What our exes say about ourselves

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Gossip columns are often obsessed with who a particular celebrity is currently dating. Singer Taylor Swift, for example, denounced the sexism inherent in much of these reports, for focusing on women’s ex-partners (and judging them).

Swift is right. What’s more, at least if the research that investigates attraction is correct, the number of ex-partners a man has matters — a lot, and it can make him more or less attractive. Having no exes is a wake-up call, while too many ex-partners can be a disadvantage. The ideal number of ex seems to be 1 or 2.

Men are also more attractive when their history shows long-term relationships. When a man has had at least one long-term relationship, the reasoning is that there must be something romantically attractive about him. So maybe Swift is right – there should be more scrutiny of men’s relationship history.

But why do we care about someone’s dating history? Does it really reveal something important? And how does having lots of exes make a man less attractive?

sign of commitment

Breaking up with multiple partners can lead to people lessening their commitment to future relationships. That might be a good reason to be careful with a man with a lot of exes.

One possibility is that the emotional stress of the breakup actually never leaves us. We carry these negative feelings into future relationships and we may be afraid to commit to new partners because they remind us of past disappointments.

But the baggage of a breakup can be reduced if there is a good reason to end the relationship. The worse we implicitly feel about an ex after the breakup, the better we adjust emotionally.

Someone’s relationship history can be a quick, if sometimes crude, way to determine their love experience without taking the time to get to know the person, says Ryan Anderson, a psychologist at Monash University in Australia.

A history of few partners indicates that there may be a reason to avoid them that is not immediately obvious. With too many partners, they can carry the negatives of previous relationships.

Being able to quickly determine whether someone is desirable as a love partner without dating the person is particularly helpful for straight women. Evolutionary psychology indicates that women invest more in raising a child and, therefore, may be more selective than men when it comes to choosing a partner.

And one of the desirable traits for raising a child would be a sign of commitment, which could be a long previous relationship.

“Men may also want a highly committed woman, but my guess is that men find it less desirable to find a potential high-commitment partner than women do,” says Anderson.

He points out, however, that women most interested in short-term relationships may not be particularly attracted to committed men.

Apparently, younger women are also more likely to value other women’s opinion of their potential relationships.

Anderson suggests that this is because people with less love experience look for social cues — such as how other women describe a man — to find a good partner.

Judging whether a potential partner is suitable based on exes is known as kill copying – if some women find a man attractive, others will copy that choice, even after looking at objective measures of attraction. This is particularly true for women who have lower levels of trust in the relationship.

While men with experience in long-term relationships are more attractive, there are scholars who indicate that men who are currently in long-term relationships may also be more attractive. In other words, married men are more attractive than single men.

There are several studies that suggest that women find photos of married men more attractive than photos of single men, but this effect seems to disappear in more realistic research involving real interactions.

It may be that, in theory, a man in a long-term relationship is considered to have better qualities, but in practice, this does not make a single woman more likely to be attracted to him because he is unattainable.

Social influences, such as taboos and the risks of extramarital affairs, can collaborate to repress this attraction.

For some people, being in a relationship makes them feel better about themselves. This is known as relationship contingent self-esteem.

But someone with a higher level of this kind of contingent self-esteem who stays in touch with an ex can damage their current relationship. The person may not break up with their current partner, but it can make them value the relationship less.

One possible reason some people still hold a flame for their exes is the tendency for current partners to have similar personalities to them, says Yoobin Park, a postdoctoral student in the Network for Emotional Well-Being lab at the University of California, California. in San Francisco, United States.

While extroverted people seem to be less attracted to people who look like their ex-partners, Park wonders if most of us have a specific “type”.

It seems a little strange to prefer partners who look like our exes – after all, there must have been a reason for the breakup. But Park studied the personalities of past and current partners from 12,000 people over nine years, who were interviewed after they went through breakups and new romances.

One reason our new partners are similar to previous ones is simply because we chose partners in a similar group. They tend to be classmates, university friends, or people of the same religion, so they are likely to have a similar level of education, political views, or personality.

But this also means that they will be similar to us, since, as we are also members of the same groups, we must have these same characteristics.

In Park’s study, the person studied, her ex and her current partner all had similar results on a personality test, which reinforces the idea that we possibly choose people like us because we select people from a similar group.

But there was also a significant level of “distinct similarity between partners”, meaning that the unique personality profile of the ex and current partner also coincided.

“Instead of simply examining the similarity in each trait one by one – for example, ‘John is as outgoing as Mike’, we thought, ‘John is just as outgoing, moderately open, low neurotic… as Mike’, all at the same time, to define the general similarity between the two partners”, explains Park.

She adds that since people generally have a positive bias towards themselves, there is likely some degree of similarity between any two people.

The distinct similarity between the partners is determined by the similarity that still exists between John and Mike, not to mention the general similarity and the similarity to us.

So there is also evidence that we are looking for a certain “type”, not just “someone like us”.

But if we tend to date people with a similar personality, are we doomed to make the same mistakes with new partners?

It is possible that yes. Relationships tend to have some degree of similarity, such as the number of divergences, which confirms Park’s research. That is, if you date a partner similar to your ex, you will also have similar ups and downs.

The ghosts of ex-partners can haunt us in other ways, too. People believe that their liking for partners changes over time – perhaps because, as they mature, they seek out different qualities. But it is possible that our taste only changes after a breakup.

When couples remain in the same relationship, their descriptions of the “ideal” partner do not change. But in a study of couples who divorced and remarried, their descriptions of an ideal partner changed — they updated their preferences when they were alone.

Park suggests a possible reason why breakups catalyze this change in ideal partner. In a relationship, we are made to have “a sense of conviction” about our choice of partner. As long as we’re single, there’s no reason to change our preferences. But the separation is the right time for a reassessment.

Just because our tastes have changed, does that mean we actually end up dating different people? Possibly not, according to Park.

While we may have a new “ideal” partner in mind, it can happen that we can’t find one – and end up dating someone similar to our ex. This is a recurring theme in relationship research. We may think we know what we want, but in practice, we don’t always end up dating that ideal person.

The very idea of ​​”dating” is a bit out of date among young adults, who tend to “go out” or “stay,” says Jessica Siebenbruner, a professor of emerging adult relationships at Winona State University.

Half of long-term young adult relationships include a period of comings and goings — and half of young adults who break up continue to sleep with their exes after the breakup, according to Sarah Halpern-Meekin, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in United States, and their colleagues.

The dividing line between current partner, ex and future partner has become much more blurred than before. Now, calculating the number of ex-partners one has is a delicate task.

Yoobin Park gives advice for anyone trying to evaluate a potential partner:

“Before you rush into another relationship, it’s worth reflecting on what kind of partner you were in that relationship.”

“Ultimately, relationships are built and shaped by the two partners,” he says.

“If you find yourself experiencing the same problems in every relationship, part of the reason could be that you’re gravitating toward the same personality traits as partners—which are helping to maintain relationship problems—and another part is maybe you are dealing with problems in the same way.”

For Ryan Anderson, our exes can reveal all sorts of things about us without ever saying a word.

“Someone who has won the affections of several extraordinarily attractive exes, for example, may have all sorts of desirable traits – hence their ability to attract highly desirable partners.”

Taylor Swift may be right when she claims that women are judged unequally for their past love affairs, but there may be good reasons to be fascinated by our ex-partners.

Perhaps we should all look at our relationship history more closely.

* Read the original version of this report (in English) on the BBC Future website.

Text originally published here

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