{"id":19221,"date":"2019-03-06T16:36:40","date_gmt":"2019-03-06T12:36:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/?p=19221"},"modified":"2019-03-06T16:36:40","modified_gmt":"2019-03-06T12:36:40","slug":"back-burner-relationships-are-more-common-than-youd-think","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/back-burner-relationships-are-more-common-than-youd-think\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Back-burner relationships\u2019 are more common than you\u2019d think"},"content":{"rendered":"

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It isn’t cheating, per se. But if you’re in a committed relationship and have multiple ‘back burners’ that you keep in touch with, is your relationship doomed?<\/em><\/span><\/h5>\n
\n

Valentine\u2019s Day tends to make people think about their romantic relationships.<\/span><\/p>\n

Single? Maybe there\u2019s someone you\u2019ve been texting regularly whom you realize you want to ask out on a date.<\/span><\/p>\n

In a relationship? You might start thinking that your current flame is your one and only.<\/span><\/p>\n

But no matter what your relationship status is, if you\u2019re like the average young adult, chances are you\u2019ve also been chatting with other potential partners, or back burners. These aren\u2019t people you\u2019re cheating on your partner with. Instead, they\u2019re prospects you keep in touch with just in case your number one option falls through.<\/span><\/p>\n

Shocked? You shouldn\u2019t be. Researchers have long known that people commonly keep tabs on the availability and suitability of other potential partners. But what once required a furtive phone call or some face-to-face catching up is now doable with the swipe or a click of a digital device.<\/span><\/p>\n

Smartphones have made it possible for both singles and those in committed relationships to keep up with relationship alternatives \u2013 so easy, in fact, that more than 70 percent of our sample said that they had at least one back burner.<\/span><\/p>\n

Research inspired by \u2018me-search\u2019<\/span><\/strong><\/h4>\n

In our study of college students, singles averaged about six back burners, while those in committed relationships averaged almost five. What\u2019s more, people seem to be able to distinguish back burners from other options \u2013 for example, crushes we\u2019re quietly attracted to, but don\u2019t act on.<\/span><\/p>\n

In other words, these prospects we regularly stay in touch with are in their own separate category.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s certainly not a new phenomenon. What we call back burners were once the people listed in one\u2019s proverbial \u201clittle black book.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But researchers have only recently begun to study their prevalence and how they operate within the context of other relationships.<\/span><\/p>\n

In our case, the experiences of Jayson inspired the study. As a graduate student, he was single and happy to mingle.<\/span><\/p>\n

It happened at a typical campus hot spot \u2013 he met a woman, they hit it off, and they traded phone numbers. And every couple of weeks or so, a text message from one to the other would be exchanged: \u201cHey, stranger, how are you?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The idea wasn\u2019t to dive into a full-blown romance, but to fan an ember, to keep a faint glow, because \u2013 as comedian Chris Rock famously said \u2013 \u201cYou never know.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

So the study of back burners was born. And it came at a time when scholars were already taking note of new ways people were navigating romantic and sexual relationships. (Consider, for example, the way that \u201chookups\u201d and \u201cfriends with benefits\u201d have become part of the mainstream vernacular.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Keeping your options open<\/span><\/strong><\/h4>\n

Our research suggests that many people keep back burners even when they\u2019re already committed to someone else.<\/span><\/p>\n

But does having lots of back burners mean we feel less committed to our romantic partners? One relationship theory suggests that commitment is determined, in part, by the quality of one\u2019s romantic alternatives.<\/span><\/p>\n

With this in mind, we predicted before gathering the data that the more back burners someone has, the less committed they should be to their partner.<\/span><\/p>\n

Surprisingly, the number of back burners people reported did not predict how committed they were to their partners. We can\u2019t infer how committed people are just by knowing how many back burners they may or may not have.<\/span><\/p>\n

What might this mean? Of course, this is only one study, so more research is needed to determine how reliable this finding is.<\/span><\/p>\n

But we have some theories. For example, back-burner relationships today are easier to hide and sustain. Facebook friends lists can be hidden, phone contacts can be given different names, and direct messages can be deleted. Contrast this to older forms of communication, like the family landline telephone.<\/span><\/p>\n

Similarly, we wonder if smartphones create a situation where people are able to separate their online communication from their offline lives.<\/span><\/p>\n

Some evidence already suggests that the contours of face-to-face interactions\/relationships don\u2019t always apply to online communication. Maybe texting with back burners over a mobile phone creates a layer of distance that allows the admirer to still maintain a strong, devoted relationship with his or her partner.<\/span><\/p>\n

Do they mean a doomed relationship?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

One obvious question we haven\u2019t addressed yet is whether back burners are harmful to relationships. You might think that if someone\u2019s excited about or thinking about other potential partners, the relationship he or she is in isn\u2019t great to begin with.<\/span><\/p>\n

We don\u2019t have a firm answer to this question yet. We know that the practice of keeping an eye on alternatives is common (and probably a part of human evolution). So it\u2019s hard to condemn the behavior at that level.<\/span><\/p>\n

But people don\u2019t always communicate with their alternatives. For a person to be a back burner, communication is necessary. So maybe this ups the ante. Our research showed that people in general don\u2019t tell their partners about their back burners, which suggests that they may feel some uneasiness about getting caught.<\/span><\/p>\n

At the same time, we found that the number of back burners people communicate with electronically says nothing about how committed they are to their current partner.<\/span><\/p>\n

We also need to keep in mind our sample: college students. We don\u2019t know how this plays out in, say, older married couples. Anecdotally, we\u2019ve heard married individuals talk about a person or two whom they would probably end up with if their spouse died. But this hasn\u2019t been tested in a scientific setting.<\/span><\/p>\n

So maybe it\u2019s still too early to sound the alarm until research can tell us more. Still, it would be interesting to know the point at which those with back burners decide to turn up the heat, how they use digital devices to do it, and what it means for our current relationships.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Jayson Dibble<\/span><\/strong>
\nAssociate Professor of Communication,
\nHope College<\/span><\/p>\n

Michelle Drouin<\/span><\/strong>
\nAssociate Professor of Psychology,
\nIUPUI<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

* Published in print edition on 1 March 2019<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It isn’t cheating, per se. But if you’re in a committed relationship and have multiple ‘back burners’ that you keep in touch with, is your relationship doomed? Valentine\u2019s Day tends to make people think about their romantic relationships. Single? Maybe there\u2019s someone you\u2019ve been texting regularly whom you realize you want to ask out on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":139,"featured_media":19222,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8348],"tags":[16124,8375,8371,14560,7062,16123,16122],"class_list":["post-19221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-conversation","tag-dating-apps","tag-friendship","tag-relationships","tag-romance","tag-smartphones","tag-social-psychology","tag-texting"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/Couple.jpg?fit=1165%2C600&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8QzSF-501","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/139"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19221\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}