Science Says Benching People Prevents You From Finding Real Love

Guys, benching someone in your life is preventing you from finding true love.

If you're not yet familiar with what "benching" is, it's the new trend among Millennials in which someone strings someone else along, hoping a better option will eventually appear. It's when the guy you're kind-of-sort-of seeing only sees you when it's convenient for him.

It's a trend even worse than ghosting, if you ask me.

According to a recent study written about in Psychology Today, having a backup plan (or person, in this case) can "reduce performance" on a person's primary goal and negatively affect their chances of success.

Having a backup plan (or person, in this case) can "reduce performance" on a person's primary goal.

Two researchers told study participants, who were assigned to control groups and backup groups, that if they succeeded in unscrambling a sentence, they would be rewarded with either the chance to leave early or a free snack.

Participants in the backup group were asked to come up with a backup plan: If they weren't able to finish the task the moment they were assigned to do it, they could save some time later in the day to finish.

The results revealed that those in the backup group performed significantly worse on the task than those in the control group did.

The findings confirm what researchers Alexandra Freund and Christopher Napolitano already theorized: People who create backups for themselves don't reach their goals in the way people who don't have backup plans do.

In other words, if you want to reach your "primary goal" one day — you know, the guy you know you should be with, the guy you actually have feelings for and could see a future with — it's a waste of your time to prolong your messing-around-with-people phase.

I find I'm often paralyzed by choice because there are so many great men out there. So I end up keeping a few of those great guys on rotation (backups), while benching the "husband guy" (primary goal), which keeps me from making a decision in the first place and inevitably leads to my perpetual singledom. Oops.

Don't follow my lead here. Maybe next time, think before you bench... that is, unless you don't really want to find true love. In which case, bench away.