Love Facts

When you look at someone you love, your pupils dilate. Surprisingly, they also dilate when you look at someone you hate — both emotions trigger the same arousal response.

The average person in their lifetime will spend an estimated 20,160 minutes kissing!

Relationships that begin through 'mate poaching' - when someone pursues a person already in a relationship - show significantly lower satisfaction, commitment and trust, plus higher rates of jealousy and infidelity compared to relationships that started between single people.

When someone looks at a new love, the neural circuits that are usually associated with social judgment are suppressed.

Approximately 145 million Valentine's Day cards are exchanged in the United States alone each year, making it the second-largest card-sending holiday after Christmas.

Brain scans show that people who view photos of a beloved experience activation of the caudate - a dopamine-rich part of the brain's reward system involving motivation and desire.

The average person dates 7 people before finding their spouse, though they may go on dozens of dates with each person along the way.

When you fall in love, that 'high' feeling is caused by a flood of dopamine that is similar to that of cocaine.

When two strangers are forced to talk and maintain eye contact for a while, it can make them fall in love.

Erotomania is a type of delusion in which the person believes another person is in love with him/her.

The left ear is more responsive to words of love and emotion whispered into it than the right.

Sandy, an African Penguin, was in 'love' with her keeper Peter Vollbracht at Münster Zoo in Germany from 1997 until her death in 2021.

Falling in love raises levels of nerve growth in a person's brain for about a year and can improve their memory.

Men fall in love faster than women do.

Approximately 1 billion Valentine's cards are exchanged each year when including school classroom exchanges, making Valentine's Day the second-largest card-sending occasion after Christmas.

Holding hands with someone you love can alleviate physical pain as well as stress and fear.

When a male gentoo penguin courts a female, he searches the beach for a pebble to present to her. If she accepts the gift, they bond and use pebbles together to build their nest.

Kissing releases masses of oxytocin, a "love potion" that helps couples bond and feel more attracted to each other.

Argentine farmer Pedro Martin Ureta spent over 20 years planting thousands of cypress and eucalyptus trees across his Pampas farmland in the shape of a guitar — a tribute to his wife Graciela, who dreamed of seeing one from the air before she passed in 1977. The guitar spans roughly one kilometer and is visible on Google Earth. Ureta, who is afraid of flying, has never seen his finished creation from above.

In 1986, Nadine Vaujour hovered a rented helicopter over La Santé Prison in Paris while her husband Michel climbed a rope to reach her. She'd spent three years learning to fly under a fake name specifically for this moment. Michel had fought his way to the roof using nectarines he'd painted green and passed off as grenades. Not a single shot was fired. They disappeared for four months before being caught.