Secret Relationships

Attractive Side of Secret Relationships

The earliest theorizing and research on secret romantic relationships was conducted by Dan Wegner and his colleagues. Wegner theorized that secret relationships are characterized by obsessive preoccupation (i.e., a cycle involving thought suppression followed by thought intrusion). In other words, people who are keeping secrets (not only about their relationships but also about anything else for that matter) want to avoid disclosing that information to others. As one means of doing so, those holding a secret may suppress relevant thoughts in the hopes that this will prevent them from accidentally talking about the secret. However, maintaining secrecy by suppressing thoughts is not ideal because extensive social psychological research has found that thought suppression has ironic effects. Specifically, suppressing thoughts may actually increase the later cognitive intrusiveness of those thoughts. Thus, with regard to secret relationships, intentionally suppressing relationship-specific thoughts actually makes those thoughts more likely to intrude, or pop into mind later on.

Wegner further theorized that this obsessive preoccupation will actually enhance attraction to a romantic relationship. Why might this be? This answer to this lies in psychological research showing that greater thought about any object or concept will result in attitude polarization. This means that one's feelings about the relationship will become more intense with greater thought about one's partner. Because people generally feel positively about their relationships to begin with, thinking about them more typically serves to make this positivity more extreme, and as a result, romantic attraction should increase. Consistent with this reasoning, several researchers have found that greater thought about one's relationship is associated with greater love for one's partner and enhanced commitment to the relationship.

Support for this theoretical rationale (i.e., that secret relationships facilitate romantic attraction by means of obsessive preoccupation) was found in a series of studies conducted by Wegner and his colleagues. In their first study, undergraduate participants were asked to recall several romantic relationships that they had previously had and report how often they thought about each of these relationships after they had ended. They found that the relationships participants remembered and thought about most frequently were characterized by higher levels of secrecy than those that were thought about less frequently. Similar to this finding, in a second study, undergraduate participants were asked to recall one specific relationship from their past and report on their current level of obsessive preoccupation with that relationship. They found that levels of obsessive preoccupation were higher for past romances that were secret in nature compared to those that were not secret.

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