is a research associate in the Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology at the University of Vienna in Austria. For centuries, the self-sufficient man who shuns romance has appeared as a kind of noble figure. Ralph Waldo Emerson devoted an entire essay, ‘Self-Reliance’ (1841), to the conviction that a man should stand apart from the crowd.
Decades later, Rudyard Kipling reduced the idea to a single line: ‘He travels the fastest who travels alone.’ Such visions of self-sufficient masculinity endure in depictions of silent cowboys, wandering rōnin, desert hermits, elite soldiers, or libertines who treat love as a sport. Powered by their own strength and resilience, these men are domesticated only when circumstances or a determined partner finally insists on it. According to this view of masculinity, love is a welcome addition but never a need.
Women, on the other hand, have often been portrayed as being consumed by their desire for romantic relationships. Consider an often-quoted line from Lord Byron’s epic poem Don Juan (1819-24): love is just one part of a man’s life, Byron writes, but ‘tis woman’s whole existence’. If men can take or leave romance, the logic goes, then women must be the real romantics.
They are the ones who fall harder and faster, and the ones who carry the emotional weight of a relationship. But that’s not how things really work. As a researcher specialising in the psychology of romantic relationships, I have found that the evidence points the other way.
In 2023 and 2024, I analysed more than 50 empirical studies and meta-analyses, revealing masculinity to be much more fragile than assumed. At every stage, from the first spark of attraction to the aftermath of a breakup, it is men who depend more on their romantic partners, for their happiness and, in measurable ways, for their survival. To understand the disproportionate weight love carries for men, we must examine the trajectory of relationships, starting from the time when men are single and searching for a partner.
On average, men consider finding a partner more important for their happiness than women do. When single, they are less satisfied with their relationship status and long for a partner more intensely. They also plunge into the feeling of falling in love more often and more quickly, and they experience unrequited love more frequently.
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