When is the turning point where a relationship becomes serious?
In the first few weeks people cannot tell the difference between relationships that will last and those that are doomed.
Both long-term and short-term relationships feel almost identical to people — at least at first they do.
Whether the relationship is destined to last a month or a lifetime, romantic interest initially rises in similar ways, interviews find.
In other words, people do not really know whether it is going to last.
However, at some stage in what become short-term relationships, romantic interest starts to tail off.
The turning point is often when the relationship becomes sexual.
Dr Paul Eastwick, the study’s first author, said:
“Long-term and short-term trajectories typically pull apart after you’ve known someone for weeks or months.
In the beginning, there is no strong evidence that people can tell whether a given relationship will be long-term and serious or short-term and casual.”
Casual to committed
The results come from in-depth interviews with over 800 adults of all ages.
People were asked to reconstruct the events and experiences in their relationships — both long- and short-term.
Dr Eastwick said:
“Some of the most interesting moments in these relationships happen after you meet the person face-to-face, but before anything sexual has happened.
You wonder ‘is this going somewhere?’ or ‘How much am I into this person?’
It is somewhere around this point that short-term and long-term relationships start to diverge, and historically, we have very little data on this particular period of time.”
People may end up in short-term relationships with those they are only attracted to a little.
Long-term relationships turn out to be those that start out exciting and grow into something long-lasting and stable.
Dr Eastwick said:
“People would hook up with some partners for the first time and think ‘wow, this is pretty good.’
People tried to turn those experiences into long-term relationships.
Others sparked more of a ‘meh’ reaction.
Those were the short-term ones.”
The study was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (Eastwick et al., 2018).
