In the pursuit of happily-ever-after, the odds seem to be stacked against us.
Men and women reap huge benefits when they stick around with a good partner -- staying happier and healthier, living longer and passing along more genes. But the sticking-around part is a challenge. We don't get long-term relationship payoffs right away. And until then -- between the once-upon-a-time and the happily-ever-after -- plenty of temptations can beckon.
Not that it's wrong to shop around before settling down. But there always will be enticing alternative mates -- whether heart-grabbing or merely eye-catching. So researchers wonder: With so many attractive alternatives, how do humans manage to maintain relationships at all?
The brain appears to have some tricks up its neural sleeve. A new line of research is exploring how automatic psychological mechanisms kick into action when the eye starts to wander, helping resist temptation and strengthening the relationship -- even without us being aware of it.
Here's a sample from some recently published experiments (all on heterosexual men and women in committed monogamous relationships) that show how our brain keeps us connected to -- and, yes, even happy with -- the old ball and chain.
(Spoiler: When it comes to relationships, men and women are a bit different.)
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Subconscious alarm bells
An early-warning alert system signals threat.
In an experiment published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in July, researchers at McGill University in Montreal asked 150 men and women to imagine chatting with an attractive member of the opposite sex. For comparison, another 150 imagined boring encounters with people of the same sex. After the visualizations, all participants played fill-in-the-blank word games designed to reveal subconscious thoughts.
When presented with "THR_AT," for instance, women who'd thought about hunky men tended to write "threat." But men more often wrote "throat." Likewise, given "LO_AL" after the hunk visualization, women saw "loyal," but men tended to see "local." (Men and women who imagined ho-hum encounters answered similarly, so researchers decided the differences were because of imagined flirtation.)
The conclusion? The mere thought of an outside flirtation is enough to trigger alarm bells in women's brains -- but not so much in men's. "It's an amazing outcome," says John Lydon, professor of psychology at McGill University and leader of the study. "The same things weren't coming to mind for the men."
