Love You Faux Ever

How do you know when a man's "I love you" is for real? I've had men express their love to me with great sincerity, only to vanish not long afterward. Are all men this fickle? Manipulative?

--Upset

Why does a man say "I love you"? Sometimes because "Look, a ferret in a top hat!" doesn't do much to get a woman into bed. To parse whether a man's "I love you" is just the later-in-the-relationship version of "You related to Yoda? Because yodalicious," you need to consider context. The exact same statement can have different meanings depending on the context -- the situation, the circumstances in which it's made. Not surprisingly, research by evolutionary social psychologist Joshua Ackerman and his colleagues suggests that men's I-love-yous "are likely to be more sincere (i.e., less colored by the goal of attaining initial sexual access) after sex has occurred." They also find that men, on average, start thinking about "confessing love" 97 days into a relationship -- so just over three months. Of course, an individual man may know sooner or take longer. All in all, the best lie detector you probably have is context -- racking up a good bit of time and experiences with a man and seeing how well the walk matches the talk. You might even wait till the three-month benchmark before concluding that the I-love-yous are likely to be for real -- and aren't, say, the best possible air bag for what might come shortly afterward: "I got you a little something on my work trip. It requires a short course of antibiotics."