Wouldn’t everyone love to know whether or not their partner would eventually cheat on them?
I mean, it would save so many of us time and heartache.
This study says that, while they can’t exactly tell you for sure, a tendency to fall in love fast and often could be an indicator.
They found that “rushing in” to romantic relationships correlates with a higher chance of infidelity.
How you fall in love – slow, fast, or somewhere in between – is known are “emophilia,” say the authors.
“Important individual differences when falling in love pertain to how easily (i.e., how rapidly) and often (i.e., how many times) one falls in love. These two factors (i.e., how easily and often) reflect one intercorrelated phenomenon, which is denoted as emophilia.”
They note that there is already a significant correlation between the two factors of easily and often.
Not everyone believes emophilia is a real thing, and even the researchers on this study state that they were skeptical.
“The research on emophilia that has been conducted is quite limited, with few studies, all of which are conducted by or in collaboration with social psychologist Daniel Jones, and most of them include North American samples.”
Basically, more varied studies are needed in order to support its existence.
The new study helps, as it was carried out with Norwegian and Swedish volunteers, and should help prove whether or not the idea of “falling in love” is dependent on culture.
They used newspaper ads to recruit 2,600+ participants and sent them online surveys measuring romantic information, personality traits, and levels of emophilia.
For emophilia, they used the Emotional Promiscuity Scale (EPS).
“It’s a two-factored scale that measures how often and easily a person falls in love.”
They quickly confirmed that the EPS responses were a pretty reliable measure for emophilia, and moved on to investigating links between emophilia and other personality traits.
It turned out to have positive correlations with traits like extraversion, agreeableness, and openness, but also with negative traits like psychopathy and narcissism.
Emophilia also seems to correlate with a person’s number of romantic relationships, as well as the number of times they are unfaithful in those relationships.
“The tendency to fall in love easily and often might lead the individual to engage in new romantic relationships more frequently, falling in love easily and often may also explain emophilia’s association with unfaithfulness, as it may lead the individual to develop romantic feelings toward someone outside their relationship.”
More research needs to be done if researchers want to prove true causation, or remove the doubt cast by a self-reported study.
“It might be that instead of emophilia causing the number of relationships/affairs, the direction could be opposite, in which scores of emophilia were at least in part a consequence of the number of relationships/affairs. One can reason that those who have been in many relationships, and/or cheated many times, might reason in hindsight that they might also have been in love many times, as it is common, and it is probably more socially desirable, to view relationship formation/cheating as being related to love.”
Take heart, my friends who fall in love fast.
But you know. Temper that wandering eye, too.
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