We’ve all grown up on the same story, from Romeo and Juliet to Titanic, from ancient myths to modern rom-coms, the message is pretty consistent: somewhere out there is The One.

One epic love. One soulmate. One lightning bolt that strikes once in a lifetime. 

But new research published in the journal Interpersona suggests something a little less cinematic.

A large study from researchers at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute asked more than 10,000 single adults in the U.S. one simple question: “In your lifetime, how many times have you been passionately in love?”

The average answer wasn’t one, it was just over two.

In fact, two was the most common response. Almost one in three people said they’d experienced passionate love twice. That was about twice as many as those who said they’d only felt it once, or never at all. A smaller group reported three or four times and some people said zero.

The idea that passionate love is a once-in-a-lifetime event? The data doesn’t really support that.

One of the interesting things about this study is how similar the answers were across different groups.

Straight, gay, lesbian, and bisexual participants all reported roughly the same number of passionate love experiences. Older respondents reported only slightly more than younger ones.

In other words, the “two loves” pattern held up across age and orientation.

That’s kind of reassuring. It suggests that passionate love isn’t rare, and it isn’t reserved for a select few. Most people experience it at least once  and often more than once  across their lives.

So if you’ve fallen deeply, passionately in love more than once, you’re not unusual. For many people, love isn’t a single lightning strike, it's something that can happen again.

For centuries, our stories have told us to look for The One, science, gently and without drama, is suggesting that for most of us, it might be The Two. 

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