Who is usually the first to say, “I love you”?
Men or women?
Sixty-four per cent of people think it’s the woman who say it before the man, but a survey in the United States showed MEN are more likely to profess love first.
Not only are men are more likely to say “I love you,” but they admit to thinking about confessing love six weeks earlier than their female partners, said study co-author Josh Ackerman, a psychologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
His study, based on interviews with 205 straight men and women and due to be published in the June issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, concludes that gender differences in the timing and function of saying “I love you” are related to whether a couple has had sex.
“Men may be more impulsive in the way they express love, but what love means to men and what love means to women may be very different,” Ackerman said in an interview.
Men reported being significantly happier than women to hear “I love you” one month into the relationship if they had not yet had sex, while women felt happier than men when they heard “I love you” after the onset of sex in the relationship.
Researchers theorized this showed men were happy to hear “I love you” before sex because it indicated there might be an advance in the relationship to include sex, while women took “l love you” post-sex as a signal of commitment.
by Susan Floyd
