There is a lot of research that shows that humans are more likely to start, advance, and keep romantic relationships than they think, according to a new study released in Personality and Social Psychology Review.
Instead of being very picky, people seem to push relationships forward even when things aren’t going well. Falling in love is also, according to the study, rather common and not especially rare.
When people are faced with a choice between a long-term relationship and singlehood, they usually choose the one that leads to a relationship. When reviewing statistics for speed-dating they found that people on average would consider dating 40% of their dating options. People also tend to become very attached to their partners very quickly. Leaving a long-term relationship, on the other hand, seems to be very difficult for many people, even if the relationship is abusive. It is therefore common that a breakup doesn’t always “stick.”
‘On-again, off-again relationships are common, in which a relationship breaks up and then comes back together, often several times, the researcher, Samantha Joel, said. Joel mentioned that the main conclusion of the paper is that people want to be in long-term relationships, and so their judgments and decisions seem to be geared toward that goal. Relationships, of course, are very complicated and influenced by a lot of different things.
“The data we are drawing from are also limited in a number of important ways, in that relationship science, like psychology more broadly, tends to greatly oversample cis, white, affluent, non-disabled Western participants” Joel mentioned.
“The Western courtship process looks very different from that of much of the world, where families tend to play a bigger role in mate selection. Further, the same marginalized groups who tend to face barriers to dating (e.g., stigma on dating apps) are also notably absent from our samples. Obtaining more diverse samples, both within and outside North America, is a crucial future direction for our field.”
