How to find love? A scientific approach
Love is a difficult concept to measure. In your quest to find love, there is no objective way to know if you are truly passionate about someone that you may have met.
Psychologists Elaine Hatfield, from the University of Hawaii, and Susan Sprecher, from the Illinois State University, have the answers, though! If you are interested, listen to this talk on their understanding of passionate love.
They have created a set of questions that are designed to tell you how passionate you are about someone that you may be in love with or met for the first time or had only a brief interaction in the past. It’s called the passionate love scale.
So get ready with a pen, paper, and calculator and start answering these question. Before you do that, pick a man/woman you met through online matrimony sites, boyfriend, girlfriend, ex-lover, husband or wife.
Are you ready now to find love or at least make sure you are actually in love?
How to find love using 16 questions
- I would feel deep despair if my partner left me.
- Sometimes I feel I can’t control my thoughts; they are obsessively on my partner.
- I feel happy when I’m doing something to make my partner happy.
- I would rather be with my partner than anyone else.
- I’d get jealous if I thought my partner were falling in love with someone else.
- I yearn to know all about my partner.
- I want my partner physically, emotionally and mentally.
- I have an endless appetite for affection from my partner.
- For me, my partner is the perfect romantic partner.
- I sense my body responding when my partner touches me.
- My partner always seems to be on my mind.
- I want my partner to know me — my thoughts, my fears, and my hopes.
- I eagerly look for signs indicating my partner’s desire for me.
- I possess a powerful attraction for my partner.
- I get extremely depressed when things don’t go right in my relationship with my partner.
- For every question, mark a response on a scale between 1 to 9, with 1 corresponding to “Not at all True” and 9 corresponding to “Definitely True”.
Answer key for the passionate love scale
Now add up the points you have scored. Here is how you find your results.
Drum roll, please…
106-135 points: Extremely passionate.
When men and women are wildly in love, they can’t stop thinking about the other, their hearts pound, their pulses race, and they find it impossible to keep away from the objects of their desire—even when the pursuit is dangerous or foolish. This is exactly the level of passion Bollywood stars have in movies.
86-105 points: Passionate.
People often feel this way, but not with such unrelenting intensity.
66-85 points: Average.
On occasion, people experience bursts of passionate feeling.
45-65 points: Cool (indifferent).
People feel a tepid passion and then only infrequently.
15-44 points: Extremely cool.
You might as well be thinking about chalk or statistics (unless you are a math lover)!
Here is an interesting tidbit. Wondering what happens to your brain when you fall in love? This video takes you right inside your brain!
The passionate love scale is a simple tool to figure out if you have the romantic chemistry with anyone you have met before or in a relationship with. What you decide to do with the score depends on your situation (just met, in a relationship, engaged, or married). Also, keep in mind that passionate love alone cannot be a pointer to a long-term relationship!
If you would like to get a definite answer for how to find love for a long-term relationship and the steps you need to take to find love, read our in-depth guide to the art and science of how to find true love.
