Love, desire, and the suppression of thoughts of romantic alternatives

Across human societies, people form long-term romantic bonds that can last a lifetime. Many theorists have proposed that the emotion love plays a causal role in maintaining these bonds, but no work to date has tested this hypothesis directly. In this study, we predicted that feeling love for a romantic partner would facilitate suppressing thoughts of attractive alternative mates. We used a relived emotion task to induce love or sexual desire for a romantic partner and asked participants to suppress thoughts of an attractive alternative. After suppression, participants in the love condition reported fewer thoughts of the attractive alternative and accurately recalled fewer attractiveness-related details about the alternative than those in the desire condition. Reports of love, but not sexual desire, predicted greater commitment to the current partner during the study. These results suggest that love serves a function distinct from desire and that love can operate as a commitment device.