You might think that relationship researchers would investigate how relationships form. But we don’t—largely because relationship formation is surprisingly difficult to study.
When Eli Finkel and I conducted our speed-dating studies
over a decade ago, we were hopeful that we would see our participants go on to
form actual romantic relationships. That is, we thought we would be able to
follow participants from their very first impressions of each other through the
formation of a dating relationship.
About a third of our speed-daters went on to have something like a coffee
date with someone they met at speed-dating. But in the weeks and months following the initial event, only about 5% of participants reported having a casual or serious
dating relationship with one of their fellow speed-daters.
Was this low percentage something weird about speed-dating?
Maybe Northwestern University undergrads have terrible social skills? Well, in
2008, Eli and I were part of a co-ed kickball league in Chicago, and ~150 twenty-
and thirty-somethings from this league got together on a weekly basis to compete,
eat, and imbibe a few alcoholic beverages.
We administered a survey to try to get a sense of how often people were
forming relationships across this league.
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| The period of time between the moment two people meet and the formation of a committed relationship is empirically hazy. |
Was relationship formation more common in this group? Yes… a
whopping 7%. That is, 7% of single people who took part in
the kickball league formed a relationship with someone else in the league over
the course of a 2-3 month season.
In the years since, there haven’t been many more attempts
to capture relationship formation as it happens; I could probably count these
studies on one hand. The path from strangers to relationship partners is
extremely hard to study. And, in my view, it remains one of the greatest untapped
reservoirs of interesting psychological phenomena.
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Close relationship scholars are pretty good at studying
initial attraction between strangers, and we are really good at studying people
who agree that they are currently romantic partners. But what about the time period between initial attraction and "real relationship" status? It’s more or less missing entirely from our literature.
As Eli Finkel, Jeff Simpson, and I argue in this recent (open
access) Psych Inquiry article, this gap in the literature is a big problem. Why? Three reasons:
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| Ethan Hawke might have been able to pick up a stranger on a train, but most people form romantic relationships with acquaintances and friends, not strangers. |
1. This period of time is not short. The average is
about a year. There are exceptions, of course, but people typically form
romantic relationships by drawing from their network of preferred-sex friends
and acquaintances. Successfully chatting up a stranger a la Before Sunrise is not the norm. So we are missing out on about a year's worth of presumably important psychological processes.
2. There are many studies that examine whether
individual differences predict relationship outcomes. But very rarely do these studies get
measures of individual differences that are uncontaminated by a current
relationship (i.e., measured before the current relationship had the chance to shape them). Sure, some studies recruit
participants right as they start dating each other, but even these studies are
not capturing the true beginning of the relationship. If you just started dating someone who has been your friend for the past year, she could have been boosting your self-esteem or exacerbating your attachment
anxiety for that entire time. This means that even though we think we’re studying the
effect of individual differences on relationship processes, we may actually be studying the effect of relationship processes on relationship processes.
3. The fields of evolutionary psychology and close
relationships both inspire a lot of work on romantic relationships, yet remain surprisingly disconnected given this shared focus. The mystery period between initial attraction and acknowledged romantic relationship might be hindering integration across these two fields:
Most evolutionary psychological studies resemble studies of initial attraction
(e.g., participants evaluate a stranger depicted in a photograph), whereas close relationships studies often focus on existing relationships (e.g., participants report on a dating partner
over time). Sometimes, scholars suggest that studies of initial attraction
capture short-term mating whereas studies of established relationships capture
long-term mating, but this suggestion imbues a methodological distinction with
intense theoretical weight (i.e., are you capturing two theoretically distinct mating strategies or simply measuring two points along a normative arc?). By filling in the missing time period between initial attraction and relationship formation, we may be able to shed better light on the true distinctions between short-term and long-term relationships, since it very well might take weeks
or months after an initial interaction before people figure out whether
someone is friend material, hookup material, or bring-home-to-meet-grandma
material.
Our article offers a meta-theoretical framework for thinking
about time across the entirety of a romantic relationship, from the moment two
people actually meet. You can also read several very thoughtful commentaries on our article from close relationships, sexuality, and evolutionary
psychological scholars who are deeply committed to studying these issues as
well (see here, here, here, and here, and see here for our reply).
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