Why Romance Makes People Reckless: What Love Does to Self-Control When No One Is Watching
Sunday, January 25, 2026.
Every two years, I present a synthesis of the most recent cross-cultural infidelity research for the LingYu Psychology Institute.
Established in Toronto in 2009, LingYu is the largest Chinese professional psychology center in North America.
For fifteen years, its global network of psychologists, psychotherapists, and social workers has delivered clinical services, professional training, supervision, corporate consultation, public mental-health education, and research at North American standards.
Which is to say: this is not a room inclined toward moral shortcuts.
And yet, every cycle, the same question surfaces—quietly, almost reluctantly:
Why do partners who value fidelity still do such reckless things?
This is why a recent study in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology matters. Not because it pathologizes love, but because it names a mechanism clinicians already recognize, even if we rarely describe it cleanly:
Romantic cues produce control depletion.
Control depletion increases risk.
Not just romantic risk.
Ethical risk.
Financial risk.
Reputational risk.
The Old Suspicion We Keep Calling Poetry
Human culture has always suspected this.
From The Butterfly Lovers to Romeo and Juliet, love is portrayed as something that loosens judgment while sharpening courage—often at precisely the wrong moment.
We tend to treat that as metaphor.
This study treats it as cognition.
What the Research Actually Shows
Across four experiments, researcher Heng Li found that mere exposure to romantic cues—words, images, or stories associated with love—made people more willing to take risks.
Not symbolic risks.
Actual ones.
Participants primed with romance were more likely to:
Choose physically dangerous activities.
Accept financial uncertainty.
Engage in ethically questionable behavior.
Seek information about bribery rather than neutral alternatives.
In one experiment, nearly three-quarters of participants exposed to romantic imagery chose a bungee-jumping ticket over a safe alternative.
This was not personality.
Not thrill-seeking types self-selecting.
It was a state-based shift in self-regulation.
The Mechanism: Romantic Control Depletion
The central finding is not that love makes people bold.
It’s how it does so.
Romantic cues reliably reduced participants’ sense of personal control—the feeling that one’s actions are deliberate, governed, and restrained.
Language has always gestured at this:
Falling in love.
Being lovesick.
Losing your head.
These are not just figures of speech. They describe a measurable change in how agency is experienced.
Romance does not erase values.
It temporarily weakens the systems that enforce them.
Why This Matters for Infidelity Research
In LingYu Psychology Institute discussions, this is where the room stills.
Because across cultures, people say the same things:
“I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“It didn’t feel like a decision.”
“I wasn’t myself.”
We are quick to hear this as evasion.
Sometimes it is.
But sometimes it is a literal description of self-regulatory depletion under romantic activation.
This explains something clinicians see repeatedly:
Insight does not reliably prevent infidelity.
Values alone do not reliably prevent infidelity.
Because prevention depends less on intention than on whether guardrails remain intact when attachment cues are loudest.
Explanation is not absolution.
But it is the difference between moralizing and designing effective containment.
The More Dangerous Finding: Risk Spillover
The most unsettling result is not that romance increases romantic risk.
It’s that it increases unrelated risk.
Participants primed with love took greater ethical, financial, and physical risks that had nothing to do with romance itself.
Love spilled over.
Clinically, this shows up as:
Reckless career moves framed as devotion.
Financial gambles justified as “for us.”
Moral boundary crossings explained as necessary sacrifices.
The risk is rarely about sex alone.
It is about control depletion in the presence of attachment cues.
Environment Still Matters
The final experiment is the most instructive.
When participants encountered romantic cues in an environment associated with discipline and containment—a library—the effect vanished.
Same stories.
Same people.
Different setting.
Self-control returned.
Romantic recklessness is not destiny.
But it is situationally predictable.
This is why older cultures emphasized something Western romance has largely abandoned: structure.
The Romans called it pietas—not obedience, but right relation to continuity, limits, and obligation especially when feeling overwhelms judgment.
Pietas did not suppress love.
It prevented love from being asked to govern itself.
The Mistake We Keep Making
This is why “just don’t cheat” is a useless intervention.
Romantic activation lowers guardrails.
Lower guardrails increase probability.
Probability plus opportunity produces behavior.
This is not a character failure story.
It is a systems failure story.
And systems can be designed differently.
A Diagnostic Ending (Not a Moral One)
When love is loud, assume your judgment is noisier than usual.
Not evil.
Not broken.
Just less governed.
Which is why people who care about fidelity, ethics, and long-term commitments do not rely on feelings to protect them.
They rely on structure, context, and limits—especially when love feels most convincing.
Love is wonderful.
But it has never been neutral.
And it has never been a reliable guardian of good decisions—only a powerful reason we give after the fact.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Li, H. (2024). Blind love, risky romance: Exposure to romantic cues increases nonmoral and immoral risk taking. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 65(4), 512–524. https://doi.org/10.1111/sjop.12945