The Countries Where People Feel Most Loved

TheCountries Where People Feel Most Loved

Uri Friedman, The Atlantic

This week, in honor of Valentine's Day, the Philippine government sponsored mass-wedding ceremonies for hundreds of couples. It seemed fitting for a country that marked Valentine's Day 10 years ago by setting a world record for the number of couples simultaneously kissing for 10 seconds (the final tally: 5,122). And it's also appropriate for a country where a whopping 93 percent of people report feeling loved.

That last stat comes from what the economist Justin Wolfers has described as "the most comprehensive global index of love ever constructed." In 2006 and 2007, Gallup asked people in 136 countries whether they had experienced love the previous day. The researchers found that on a typical day, roughly 70 percent of the world's population reports feeling love. The world leader in love turned out to be the Philippines, where more than 90 percent said they had experienced love, and the world's laggard Armenia, where only 29 percent of respondents did. In the United States, 81 percent replied in the affirmative. (Click on the map to expand it.)

Gallup data; created with Datawrapper (Click to expand)

The map offers some broad lessons. Love appears to be flourishing in the Americas, achieving mixed results in Africa, and languishing in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. But Wolfers cautions against reading too much into the data. "[D]ifferences between countries may be due to how cultures define 'love' and not in actual day-to-day experiences," he writes. "For example, in some countries, the idea of 'love' is restricted to a romantic partner, while in others it extends to one's family members and friends."

The global data and arrived at some fascinating conclusions, including that feeling loved peaks when people are in their mid-30s or mid-40s, and that unmarried couples who live together report getting more love than married spouses. But perhaps their most interesting findings involved the complex relationship between money and love:

What’s perhaps more striking is how little money matters on a global level. True, the populations of richer countries are, on average, slightly more likely to feel loved than those of poorer countries. But love is still abundant in the poorer countries: People in Rwanda and the Philippines enjoyed the highest love ratios, with more than 9 in 10 people providing positive responses. Armenia, Uzbekistan, Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan, with economic output per person in the middle of the range, all had love ratios of less than 4 in 10.

Still, the truly remarkable stage of the research came when a commenter looked at their effort to plot the love data against GDP per capita to see whether there was a relationship between feeling loved and economic development. The reader pointed out that the data points clustered together to form a heart shape.

Wondering how your country performed? The full results of Gallup's poll are below.

Rank	Country	Percent Feeling Love
1	Philippines	93%
2	Rwanda	92%
3	Puerto Rico	90%
4	Hungary	89%
5	Cyprus	88%
6	Trinidad and Tobago	88%
7	Paraguay	87%
8	Lebanon	86%
9	Costa Rica	85%
10	Cambodia	85%
11	Nigeria	84%
12	Guyana	83%
13	Spain	83%
14	Mexico	82%
15	Tanzania	82%
16	Ecuador	82%
17	Jamaica	82%
18	Venezuela	82%
19	Cuba	82%
20	Brazil	82%
21	Laos	81%
22	Argentina	81%
23	Belgium	81%
24	Canada	81%
25	Greece	81%
26	United States	81%
27	Denmark	80%
28	Portugal	80%
29	Netherlands	80%
30	Vietnam	79%
31	New Zealand	79%
32	Italy	79%
33	Colombia	79%
34	Madagascar	78%
35	Uruguay	78%
36	Turkey	78%
37	Dominican Republic	78%
38	United Arab Emirates	77%
39	Saudi Arabia	77%
40	Chile	76%
41	Malawi	76%
42	Ghana	76%
43	South Africa	76%
44	Australia	76%
45	Panama	75%
46	Zambia	74%
47	Kenya	74%
48	Namibia	74%
49	Nicaragua	74%
50	Germany	74%
51	Ireland	74%
52	Sweden	74%
53	United Kingdom	74%
54	Switzerland	74%
55	Montenegro	74%
56	Austria	73%
57	France	73%
58	Kuwait	73%
59	Finland	73%
60	El Salvador	73%
61	Pakistan	73%
62	Zimbabwe	72%
63	Honduras	72%
64	Peru	72%
65	Egypt	72%
66	Serbia	72%
67	Bosnia and Herzegovina	72%
68	Sierra Leone	71%
69	India	71%
70	Taiwan	71%
71	Bangladesh	70%
72	Belize	70%
73	Croatia	69%
74	Macedonia	69%
75	Mozambique	69%
76	Bolivia	69%
77	Liberia	68%
78	Iran	68%
79	China	68%
80	Slovenia	68%
81	Haiti	68%
82	Norway	67%
83	Sri Lanka	67%
84	Poland	67%
85	Guatemala	67%
86	Uganda	66%
87	Sudan	66%
88	Israel	66%
89	Kosovo	65%
90	Thailand	65%
91	Jordan	65%
92	Albania	64%
93	Guinea	62%
94	Botswana	62%
95	Angola	62%
96	Burkina Faso	62%
97	Malaysia	61%
98	Mali	61%
99	Niger	61%
100	Palestinian Territories	61%
101	Romania	61%
102	Senegal	61%
103	Indonesia	61%
104	Afghanistan	60%
105	Hong Kong	60%
106	Cameroon	59%
107	Japan	59%
108	Nepal	59%
109	Bulgaria	59%
110	Slovakia	58%
111	Singapore	58%
112	Czech Republic	58%
113	Mauritania	57%
114	Benin	56%
115	South Korea	56%
116	Myanmar	55%
117	Latvia	54%
118	Togo	54%
119	Estonia	53%
120	Lithuania	50%
121	Russia	50%
122	Chad	49%
123	Yemen	48%
124	Ukraine	48%
125	Ethiopia	48%
126	Azerbaijan	47%
127	Tajikistan	47%
128	Moldova	46%
129	Kazakhstan	45%
130	Morocco	43%
131	Belarus	43%
132	Georgia	43%
133	Kyrgyzstan	34%
134	Mongolia	32%
135	Uzbekistan	32%
136	Armenia	29%