Can't Help Falling In Love? You Might Be More Likely To Be A Cheater

As Elvis famously crooned: “Wise men say, ‘only fools rush in.’ But I can’t help falling in love with you.” It’s both a romantic song and, according to a new study, a massive red flag – as it turns out that “rushing in” to love may correlate with a higher chance of infidelity in relationships.

With the exception of aromantic folks or the extremely unlucky, most of us will “fall in love” at least once in our lives. The process and experience is different for everyone: for some of us, it’s a gradual and rare realization; for others, it’s an immediate and passionate rush. However it comes to you, though, so far appears to be something of a unique character trait – one that researchers have come to know as “emophilia”.

“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,” explains the study. “These two factors (i.e., how easily and often) reflect one intercorrelated phenomenon, which [is] denote[d] emophilia.”

“The two factors of emophilia (i.e., easily and often) are […] normally collapsed into one dimension, due to the high correlation between them,” it adds.

So far so good – but it’s important to note at this point that not everyone is convinced that “emophilia” is a real thing. In fact, the researchers themselves went into the new study with a healthy dose of skepticism: “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,” they point out in the paper, “and most of them include North American samples.”

“Given the replication crisis in psychology, it is important that findings are supported by separate studies,” they write. “Further, cross-cultural studies are needed to establish emophilia as a universal trait.”

The new study does go a little way towards remedying this, being carried out among Norwegian and Swedish volunteers rather than Americans or Canadians. It’s a variable that might have proven crucial to proving the existence – or otherwise – of the phenomenon, as “love”, and our ideas around the concept, are known to be dependent on culture . Consider the popular idea, for example, that romantic love should go hand-in-hand with friendship and comfort – characterizations that one 2011 study says are virtually unknown in, say, Russia or Lithuania, where “love” was suggested to be conceptualized more as a temporary "fairytale" than in American participants.

Basically, before the researchers could start investigating whether emophilia was linked to infidelity, they first had to make sure it was actually a thing for everybody, rather than just being a quirk of North Americans. So, using newspaper ads, they recruited more than 2,600 study participants and sent out online surveys measuring romantic information, personality traits including the “dark triad” and “big five” clusters, and levels of emophilia.

The latter category was investigated using the Emotional Promiscuity Scale, or EPS: a “two-factored scale [that] measures how often and easily a person falls in love,” the researchers explain. The first result was encouraging: a quick statistical analysis of the EPS responses confirmed that it’s a pretty reliable measure for emophilia.

That checked, the team moved on to investigating the links, if any, between emophilia and other personality traits. For all you hopeless romantics out there, the results may be reassuring: while emophilia had a small positive correlation with Machiavellianism and psychopathy, and a slightly stronger one with narcissism, it was also had a small positive correlation with positive traits like extraversion, agreeableness, and openness.

The main question, though, was how emophilia affects your love life – specifically, is it positively associated with a person’s number of romantic relationships and times being unfaithful? The answer appears to be yes.

As the team points out, this may not be surprising. “The tendency to fall in love easily and often […] might lead the individual to engage in new romantic relationships more frequently,” they write, while “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.”

It’s depressing news for those who love love – but don’t lose heart just yet. Because of the way the study was conducted – being cross-sectional, and based entirely on self-reporting – it’s impossible to say for sure that emophilia causes infidelity or higher numbers of relationships. Indeed, as the researchers themselves point out, it could be precisely the opposite.

“It might be that instead of emophilia causing the number of relationships/affairs, the direction could be opposite, in which scores on emophilia were at least in part a consequence of the number of relationships/affairs,” they suggest. “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.”

The study is published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology .