Don't Be Someone's Second Potato

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So imagine this scenario:

Joe is excited to be with Brittany. She is kind, fun, smart, and has a great personality. He's highly attracted to her on every front.

At some point, Brittany had given Joe the vibe that she'd had a very hard breakup before the two of them met—she even implied that she had strong feelings for this other guy. The other guy, it turned out, lived over 1,000 miles away and, by the time that Joe and Brittany started to date, he was, based on what Joe could gather from social media, happily married to someone else. Joe never gave this other guy a second thought. That turned out not to be the case for Brittany, who secretly longed for this other guy for years.

When One Person in a Relationship is the Other's "Second Potato," Disaster May Lurk

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In a study conducted by my research team several years ago (Geher et al., 2005), we asked people who identified as being in long-term relationships to describe, across various features, how they felt about their current romantic partner as well as how they felt about their most recent former romantic partners.

Our findings have important implications for satisfaction and success in long-term relationships.

First off, in a sample of over 150 adults who were both (a) currently in long-term relationships and (b) had at least one prior long-term relationship, the large majority of participants described their current partners as, across all kinds of features, better than their exes.

In this study, we also measured relationship satisfaction. The results were somewhat eye-opening. The biggest predictor of low levels of relationship satisfaction pertained to the following constellation: One partner saw their most recent former romantic partner in more positive terms than was the case for how they saw their current partners.

In short, people who reported more liking of their past romantic partner than their current romantic partner had extremely low levels of relationship satisfaction.

In a second study on this topic, we found that this effect was actually obtained at the psychophysiological level as well. Just thinking about one's most recent former romantic partner positively seemed to activate participants' fight-or-flight response across several physiological indices.

When one member of a relationship sees their most recent former partner more positively than how they see their current partner, they are probably looking at a recipe for relationship failure. And such a set of perceptions may well cause stress in terms of the autonomic nervous system (the system that oversees the fight-or-flight response).

Adverse Outcomes Associated with Relationship Dissatisfaction

Decades of research on predictors of relationship satisfaction have found a broad array of adverse personal, relational, and even societal problems associated with low levels of satisfaction in a relationship. Relationship dissatisfaction has been found to:

• Be a major predictor of infidelity (see Rokeach & Chan, 2023: which has been shown to often go along with such adverse outcomes as relational aggression and even homicide (see Horder, 2015)).
• Predict low self-esteem for both members of the relationship (see Richter & Finn, 2021).
• Serve as a major predictor of relational conflict (see Richter & Finn, 2021).
• Correspond to feelings of inequity in relationships (when one partner feels under-benefited and sees the other partner as over-benefited in the relationship; Sprecher, 2018).

And more. Relationship satisfaction on the part of one member of a relationship is simply a recipe for all kinds of adverse outcomes.

Bottom Line

Intimate relationships are, to make an understatement, tricky. It would be ideal if, in relationships, it were always the case that both parties loved one another equally. Further, it would be great if, in any given relationship, each partner was the other partner's #1 potato.

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As we found in our research on perceptions of current and past romantic partners (Geher et al., 2005), these idealized outcomes are not always the case. Further, when one partner sees the other partner as their "second potato," the relationship may well be on shaky footing. Such a state may lead to low relationship satisfaction, relationship conflict, perceptions of inequity in the relationship, infidelity, and, quite possibly, relationship dissolution.

As discussed by major researchers on the evolutionary origins of mating and intimate relationships (e.g., Buss, 2017), choosing a long-term relationship partner has been (and continues to be) one of the most important decisions that people have made across the evolutionary history of humans.

One clear implication of these ideas, in combination, is this: If you sense that you are likely to be someone's second potato, perhaps bide your time and look around a bit more. You have every right to wait for a relationship in which you and the other genuinely see one another as each other's first potato. With reincarnation being unlikely, remember that you will not have endless opportunities to make this evolutionarily critical decision.

Don't settle for being someone's second potato. In addition to the problems with such a scenario demarcated above, always remember this: You're better than that.