A first-of-its-kind Kinsey Institute study finds U.S. adults fall passionately in love about twice in a lifetime. The results challenge media-fueled expectations and may help people and therapists rethink what romantic love really looks like.
How many times will you fall passionately in love in your lifetime? According to new research from the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, the answer for most people is only a handful of times — and often fewer than we might expect from movies, music and romance novels.
The study, published in Interpersona: An International Journal on Personal Relationships, is the first large-scale effort to put a number on how often people experience intense, passionate romantic love over the course of their lives.
The researchers surveyed 10,036 single adults ages 18 to 99 from across the United States and asked a simple but surprisingly unexplored question: “In your lifetime, how many times have you been passionately in love?”
On average, participants reported about two such experiences (2.05 times) over their lifetime. The responses varied: 14% said they had never experienced passionate love, 28% said once, 30% said twice, 17% said three times, and 11% reported four or more times.
The researchers were struck by how basic the question was — and how little data existed to answer it, according to lead author Amanda Gesselman, a scientist at the Kinsey Institute.
“People talk about falling in love all the time, but this is the first study to actually ask how many times that happens across the lifetime,” Gesselman said in a news release. “For most people, passionate love turns out to be something that happens only a few times across their entire life.”
Passionate love — the intense, all-consuming form of romantic love that often defines the early stages of a relationship — has long been a focus of art, culture and psychology. It is linked to powerful emotional and behavioral changes, from euphoria and obsession to risk-taking and deep attachment.
Yet until now, researchers had not quantified how often people actually feel that level of intensity.
The Kinsey Institute team found that experiences of passionate love were broadly similar across sexual orientations. Heterosexual, gay, lesbian and bisexual participants reported comparable numbers of passionate love experiences, suggesting that this kind of love is a widely shared human experience rather than something that differs dramatically by identity.
Age did make a modest difference. Older adults reported slightly more experiences of passionate love than younger adults. That pattern fits with the idea that many people first encounter passionate love in adolescence and young adulthood but can still experience it later in life. The findings suggest that intense romantic feelings are not limited to youth and can emerge at many points across the lifespan.
Gender differences were also small. Men reported marginally more experiences of passionate love than women, a difference driven specifically by heterosexual men compared with heterosexual women. However, the researchers emphasized that these gaps were minor compared with the overall similarities across groups.
Those modest differences matter, the authors suggest, because they highlight how universal passionate love appears to be. At the same time, the numbers show that it is relatively rare, not a constant state that people move in and out of endlessly.
That insight could be especially useful for therapists and counselors who help people navigate relationships, breakups and expectations about love. Knowing that most people report only a few episodes of passionate love over an entire lifetime may help normalize the intensity of those experiences — and the disappointment or grief when they end.
It may also help people appreciate other forms of love that are less dramatic but often more stable and sustaining, such as companionate love, long-term partnership and deep friendship.
The study arrives in a cultural moment when many people say they feel pressure to find a perfect, storybook romance. Data from the ongoing Singles in America project, conducted by the Kinsey Institute with dating company Match, show that 60% of U.S. singles describe themselves as very romantic. A majority endorse ideas like love at first sight and destiny.
At the same time, 51% of singles report feeling more pressure to find love than previous generations did, and 73% say romantic media has at least somewhat set unrealistic standards or expectations for their own relationships.
Those figures suggest a gap between how love is portrayed and how it actually unfolds in most people’s lives. By putting numbers on passionate love, the Kinsey Institute study offers a counterweight to media fantasies and may help people recalibrate what they expect from themselves and their partners.
The findings also open the door to new questions. Researchers can now explore what predicts who falls passionately in love more or fewer times, how those experiences shape mental health and life choices, and how cultural messages about romance influence people’s sense of whether they are “on track” in their love lives.
For now, the takeaway is both sobering and hopeful: passionate love is powerful, but it is not endless or guaranteed. It may come around only a few times, at different ages and in different forms, and that rarity may be part of what makes it so meaningful.