Why We Diss Our Dates

Lovers are guarded when partners meet good-looking strangers.

By Susan Smith, published on May 01, 2004

You’re at a cocktail party, and your boyfriend is attacking the nachos while you talk with an attractive blonde. When she asks about him, you tell her about his junk-food proclivities instead of his sense of humor.

Psychologist Beth Pontari, of Furman University in South Carolina, recently discovered that in certain situations, many of us are inclined to diss our dates. She studied 89 college couples and found that people in committed relationships tend to downplay their partners’ positive qualities when talking to attractive members of their own sex.

In her previous studies, Pontari found that same-sex friends are eager to highlight each other’s positive traits when meeting new people of both sexes. She wondered whether lovers, with their more intense feelings, would do the same.

Pontari and her colleague, Barry R. Schlenker, a psychology professor at the University of Florida, led their subjects to believe that their significant others were interacting with attractive members of the opposite sex. They then asked the partners to give written descriptions of the significant other.

The study, which appears in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, discovered that couples who had just begun dating were likely to offer positive feedback about their partners to most of the people they encountered, like same-sex friends would. And, if a woman had been dating a man for a while, she was more likely to give positive descriptions of her mate to other men and unattractive women. However, when it came to meeting attractive women, female participants ignored postive qualities about their partners.

Nervous lovers might be more concerned about their own needs than those of their partners, Pontari notes. Close couples have more to lose if their relationship is jeopardized; they may be particularly keen on not making their partner look “good” to an attractive acquaintance.