When I was a mere slip of a college student, I fell in love with my friend’s boyfriend. This, as you can imagine, was not an ideal situation. Let’s call this couple Chris and Becca. Within a few weeks, Becca and I were firm friends and when a room became available in her house share, I moved in. Becca and I had similar tastes and interests — we were doing the same degree, we liked the same music and books, and we went to the same clubs. Unfortunately these tastes extended to her boyfriend. I though Chris was the best-looking, funniest, sexiest, coolest, sweetest guy ever to roam our godforsaken planet.

I am not a completely horrible person — a flawed human being, certainly, but not terrible — so I did nothing about it. Well, strictly speaking that’s not true, because I was scrupulous in my behaviour around Chris and didn’t do anything that could reasonably be regarded as flirting.
This would have been easier if I had thought that the sexual tension was all on my side, but I suspected it wasn’t. It would also have been easier if I didn’t see Chris most days, but I did. However, having spent my formative years in a convent, I harnessed the Catholic superpowers of repression and guilt. So I repressed my feelings — and felt guilty about them.
Hmmm... I did say that I wasn’t a completely horrible person — and it is true that my major motivation in keeping my starry-eyed sexual desires in check was that I didn’t want to do anything that would hurt a friend I loved and respected. However, there was also a slightly more prosaic reason too, as I seemed to be caught in a sort of romantic paradox: if I could get Chris by underhand means, he would no longer be the man I thought he was; if I could lure him away, he would no longer be worth having.
My behaviour was on the side of the angels, but my intuition may have been on the side of the scientists. The social psychologist Joshua Foster recently published a study in the Journal of Research in Personality, which claims that people who have been ‘stolen’ from a former partner are less satisfied, less committed and less invested in their relationships, and therefore more likely to cheat.
Most of us have experienced a nagging attraction to someone we’re not supposed to fancy, such as a friend’s significant other or a married colleague. Attempting to seduce, or successfully seducing, someone who is already in a relationship is so common a phenomenon that social scientists have a name for it — mate-poaching. According to one estimate, just under two-thirds of American men and more than half of American women claim their current partner “stole” them from a previous one. That’s a whole lot of bad behaviour and broken hearts out there!
I imagine that most people would agree that you can’t actually steal another person, unless they want to be stolen (or you kidnap them, which is a whole different level of bad behaviour). However, we also have two widely accepted and somewhat contradictory social rules regarding relationships. First, that if you are in a monogamous relationship, it is up to you, not other people, to keep it that way. However, it is also believed that you shouldn’t mess around with other people’s relationships, particularly if these people are your friends or colleagues. As Shakespeare put it: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds, admit impediments.” Or as he didn’t, “Don’t shit where you eat.”
However, we also know that promises of fidelity are frequently broken; and that while “bros before hos” or “chicks before dicks” is all very well in theory, real life is messy and complicated. After all, the heart wants what it wants. Unfortunately, it turns out that the heart is kind of lazy, since it mostly choses from what is available in the vicinity instead of looking further afield.
For much of human history, this would have made sense. If you lived in a small community, or if your marriage options were strictly stratified by social hierarchies, your chances of finding a suitable mate were curtailed accordingly. Choosing someone from this limited field was better than hankering after handsome men or fair maidens from distant shores.
These days we have easy mobility from one city or country to another, online dating and apps like Tinder, so you’d think that mate-poaching would be less of an issue. Despite this, most people don’t have a seemingly endless parade of partners to choose from — unless they are very attractive, charming and rich — but even if a new sexual or romantic interest was a simple swipe away, we are still more likely to fall for someone in our social circle. There’s a very obvious reason for this — we know them.
To make matters worse, someone who already has a partner is often seen as a better prospect than someone who doesn’t. If a man or woman is generally regarded as attractive, we are likely to believe the group opinion because if we respect our peers we rely on their judgments. What’s more, if Tom is a good boyfriend to Ciara, and you share many of Ciara’s values and beliefs, it is logical to believe that Tom would also be a good match for you too. Scientists think this might be an easy route to successful mating — it takes time and effort to find a good partner, so we are happy to let others do the legwork for us.
Given all of this, it is no surprise that mate-poaching is so common. Whether or not you should do it is really up to you. Joshua Foster would probably say no. In his Journal of Research in Personality article he had some choice words to say about these folk: “Individuals who were successfully mate-poached by their current partners tend to be socially passive, not particularly nice to others, careless and irresponsible, and narcissistic. They also tend to desire and engage in sexual behavior outside of the confines of committed relationships.” Ouch!
Foster conducted three studies — two longitudinal studies and a shorter one — before publishing his findings. That sounds pretty conclusive until you read that the first longitudinal study’s participants had an average age of just 20-years-old. And you know who else tends to be narcissistic, irresponsible and fond of casual sex? Young people.
It seems unfair to draw any real conclusions about poached people based on this study. After all people don’t generally leave happy relationships, and there are many reasons why you might be willing to swap one partner for another. You could be coasting in a relationship that had long lost its spark; meeting someone new could give you the strength to leave an abusive or emotionally distant partner; your values or life goals may have diverged over the years; or you might just realise that your current squeeze is never going to be able or willing to give you what you want or need in a romantic or sexual relationship.
If you have a romantic turn of mind you might be wondering what happened to Chris. Reader, I got him — eventually. About six months after I met them, Becca broke up with Chris. After another six months, we got together with her blessing. Chris was indeed handsome, funny, sexy and cool but after a year or so I realised that he was also manipulative and controlling. Love’s young dream may not have worked out, but Becca and I remain friends.
We still share many of the same tastes and I like her husband very much — but luckily not too much!