Sex 20 times a week? New study identifies four types of romantic lover

Australian research is ‘first to empirically show that we don’t all love the same’, lead author says

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New research has identified four types of romantic lover, including one that has sex up to 20 times a week.

The research, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, categorised lovers as mild romantic, moderate romantic, intense romantic, and libidinous romantic.

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Mild: About one in five – 20.02% – fell into this cluster, characterised by “the lowest intensity, lowest obsessive thinking, lowest commitment, and lowest frequency of sex”. This group also had the lowest proportion of people who thought their partner was “definitely” in love with them – just 25.31% – and the lowest proportion having sex, at 82.72%.

Moderate: About four in 10 – 40.91% – landed in this category, which Bode described as “fairly stock-standard” – or in the words of the journal article, “entirely unremarkable”. Those in this category were more likely to be male, and less likely to have children. This group had “relatively low intensity, relatively low obsessive thinking, relatively high commitment, and relatively moderate frequency of sex”.

Intense: This category described about one in three – 29.42% – of survey respondents, who Bode described as “crazy in-love” types. They were characterised by “the highest intensity, highest obsessive thinking, highest commitment, and relatively high frequency of sex”. About six in 10 people in this group were female.

Libidinous: About one in 10 – 9.64% – were libidinous romantic lovers, who had sex an average of 10 times a week and up to 20 times. They were characterised as “relatively high intensity, relatively high obsessive thinking, relatively high commitment, and exceptionally high frequency of sex”. This group were slightly more likely to be male, and had the highest proportion of people in a committed relationship but not living together.

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