People believe in love more as they get older, not less

There's a story most people tell about getting older and love: that it gets harder to believe in, that experience makes you guarded, that somewhere between your twenties and your forties the romanticism fades. The Smitten data tells a different story entirely.

Belief in love at first sight climbs with age. Love itself becomes more universal where almost everyone over 45 has been in it. And as it accumulates, regret and fear quietly shrink. Whatever the years bring, they don't seem to make people more closed off. If anything, the opposite.

The fuller picture is more complicated, as it always is. Most people have made someone breakfast in bed, and that number only grows with age. But so does having been dumped. The tenderness and the hurt accumulate together. Even the graceless exits get kinder over time: fewer people admit to ending things over text as the years pass.

And then there's the number that complicates everything. Affairs increase steadily with age across the Nordics, but the gap between markets is where it gets interesting. Denmark and Norway sit at nearly double the rate of Iceland, where the number stays low across every age group. Whether that says something about culture, about honesty, or about what long relationships look like on a small island, the data doesn't say.