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."