It’s only natural to want to wait until the time feels right to tell your partner you love them, as that fear of rejection is always all too real.
But as everyone's different, it’s hard to know when that ‘right’ time actually is - sure, you can listen to your gut, but who can say internal organs have ever been the best source of guidance when it comes to your love life?
The one thing we do have, at least, is SCIENCE.
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That’s all thanks to a study from last year, which looked at when men and women said those three magic words across several countries.
The team of researchers from Abertay University in Dundee published their findings in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, having crunched the numbers after collating data from thousands of participants.
Adults from Australia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, France, Poland, and the UK were given several online questionnaires to fill out, with questions including which partner said ‘I love you’ first in their most recent relationship, how happy hearing their other half say it made them feel and when they felt it was acceptable to admit it in a new partnership.
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“Feeling and expressing love is at the core of romantic relationships, but individuals differ in their proclivity to worry about their relationships and/or avoid intimacy,” the team wrote in the study’s abstract.
“Saying ‘I love you’ signals a commitment to a future with our romantic partner.”
In a twist that may come as a surprise to some people, in six of the seven countries, it was found that men were more likely to confess their love first.
The experts found that, on average, men said ‘I love you’ 107 days (3.5 months) into a relationship.
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Women, meanwhile, waited on average until 122 days (4 months).
However, there was less of a gendered gap in the time period people thought about telling the other person they loved them, with women on average thinking about it 77 days into a relationship, compared to men thinking about it 69 days deep.
The abstract continued: “Contrary to gender stereotypes, research in the United States demonstrates that men are more likely to confess love first. We aimed to replicate this sex difference in an online cross-national sample (seven countries, three continents), while testing for variation according to attachment style and environment (the national sex ratio).
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“Men were more likely to confess love first in a relationship, with preliminary evidence that this was more likely when men had more choice (more female-biased sex ratio).
“Independent of biological sex, highly avoidant respondents were less happy to hear ‘I love you’ than less avoidant respondents, and highly anxious respondents were happier to hear ‘I love you’ than less anxious respondents.”
Topics: Sex and Relationships, Science
Jess Hardiman