Romantic Love and Limerence - you need to know about this

Men who have a strong sexual self-concept combine stereotypically male qualities of power and aggression with more sensitive qualities usually associated with women. These men are open to balancing male qualities with ones of emotional attachment, romance and love.

Both the stereotypically male traits, such as power and aggression, and traits such as love and passion are key parts of a man’s sexuality. Power and aggression are related to a man’s self-esteem. But attributes of love and passion help men form relationships and connect with women. These are clearly the traits men see as most important.

Studies of men’s sexual self-concepts, along with earlier studies of women, demonstrate that men and women show a surprising amount of agreement about what constitutes a “sexual” person.

Clearly, men and women agree that the primary characteristics of a sexual person are that they are loving and compassionate and sensitive

Men who score highest on a measure of sexual self-concept are more likely than others to be in a relationship and to experience feelings of love and romance.

In developing a measure of sexual self-concept for men, men evaluated 300 words as to whether they described a “sexual man.” The list is reduced to 27 words that had the most relevance to men’s sexuality. Some of these words include aggressive, passionate, open-minded, romantic, loving and domineering.

The list of words reveal three different facets of men’s sexual self-concepts.

passionate and loving - a facet found in the study of women’s sexual self-concepts. While passion and love are often thought of as stereotypically feminine traits these are the traits that men choose as the most descriptive of a sexual man. Men -- young and old alike -- indicated that sexual men are those who are compassionate, warm-hearted, passionate and loving
power and aggression - this is not found in women. Sexual men are described with such words as aggressive, individualistic, direct and experienced. But power and aggression are not as important as passion and love for the sexual man.
open-minded - described by words such as liberal, open-minded and broad-minded. A similar facet was also found in the study of women’s sexual self-concept.

Men’s sexual self-concepts are strongly associated to their sexual and romantic relationships, both past and current. Men who score high on the sexual self-concept scale -- those who described themselves as very romantic, aggressive, loving and so on -- are more likely than others to have been in love. About 30 percent of the low scorers said they had never been in love, compared to only 8 percent of the high scorers. The high scorers also reported being in love more often than did others.

In addition, about three-quarters of the high scorers said they were currently involved with a partner, while only about one-third of the low-scorers said they had a partner.

These findings suggest that men with a positive view of their sexuality are not only more sexual, but also more likely to become romantically involved and experience feelings of intimacy and love.