Gilmartin had seven criteria for each "love-shy man" he included in his study:
He is male.
He is a man who very rarely goes out socially with women.
He is a person without a past history of any emotionally close, meaningful relationships of a romantic and/or sexual nature with any member of the opposite sex.

He is a person who has suffered and is continuing to suffer emotionally because of a lack of meaningful female companionship. In short, he is a male who desperately wishes to have a relationship with a woman, but does not have one because of his shyness. In other words, he is not a man who consciously chooses not to have romantic or intimate relationships; rather, he wants such relationships but cannot establish them.
He is a man who becomes extremely anxiety-ridden over so much as the mere thought of asserting himself vis-à-vis a woman in a casual, friendly way. This is the essence of "love-shyness".
He is a man who is strictly heterosexual in his romantic and erotic orientations. Again, he is a male who is in no way a homosexual.

Gilmartin did not rule out the existence of female or homosexual love-shy people, but he doubted they would feel the same negative effects as heterosexual men, and suspected that the condition would manifest very differently in them, largely due to the societal roles that force heterosexual men into an "active" role in initiating relationships that do not subject women or homosexual men to the same pressures. Gilmartin explains, "[T]he very shy young woman is no less likely to date and to marry than is the self-confident woman, non-shy woman . . . . In essence, even very shy women marry. Love-shy men cannot and do not marry irrespective of how strong their desires might be . . . . "