Being in Love May Help
Suppress Random Lust

LOS ANGELES (Reuters Health) - If your partner says he or she only has eyes for you this Valentine's Day, it may be a sign of lasting love. New research suggests that being in love helps prevent us from lusting after others.

"Love may actually facilitate the preservation of long-term bonds via a thought-suppression mechanism," said Mari Sian Davies, a psychology researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles.

However, sex may complicate matters, noted Davies, who reported the findings here Friday at a meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

While lusting after one's current romantic partner clearly can have positive effects in a relationship, the new research suggests a potential downside when it comes to commitment: People who have a lot of sexual desire for their partner may have a hard time suppressing sexual thoughts about others.

"So high desire could be a danger to a relationship," Davies told Reuters Health.

The study involved 53 male and female college students who were in romantic relationships.

They were asked to select a photograph of an opposite-sex individual that they found attractive and to elaborate why in writing.

Then they were divided into two groups, one that was instructed to write briefly about times they felt great love for their current romantic partner and another that was instructed to write about times they felt great sexual desire for their partner.

Within each of the two groups, half of the participants first wrote about their partner while suppressing thoughts of the attractive person in the photo and then while expressing those thoughts. The other half of the participants first expressed those thoughts and then suppressed them while writing about their partner. All participants recorded how often they thought of the person in the photo.

Among those writing about love for their partner, results showed that thoughts of the attractive person in the photo were fewer after the participants had been asked to suppress those thoughts than before.

However, the opposite was true among those asked to write about desire for their partner. They thought more about the attractive person in the photo after they had been asked to suppress those thoughts.

"If people were feeling desire toward their partners, that revved up thoughts of the attractive alternatives," Davies said.

In addition, analyzes of the participants' final essays showed that the more love the participants felt toward their partner the less they thought about the person in the photo. But the more desire they felt for their partner, the more they thought of the other person.

The researchers concluded that feelings of love help people successfully suppress sexual thoughts of others but feelings of sexual desire do not.

Reference Source 89

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