‘Gender inequities are important’: why couples fall out of love

A new study unpicks the reasons men and women call time on a relationship and finds that micro-grievances really do matter

The desire to get married is a basic and primal instinct in women," observed the late, great Nora Ephron. It's followed by another basic and primal instinct: the desire to be single again." Relationship wisdom is full of such emphatic generalisations but, according to that eternally reliable media source a recent study", women do appear to fall in and out of love more extremely than men.

A behavioural economist, Saurabh Bhargava of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, has published a new study in Psychological Science, the leading journal in the field, which has a number of striking findings. The first is that women reported having feelings of love almost twice as frequently as men. The second is that, over the course of a long relationship, women on average experience a much steeper decline in these feeling compared to their male partners.