Happy Valentine's Day! Here's a dozen of the craziest romance-related studies we've ever featured.

Seriously, Science?
By Seriously Science
Feb 14, 2014 4:00 PMNov 20, 2019 2:27 AM

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What's better than a dozen long-stemmed roses on St. Valentine's day? Why, a dozen romance- and sex-related scientific studies, of course! Enjoy! 1.) A squamous cell carcinoma with a Saint Valentine's Day message. When your cancer loves you. 2.) When love makes you blind…literally. "Our patient experienced transient monocular visual loss every time he reached the climax of sexual intercourse, but never while performing strenuous physical exercise." 3.) Will your love last? This mathematical model may hold the answer... " Scholars and therapists agree on the existence of a sort of second law of thermodynamics for sentimental relationships." 4.) The odors of the human vagina. It's pretty much what you would imagine. 5.) Sex burns 3.6 calories a minute. "Objective: To determine energy expenditure in kilocalories (kcal) during sexual activity in young healthy couples in their natural environment and compare it to a session of endurance exercise." 6.) Can differing levels of sexual experience doom your relationship? "Further, among the married couples, a higher discrepancy between men’s and women’s number of previous intercourse partners was related to lower levels of love, satisfaction, and commitment in the relationship." 7.) Might as well face it, you're addicted to love. "There are no recognized definitions or diagnostic criteria for “love addiction,” but its phenomenology has some similarities to substance dependence" 8.) The economics of faking orgasms. "In the act of lovemaking, a man and a woman send each other possibly deceptive signals about their true state of ecstasy." 9.) On bushcrickets, genital titillators, and copulation time. "We examined the relationship between copulation duration (prior to spermatophore transfer), the complexity of titillators (sclerotized male genital contact structures), spermatophore mass and male body mass across 54 species of bushcricket." 10.) Wham, bam, thank you ma'am: an evolutionary perspective. "Few empirical studies have been devoted to exploring behaviors occurring immediately following sexual intercourse." 11.) If I'm not hot, are you hot or not? Physical attractiveness evaluations and dating preferences as a function of one's own attractiveness. "When less attractive people accept less attractive dates, do they persuade themselves that the people they choose to date are more physically attractive than others perceive them to be?" 12.) Apparently women (but not men) like monkey sex… literally. "In this study, we tested the hypothesis that a nonhuman sexual stimulus would elicit a genital response in women but not in men."

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