It sets your heart racing, it puts butterflies in your stomach, and is a non-stop distraction for your mind – but that feeling we call love is something men fall into more quickly than women, according to new research.
A team of researchers in Australia and New Zealand dug into survey data from 808 adults. The participants were aged between 18 and 25, and all described themselves as currently being in love.
"The study spans across 33 different countries in Europe, North America, and South Africa," says biological anthropologist Adam Bode, from Australian National University (ANU).
"We're most interested in whether biological sex influences the occurrence, progression, and expression of romantic love."
The questions used in the study were comprehensive: they covered the timing and intensity of falling in love, the number of times the participants had fallen in love, and how obsessed they were with their partners.
After some statistical processing, the data showed that the men tended to fall in love about a month ahead of the women on average – possibly because the onus is on men to show commitment to attract a partner, the researchers suggest.
Men fall in love slightly more often than women do, according to the study, but are a little less committed. The women tended to spend more time obsessively thinking about their partner, and were slightly more romantically intense in their love.
Men were also more likely to fall in love before the relationship had become 'official', with 30 percent of the male study participants reporting this timing compared to less than 20 percent of the women.
"This is the first study to investigate differences between women and men experiencing romantic love, using a relatively large cross-cultural sample," says Bode. "It is the first convincing evidence that women and men differ in some aspects of romantic love."
The team also ran the figures while accounting for extra factors that may influence our feelings of love, including age, and the ratio of men to women in the country of each participant. Most of the differences reduced but still held, though the differences in commitment disappeared.
There were some interesting findings around gender equality too, with those in countries with higher gender equality falling in love less often, showing less commitment, and being less obsessed with their partners, broadly speaking.
This suggests social norms also have an impact on our feelings of love, as well as the evolutionary pressures of needing to find a mate and keep our species alive – something the researchers are keen to investigate further.
"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."
The research has been published in Biology of Sex Differences.