Why We Diss Our Dates

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.