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.