"Feeling love for your romantic partner appears to make everybody else less attractive, and the emotion appears to work in very specific ways, by 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.
Could love be the secret to resisting the temptation to cheat?
In this experiment conducted by UCLA and the online dating service eHarmony, researchers found that when college students in long-term relationships reflected on the love they felt for their boyfriends or girlfriends, they perceived attractive members of the opposite sex to be less appealing.
The Difference Between Love & Sexual Desire
Researchers Gonzaga and Martie Haselton, an associate professor of psychology and communication studies at UCLA, believe they have touched on the biology of love – the drive behind the emotion that makes people feel 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 was passed along to us."
The Secret to Resisting the Temptation to Cheat
"It's almost like love puts blinders on people," said co-author Haselton. People in love find it easier to push an attractive person out of their minds, even when they are extremely appealing.
Not only were the people in the “love group” in this experiment less likely to think of the attractive strangers, they also had a more difficult time remembering the “hottie's” appeal later.
"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."
How to Stay Faithful to Your Partner
In this study, 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," Gonzaga said. "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."
If you found How to Stay Faithful to Your Partner: Online Dating Research Reveals the Secret to Resisting the Temptation to Cheat interesting, try:
Source: “'Hotties' Not So Hot When You're In Love, Online Dating Researchers Find” – ScienceDaily (Feb. 14, 2008)
Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen - Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen is a full-time writer and blogger in Vancouver, BC, and the creator of the Quips and Tips blog series.
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