A new study states that long and short-term relationships tend to look identical in the beginning stages of the relationship. "Long-term and short-term trajectories typically pull apart after you've known someone for weeks or months," said Paul Eastwick, an associate professor at University of California, Davis (UC Davis) in the US.
"In the beginning, there is no strong evidence that people can tell whether a given relationship will be long-term and serious or short-term and casual," said Eastwick, who led the study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Eastwick and his colleagues surveyed more than 800 people from a wide range of ages and used a state-of-the-art "relationship reconstruction" survey in which people reproduce the events and experiences they had in their prior real-life short-term and long-term relationships.
"Some of the most interesting moments in these relationships happen after you meet the person face-to-face, but before anything sexual has happened," Eastwick added. "You wonder 'is this going somewhere?' or 'How much am I into this person?' It is somewhere around this point that short-term and long-term relationships start to diverge, and historically, we have very little data on this particular period of time," he said. The researchers found that romantic interests rise at the same rate in both, long and short-term relationships. However, after a certain point, romantic interest tends to plateau and decline in short-term relationships, while in long-term relationships, it continues to ascend.
"People would hook up with some partners for the first time and think 'wow, this is pretty good.' People tried to turn those experiences into long-term relationships," said Eastwick. "Others sparked more of a 'meh' reaction. Those were the short-term ones," he said.
