Whether the binding glue of a pair is lust or companionship and commitment, people experiencing romantic love probably fit into one of four distinct categories of romantic lovers, according to the first-of-its-kind research from The Australian National University (ANU).
The study grouped 809 partnered young adults who were in love based on the intensity of romantic love, obsessive thinking, commitment, and frequency of sex per week.
The results revealed four clusters of romantic lovers: mild romantic lovers, moderate romantic lovers, libidinous - or lustful - romantic lovers and intense romantic lovers.
The four sub-types of lovers are underpinned by varying characteristics, including how quickly they fall in love to how much or little coffee and sleep they need.
Lead researcher and ANU PhD student Adam Bode said that the study's results revealed four types of romantic lovers which highlights diversity in the way people experience romantic love.
"The bottom line is that we don't all love the same, with some people having sex up to 20 times per week when they fall in love," he said.
"How we fall in love is associated with a range of other interesting behaviours."
The largest cluster is the moderate (or "common") lovers, making up over 40 per cent of lovers.
The study defined these lovers as "entirely unremarkable" due to unexceptional romantic love characteristics.
"These lovers exhibit relatively low intensity and relatively low obsessive thinking, relatively high commitment, and relatively moderate frequency of sex," Bode said.
"The lower-end-of-the-spectrum scores characterise these lovers as fairly stock-standard, and interestingly, they are also the most likely to be male."
The smallest cluster, the libidinous romantic lovers, make up only 9.64 per cent and are most notably characterised by an extremely high frequency of sex, an average of 10 times per week.
"Among other characteristics, they also had the highest proportion wanting to travel, spending more money than usual and smoking more cigarettes than usual," Bode said.
The second largest cluster, making up over 29 per cent of lovers, is what the researchers call the "head over heels" type of lovers with high-intensity scores across all measures.
"These lovers scored the highest intensity, highest obsessive thinking, highest commitment, and relatively high frequency of sex," Bode said.
"These folk are your "crazy in love" types. They had the highest proportion who fell in love before their romantic relationship even began and are the only group with more females (at 60 per cent) than males.
"Some other notable characteristics of the intense lovers are that they scored the highest on agreeableness, conscientiousness and enjoying work, but had the lowest proportion engaging in risky driving, drinking more coffee and alcohol, and taking more drugs than usual."
Contrastingly, the second smallest cluster, the mild - or benign - romantic lovers, make up 20 per cent of lovers and are most notably characterised by consistently low scores across all romantic love measures.
"These lovers exhibit the lowest intensity of romantic love, obsessive thinking, commitment, and frequency of sex. They also had the lowest extraversion and agreeableness scores," Bode said.
"They have fallen in love the greatest number of times, have been in love for the shortest length of time and are most likely to be male and heterosexual."
The study used data from the Romantic Love Survey 2022 , the world's largest dataset of 1,556 young adults experiencing romantic love. It has participants from 33 countries representing different cultural and ethnic groups.
Romantic love and human mating researcher Adam Bode said they recently made the data available to other researchers.
"The Romantic Love Survey is the first of its kind and a game changer in the science of romantic love," Bode said.
"This really is a coup for ANU to have collected the world's largest dataset of people experiencing romantic love.
"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."
The researchers claim that romantic love has only recently been investigated as a reason for the well-documented increased sexual activity in the early stages of romantic relationships.
"This study will help facilitate ideas for future research, and these findings have implications for the evolution of romantic love," Bode said.
"Humans may still be evolving in terms of how they express romantic love."
The research team includes experts from ANU, the University of Canberra and the University of South Australia.
The study has been published in Personality and Individual Differences.
