(Online Dating Industry Journal) In an experiment with college students in long-term relationships, researchers at UCLA and relationship service eHarmony found that asking coeds to reflect on the love they felt for their boyfriends or girlfriends blunted the appeal of especially attractive members of the opposite sex.
"Feeling love for your romantic partner appears to make everybody
else less attractive, and the emotion appears to work in very specific
ways by in enabling you to push thoughts of that tempting other out of
your mind," said Gian Gonzaga, an eHarmony research scientist and lead
author of the study, which appears in the current issue of the journal
Evolution and Human Behavior.
"It's almost like love puts blinders on people," said co-author
Martie Haselton, an associate professor of psychology and communication
studies at UCLA.
With their research, Gonzaga and Haselton believe they have
glimpsed the biological imperative behind the emotion that makes people
feel all gushy and do silly things.
"Popular culture may mix romantic love up with sexual desire, but
from an evolutionary perspective, romantic love fulfills a different
function," Haselton said. "Love is a commitment device, which has
evolved to make us identify and stick with a long-term mate long enough
to raise a child. Our ancestors who had this ability were more
successful in raising their offspring to maturity, so the adaptation
got passed along to us."
The researchers invited 120 heterosexual undergraduates in
committed relationships to pore over photographs of attractive members
of the opposite sex.
"We got the photos from Hot or Not," Haselton said, referring a dating Web site that rates user photos, "and we only downloaded the hot ones."
From the dozens of photos at their disposal, the undergrads were
asked to identify the member of the opposite sex to whom they felt most
physically attracted.
The researchers then asked each undergraduate to compose an essay
on one of three subjects: the time they felt the most love for their
current romantic partner, the time they felt the most sexual desire for
their current romantic partner, or anything they wanted to write about.
The third group acted as a control group.
"Basically, these students were reliving an intense moment of love
or an intense moment of sexual desire for their partner," said Gonzaga.
While writing, the undergraduates were instructed to put the
attractive other out of their mind. If they nevertheless happened to
think of the hottie, they were asked to put a check in the margin of
their essays every time they did so. Later, they were asked to list the
hottie's attributes.
Undergraduates who reflected on the love they felt for their
romantic partner were six times less likely than the control group, and
more than four times less likely than the group that wrote about their
sexual desire for their partner, to think of the hottie. On average,
undergraduates in the love group thought of the tempting other once
every two pages, compared with more than twice a page for the desire
group and almost four times a page for the control group.
"People in the love group found it easy to push an attractive
other out of their mind even though we made those thoughts tempting,"
said Haselton.
In fact, conventional wisdom holds that when people are instructed
to not think of something, a "rebound effect" occurs, causing the taboo
thought to present itself even more frequently than it otherwise would.
Not only were the undergraduates in the love group less likely to
think of the attractive others, but they had a much tougher time later
recalling the hottie's appeal. On average, students from the love group
remembered about two-thirds as many attractive features — such as
bulging muscles or a low-cut blouse — as the students in the desire and
control groups. And what members of the love group did remember of the
hotties was less likely to be an attractive feature than a sort of
general, identifying characteristic like the location where the photo
was shot or the color of an article of the hottie's clothing.
"These people could remember the color of a shirt or whether the
photo was taken in New York, but they didn't remember anything tempting
about the person," Gonzaga said. "It's not like their overall memory
was impaired; it's as if they had selectively screened out things that
would make them think about the how attractive the alternative was."
The findings are consistent with past research, which has shown
that people in romantic relationships rate potential others as less
attractive than their uncommitted counterparts. Research has also shown
that when shown photos of attractive members of the opposite sex,
people in romantic relationships tend to spend less time looking at the
photos than noncommitted people.
"Earlier studies didn't examine whether love was driving the
pattern," said Haselton. "It could be that people who end up in
relationships might be the people who don't look at others. This is the
first direct causal evidence between feeling love and defending a
relationship from external threats."
Overall, reliving a loving moment with a romantic partner helped blunt the allure of a potential threat to the relationship.
"One of the biggest threats to a relationship is an attractive
alternative to your loved one — or that attractive woman at work or the
hot guy you meet in the bar," said Gonzaga. "In subtle ways that you
might not even notice, the gushy feelings you get when you think of
your partner help you fend off these threats."
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