing relationships spent increasingly more time relaxing and sleeping or napping.

This study also found that feelings of love were accompanied by a "massive" boost in mood for both genders, supporting the idea that love enhances our psychological wellbeing. In fact, this mood boost was equivalent to three times the mood difference between a typical Saturday (the day with the best mood ratings of the week) and Monday (the day with the worst). 

Yet another notable finding related to love after time spent apart. Both men and women reported more love for their partner after a separation lasting a day, and there was an "extreme elevation" in love after longer separations. This represents evidence for the proverb that distance (as measured by the clock, at least) makes the heart grow fonder. 

In a second, supplemental study that Bhargava ran online, he asked for further detail from 778 people who said they'd felt love in the past hour. The analysis of this data showed the same gender gap as in the first study for feelings of love overall and, again, men and women didn't differ in the levels of love for romantic partners. This second study also found both men and women experienced partner love in similar ways, most frequently characterising it as 'passionate', followed by 'companionate' and 'caregiving'. 

Some of these findings support current theories about love — for example, that there is a decline in passionate love over time. Others contradict popular ideas — for example, that men and women experience romantic love differently. If there has previously been a lack of empirical evidence on love, Bhargava has certainly produced it in spades. 

Read the paper in full: https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976231211267