14 DAY TRIAL // This is the real power of love scientifically proven: hold on to temptation. A study made by a team from UCLA and the online dating service eHarmony and published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior discovered that people involved in long-term relationships were less attracted by hot members of the opposite sex.
"Feeling love for your romantic partner appears to make everybody else less attractive, and the emotion appears to work in very specific ways by in enabling you to push thoughts of that tempting other out of your mind," said lead author Gian Gonzaga, an eHarmony research scientist.
"It's almost like love puts blinders on people. Popular culture may mix romantic love up with sexual desire, but from an evolutionary perspective, romantic love fulfills a different function. 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 got passed along to us," said co-author Martie Haselton, an associate professor of psychology and communication studies at UCLA.
120 heterosexual students in committed relationships were put to watch dozens of photographs of attractive members of the opposite sex. They were asked to choose the member of the opposite sex most physically attractive to them. After that, each subject had to compose an essay on one of 3 topics: moments when they felt the most intense love for their partner, moments when they felt the strongest sexual desire for their partner, or a free choice subject essay. A group of students acted as control.
"Basically, these students were reliving an intense moment of love or an intense moment of sexual desire for their partner," said Gonzaga.
The subjects were instructed to put the attractive person from the photo out of their mind. If they could not, they had to put a check on the margin of their essays each time that occurred. After that, they were asked to list the attributes of the hot model. The in love subjects were 6 times less likely than the control students, and over 4 times less likely than the controls, to have their mind on the other attractive person while writing about their sexual desire for their partner. The "in love group" thought of the temptation once at two pages, compared to about 4 times a page for the controls.
"People in the love group found it easy to push an attractive other out of their mind even though we made those thoughts tempting," said Haselton.
Usually, when people are told not to think of something, a "rebound effect" makes the taboo thought to be much more intense than it otherwise would. The "in love group" also had a much later recalling of the attraction for the hot person. Students found in committed relationships recalled about 70 % as many attractive traits, like bulging muscles or a low-cut blouse, compared to the others. What they remembered was sexually less relevant, like the color of an article of the attractive person's clothing.
"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. 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," said Gonzaga. Those in committed relationships also tended to spend less time watching the photos compared to controls.
"It could be that people who end up in relationships might be the people who don't look at others. This is the first direct causal evidence between feeling love and defending a relationship from external threats," said Haselton.
"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. 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," said Gonzaga.