Dr. Brian G. Gilmartin coined the term “love-shy” in his 1987 book Shyness and Love: Causes, Consequences, and Treatment. His is the definitive and basically only scientifically based book on the subject of people who, due to psychological reasons, cannot have romantic relationships whatsoever. Studying adult virgins he found, rather than a variety of reasons for their involuntary situation, a single identifiable syndrome with standard causes and symptoms. Based on shyness, love-shyness works specifically to keep romantic and sexual relationships from happening. In simplest terms, love-shyness is a phobia of romance and mating. Any romantic or prospective romantic situation induces such a high level of anxiety in the love-shy sufferer that almost any dating and sexual relationship proves impossible. The more attractive and available the romantic interest, the greater the phobia.

This anxiety so strongly dominates during the formative years that the love-shy child fails to learn and pick up on the human mating ritual. One cannot easily learn a subject one fears. The knowledge and social skills related to romance and sex that a typical young adult intuitively grasps are absent in a similarly aged love-shy person. Thus, in addition to general shyness, loveshyness doubly curses romantically. Not only is such a person extremely nervous in social situations involving someone to whom he or she is attracted, he or she is usually clueless about what to do in such situations. The immediate phobic reactions prevent a relationship from even starting. These factors tend to culminate in a person who never marries and ends up a life-long virgin. So, the working definition of a love-shy person is someone who cannot have romantic or sexually intimate relationships because of substantial anxiety surrounding sexuality along with a failure to comprehend proper courtship and mating rituals.