Thinking back on the person you fell in love with and how your life changed as a result, did you even wonder how it all happened? Somehow you went from being with this person on an occasional basis and getting along well to falling head over heels in love. Whether it took days, weeks, or even years, a switch flipped, and your daily life and your future were changed forever.
As you recall that period of your life, perhaps you can identify the episode or episodes that took place over the course of your increasing involvement with this person. Maybe it was a romantic dinner, a shared evening at a concert, or just a casual chat while strolling in the park. What were the defining moments?
Time and Relationships
In an unusual study of wedding announcements published in the New York Times Sunday Styles section, University of South Florida’s Michael Flaherty and University of Bucharest’s Cosima Rughiniș (2026) explored the ways that the announcements described the series of key turning points in the newlyweds’ path to commitment. They approached the topic from a symbolic interactionist perspective, meaning simply that they sought to understand the “signal function” that indicated to the couple that they were meant to be together.
The signal function they chose to explore was time and temporal experience to “apprehend the meaning of a complicated and ambiguous situation” in which couples decide that they have, indeed, fallen in love. By examining wedding announcements, which in the case of the Times typically includes the narrative of a couple’s progression from first meeting to marriage, they could unpack the key indicators of the switch flipping from knowing each other to wanting to spend their lives together.
The 6 Time Signals That Define Falling in Love
From their sample of 191 announcements, the authors pulled quotations from the couples themselves as well as the interpretations offered by the editors who wrote the announcement. Data for these announcements come from an online questionnaire that couples complete; those who are selected for publication meet some criteria involving who they are (e.g., well-known people or children of well-known people) but also, as importantly, whether the couple’s relationship makes a good “story.”
According to Flaherty and Rughiniș, “every couple cited aspects of temporality as evidence that they were falling in love.” In their narrative analysis, the authors extracted these six main themes:
- Duration: The first theme relates to the familiar sense you might have had when you felt that time stopped or slowed down with your romantic partner. Couples in the study reported that they lost track of time when they were together, whether on a first date or as their relationship progressed. Some mentioned that they didn’t want the encounter to end. This sense of unending time therefore became an important cue.
- Frequency: It makes sense that when you’re falling in love, you want to see each other as much as possible. In the cases of the newlyweds in this sample, the idea of frequency as a signal of love was expressed in terms of showing the relationship was meant to be. Bumping into each other while sharing the same space (such as school or work) became, the authors concluded, a matter of “propinquity and happenstance.” Frequency also became expressed by intentional efforts to get together as couples sought to be with each other as often as possible or even, for one couple, “nonstop.”
- Sequence: The order or succession of events became the third feature of emerging relationships. The narrative of a couple’s relationship, note the authors, is composed of “dates and kindred experiences.” As you think about your relationship, you can probably tick off these events, beginning perhaps with exchange of numbers, deciding when to tell family members, moving in together, and eventually sharing words of commitment. These may form, as they did for the study’s couples, a set of “firsts” from the first date to kiss to night spent together. One key event in this sequence, note the authors, is deleting your information from dating apps if you used these.
- Timing of Commitment: When do couples issue their first words of commitment? This becomes another feature of timing. For the newlyweds in this study, timing often occurred much sooner than they expected it would, ranging from 30 minutes into the first date to becoming engaged 5 months after meeting. Falling head over heels seems, from these couples anyway, to be a pretty speedy process.
- Allocation: We now get to the key issue that confronts every couple, which is to make the commitment to be together. In the words of the authors, “Time is the essential currency of our relationships.” Perhaps you and your partner decided that you wanted to test your love by taking a break (like the infamous “break” between Rachel and Ross in “Friends”). Finding that, as with these characters, you couldn’t pull it off, you now become convinced that you are meant to be together.
- Stealing Time: Spending time with your loved one means that, by definition, you’re spending less time on other obligations. As the courtship progresses, a couple may find that they’re sacrificing household chores as their weeknights and weekends become filled with time spent together. This indication, to the authors, is “an unmistakable signal.” Family and friends may, as the authors go on to say, “jeer and gripe from the sidelines.” Sometimes, however, this turns into a social faux pas if the person they stole time from was another potential romantic partner who they eventually dumped.
Writing Your Own Relationship Narrative
With these six signals, you can reflect back on how your relationship progressed or is progressing from early attraction to commitment. Some of the words that popped out in the narratives of these couples include the timing as “fortuitous” and “uncanny.” As you travelled through the formative stages of your relationship, you may also have marveled at the miraculous ways you were brought together.
Put another way, the authors suggest that “One’s perception that time slows, accelerates, or collapses in the presence of another person is an empirical basis for interpreting one’s feelings as ‘falling in love.’” You know you’re in love when it “disrupts the temporal regime.”
We know from other research that reminiscing about the past with your partner can help build or rebuild emotional connections. Using the framework developed by Flaherty and Rughiniș can help you structure that reminiscing. What might also be a productive exercise is to compare notes on who felt what and when. Maybe you didn’t realize just how much you and your partner agree on the ways that time flew when you were together. If you’re lucky, perhaps it still does.
To sum up, couples fall in love in an infinite variety of ways. Looking at the cues that time provides can help you gain a deeper appreciation of the bonds that connect you and your partner as you traverse the years ahead.
