Our goal is to use prototype analysis to distinguish the folk or culturally held understandings of love, romantic love, and sex and to specify, from the obtained data, the semantic relationship among these three associated concepts. By considering the semantic distinctions between these three concepts, we come to an unintended insight: if romantic love is a socio-cultural universal it does not appear to have the same evolutionary history as love or sex and this may account for its somewhat ambiguous status in the scholarly literature on romantic love. We demonstrate that, in the United States, sex, in and of itself, is seldom conceived of as a relationship while love and romantic love are primarily viewed as relational. Our findings, though preliminary, strongly suggest that romantic love is a synthesis of two evolutionary drives: love (or bonding) and sex.

我们的目标是使用原型分析来区分民间或文化中对爱情、浪漫爱情和性的理解，并从获得的数据中指定这三个相关概念之间的语义关系。通过考虑这三个概念之间的语义区别，我们得出了一个意外的见解：如果浪漫爱情是一种社会文化普遍性，它似乎与爱情或性没有相同的进化历史，这可能解释了它在关于浪漫爱情的学术文献。我们证明，在美国，性本身很少被视为一种关系，而爱情和浪漫爱情主要被视为关系。我们的发现虽然是初步的，但强烈表明浪漫爱情是两种进化驱动力的综合：