New study finds most relationships start between friends rather than strangers

Movies and television might depict love as something that happens between strangers who accidentally crossed paths or exchanged a quick glance at the coffee shop, but a new study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science suggests the opposite happens in real life.

Instead, 2 out of 3 romantic relationships began as friendships, Canadian researchers found.

“There are a lot of people who would feel very confident saying that we know why and how people choose partners and become a couple and fall in love, but our research suggests that is not the case,” Danu Anthony Stinson, a psychology professor at the University of Victoria, Canada and the lead author of the study, said in a statement. “We might have a good understanding of how strangers become attracted to each other and start dating, but that’s simply not how most relationships begin.”

According to the study, most previous research on relationship initiation had focused on strangers rather than friends, with only 8% of studies focusing on romantic relationships that began as friendships.

“Thinking about how we tend to gravitate towards people, if we’re hanging out with certain people in our friendship groups, then finding romantic partners within those friendship groups seems logical,” said Jodie Hertzog, an associate professor at Wichita State University who was not involved in the study.

To reach their conclusions, the study authors performed a meta-analysis to combine the results of seven previous studies, totaling nearly 1,900 undergraduate students in Canada and adults living in Canada and the United States, 677 of whom were married.

The authors found that the two in three statistic didn’t vary based on gender or race, but twenty-somethings and people in same gender or queer relationships were more likely to say their relationship began as a friendship than other people were.

In fact the university students in the study reported that friends-first was their preferred way of developing a romantic relationship compared to meeting someone at a party or bar or using a dating app. They reported that their relationships were often platonic for 1-2 years before they became romantic.

How those relationships evolved from platonic to romantic isn’t known yet, according to Hertzog, making it an area for potential research.

“Our research suggests that the lines between friendship and romance are blurry,” Stinson said in a statement, “I think that forces us to rethink our assumptions about what makes a good friendship but also what makes a good romantic relationship.”

According to Hertzog however, those might not be that different according to research conducted at the Gottman Institute in Seattle.

“The quality of a friendship is the strongest predictor from their research of whether a relationship will last or not.” she said.

This story was originally published July 25, 2021 at 4:09 AM with the headline "New study finds most relationships start between friends rather than strangers."