“Showmance”: Is performing intimacy associated with feelings of intimacy?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many actors report, anecdotally, a phenomenon known as a “showmance,” whereby actors develop romantic and/or sexual feelings for acting partners, often in the process of portraying romance onstage together. Because acting partners spend so much time together and may be engaging in several activities that facilitate emotional and physical closeness, it is possible that performing intimacy may influence feelings of actual intimacy. In this study, we aimed to understand the association between the type of onstage relationship that an actor portrays with their acting partner and the degree of intimacy—specifically nurturance and eroticism—that they feel toward this partner. We surveyed actors (amateur and professional) about their past theatrical experiences performing with a romantic acting partner ( romantic/intimate), a non-romantic but still intimate partner ( non-romantic/intimate; e.g., friendship, parent-child), and a non-romantic and non-intimate partner ( non-romantic/non-intimate; e.g., strangers, colleagues). We found that actors reported significantly higher levels of nurturance when recalling romantic and non-romantic/intimate onstage roles, compared to non-romantic/non-intimate roles. We also found that actors reported significantly higher levels of eroticism when recalling romantic onstage roles compared to other roles. Finally, we found that actors reported having experienced a significantly greater proportion of romantic/sexual feelings across their acting careers toward romantic acting partners, compared to other acting partners. The findings of this study provide a better understanding of the bidirectional relationship between behaviour and affect, as well as the predictors of intimacy, through a theatrical lens.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".