The psychology of "backburner" relationships

There are a couple of competing evolutionary imperatives at play when it comes to keeping people on the backburner. On the one hand, it makes a certain primal sense to explore all the potential mates available, to be sure to get the best deal. But having one long-term partner helps offspring survive, in the rough-and-tumble caveman world often invoked by evolutionary psychology. So commitment provides benefits, in exchange for letting go of other possibilities—the wouldas, the couldas, the shouldas.

According to the investment model of relationships, developed by social psychologist Caryl Rusbult in the 1980s, people who have invested more resources—time, energy, money—into a relationship should be more committed to it, and alternative partners should seem less attractive. One 2007 study found that love motivates people to shut down other options—people who thought and wrote about love for their partners were more able to suppress thoughts about attractive strangers. This is consistent with research that suggests people in relationships don’t pay as much attention to other members of the sex they’re attracted to, and tend to rate others as less attractive.

So, with all this as background, Dibble reasoned that people in committed relationships in his study would keep fewer people on the backburner.