Love-shyness and mainstream psychology

Love-shyness is not recognized as a mental disorder by the World Health Organization or American Psychiatric Association. It does share some characteristics with commonly recognized mental disorders, however.

Like people who have a specific social anxiety, love-shy people can be very anxious in informal social situations.

Like people who are afflicted with an avoidant personality disorder, love-shy people feel uncomfortable in many informal social situations, and typically avoid opportunities for social contact.

Like people with attachment anxiety, love-shy people worry intensely that their relationship attachments aren't good enough.

Their impairment of functioning in social interactions bears some similarities to the symptoms of Asperger's syndrome. For example, like people who have Asperger's syndrome, love-shy men often have a hard time developing peer relationships. In a March 6, 2004 letter by Gilmartin , he felt "as many as 40 percent of the cases of severely love-shy men would qualify for a diagnosis of 'Asperger's Syndrome'". We are also told that "1.5 percent of men are love-shy". If we assume that a quarter of these love-shy men qualify as "severely love-shy", we reach a possible incidence rate of severely love-shy Asperger's men of 0.15%, a figure which is consistent with estimates of Asperger's Syndrome of between 0.18% and 0.36% reported by Barlow and Durand (2002).