Do Crushes Pose a Problem for Exclusive Relationships? Trajectories of Attraction Intensity to Extradyadic Others and Links to Primary Relationship Commitment and Satisfaction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT This study examined individuals who had an active agreement to be exclusive with their relationship partner but who also reported romantic or sexual attraction to someone outside of their relationship (a “crush”). We tracked participants over time, measuring attraction intensity and relationship quality, to help clarify when an extradyadic attraction might challenge the quality of the primary relationship in some way. Of 567 individuals ( M age = 28.52; 55.4% women; 82.2% heterosexual) who reported an extradyadic attraction, 172 (30.3%) completed all assessments and maintained their primary relationship over a one‐year period. We used HLM and cluster analysis to examine patterns of associations among these 172 participants and to capture typologies for extradyadic attraction. Overall, many harbor attraction to people outside of their relationship with no corresponding harms noted in that primary relationship, regardless of whether that attraction varied or was stable in its target. However, some had extradyadic attractions that were linked to decreases in primary relationship romantic and sexual satisfaction over time, especially among those whose relationship quality was lower at baseline. The findings have implications for researchers, counselors, and educators invested in supporting couples and for understanding relationship maintenance processes generally.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".