[1][2] Tennov was born in Montgomery County, Alabama, to Lois Estelle Moore of Birmingham and Daniel Edgar Tennow, who had emigrated from the Russian Empire in 1914.
[citation needed] Her professional interest in romantic love began when two young men told her that breakups had driven them to alcoholism and losing a semester at university, respectively.
[3] During her years of research into romantic love experiences, Tennov obtained thousands of personal testimonies from questionnaires, interviews, and letters from readers of her writing, in an attempt to support her hypothesis that a distinct and involuntary psychological state occurs identically among otherwise normal persons across cultures, educational level, gender, and other traits.
Her television credits included a PBS interview with the French novelist and essayist Simone de Beauvoir and an appearance in a 1998 BBC documentary, The Evolution of Desire.
[3] From 1986, she lived in Millsboro, Delaware, where she lectured at the local senior learning academy and worked as a volunteer at the nursing home.