Experienced Love: An Empirical Account

This article presents new evidence on the prevalence, dynamics, and hedonic correlates of experienced love from data describing the emotion, well-being, and time use of a diverse sample of 3,867 U.S. adults every half hour for 10 days ( N = 1.12 million) supplemented by a hedonic snapshot of an additional 7,255 adults. The findings allude to the seemingly functional and adaptive nature of love and to similarities across binary gender—men and women reported comparable degrees of (passionate) partner love overall, elevated partner love after prolonged same-day separations, substantially elevated well-being in love’s presence, and reduced (but not extinguished) partner love in mature marital cohorts. The gender differences that were found—women reported more child love than men, and men exhibited a less pronounced reduction in partner love across cohorts—are also consistent with functional accounts of love that recognize the varying role of men and women in the formation and sustenance of relationships.