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”.
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”.
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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%.
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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”.
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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.
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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].”
