Here’s why it’s difficult to predict if your relationship will last

Human emotions and how people might behave in romantic relationships is a tough task. Typically, when people get into new relationships, they spend days pondering if the person is ‘the one’ for them or just good for a casual fling. They look for signs which mught clear the dilemma. However, it’s not so easy to tell.

According to a study led by the University of California, in the beginning, long-term and short-term relationships may look more or less identical. When you survey the complete time course of a short-term and a long-term relationship — from the moment you meet someone until the moment the relationship is over for good — it takes a while for the differences in both kinds of relationships to emerge. “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 Paul Eastwick, the lead author on the study.

Eastwick and his co-authors surveyed more than 800 people from a wide range of ages. They used a state-of-the-art ‘relationship reconstruction’ survey in which people reproduce the events and experiences they had in their prior short- and long-term relationships. This procedure differs from the standard ‘relationship science’ approach, which starts studying people once they are already in a dating relationship. “Some of the most interesting moments in 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 interest rises at the same rate in both kinds of relationships. But at some point, romantic interest tends to plateau and decline in shortterm relationships, while in long-term relationships, it continues to ascend. So, when do the two trajectories start to diverge? On average, it happens at about the time that the relationship starts to become sexual. “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. Others sparked more of a ‘meh’ reaction. Those were the short-term ones,” ” said Eastwick.

The study, which appears in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, offered a new twist on the distinction between the stable, long-term partner and the exciting, short-term partner. In real life, people may end up in shortterm relationships when they are ‘just a little’ attracted to the other person — enough to keep having sex, but maybe not for very long. Long-term relationships may be the ones that start especially exciting and sexy, and grow into something stable and lasting.

PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK A study says that at the onset, longterm and shortterm relationships may look identical