Sarah Molano wrote this article in CNN:
Contrary to the popular perception that love typically sparks from passion, a new study finds two-thirds of romantic relationships begin as long-term friendships.
Though highly prevalent, the friends-to-lovers pathway to a relationship has been largely overlooked by science, said Danu Stinson, lead author of the study and an associate professor of psychology at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.
Stinson has studied relationship initiation for 20 years, and she noticed over the years that many participants reported they were forming romantic bonds with friends they had known for a while. She began asking the question, "Were you friends with your partner before you became romantically involved?" in her other research and conducted a meta-analysis for this paper.
"Very few studies are really looking at this friends-first relationship initiation, despite our observation that it's the most common form of relationship initiation by far," Stinson said.
She expected friends-first initiation to be common, but she was surprised at how dominant it was in the research. The prevalence of friends-first relationships was also consistent across ages and ethnic groups.
The research, published last week in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, comprises four different studies on relationship initiation.
The first two studies analyzed popular journals and textbooks and found that the existing literature on relationship initiation overwhelmingly focuses on "romance that sparks between strangers" and largely overlooks "romance that develops between friends," the paper says.
The researchers then conducted an analysis of seven of their lab's studies with university students and adults of all ages, consisting of almost 1,900 people in Canada and the United States. The online studies were done between 2002 and 2020 for other purposes, and the data used for this analysis came from demographic information about the participants.
That analysis found that 66% of couples began as friendships, many of them long-term friendships spanning several months or years.
In the final study, which only looked at 300 university students, the "friend stage" lasted almost 22 months on average before turning romantic. Almost half of this sample said friends-first initiation was their preferred method of beginning a romantic relationship. However, the vast majority of the sample did not enter their friendships with the intention of a romantic relationship.
"Dating scripts really say that you're going to meet somebody, and a flash of lightning will strike you," Stinson said. "I think if you really believe in that dating script, then it's hard to imagine another situation" where you become closer with a friend and start a romantic relationship.
TWEET YOUR COMMENT