Women are emotional. That statement is so pervasive in US culture that it's almost taken as fact. We call romantic comedies "chick flicks" and berate women for being overly emotional even when an emotional reaction is completely justified.
On the flip side, men are thought to be rational and cool-headed. So much so that we've elected arguably one of the least rational people to run the country over a woman who was criticized for having emotions at all.
Well, science just proved us all wrong. A study published in The Journal Of Social Psychology finds that it's men, not women, who tend to fall in love faster. (That sounds pretty emotional to us.)
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The study surveyed 172 college students on their past relationships, asking when they fell in love and at what point they say, "I love you."
"Both men and women in our study presumed that women would fall in love and say 'I love you' faster than men," Marissa Harrison, who co-authored the study told Broadly.
But the opposite was true. Men who participated in the study reported that they both fall in love and say, "I love you" to a partner faster than the women who were surveyed.
So, why is it that men fall in love easier? Harrison theorizes it's because they've always had less to lose.
"I think women unconsciously postpone love compared to men," Harrison told Broadly. "Women have a lot more to lose reproductively by committing to the wrong man. They are born with a finite number of eggs, yet men produce millions of sperm on a daily basis."
If that isn't romantic, we don't know what is.