Science says: why you fall in love with your BFF's partner

Sisters before misters is a slogan that you hopefully also adhere to. Exes of friends are an absolute no-go, unless of course you have talked about it well and your friend is completely okay with it. That can happen: that the love from both sides is so over between the exes that your friend genuinely doesn't mind if you run off with an ex.

With a current relationship, it's a bit different... I can't imagine that anyone on earth would be okay with that. And even if there isn't a hair on your head that thinks about it, maybe there is a hair or two that secretly would want to — or have thought about it. Don't worry, you're not a bad person and not crazy either: it's very common to see your BFF's partner as very interesting and/or attractive.

This psychological phenomenon is called ‘mimetic desire’, a term coined by the French philosopher René Girard, who based it on his own feelings and experiences; he had ‘desires on behalf of another’.

His explanation for mimetic desire (in Dutch: mimetisch verlangen) was that anything desired by one person or loved by another becomes significantly more attractive to you (as an outsider). In other words: you copy or imitate the desires of the other, in this case, your BFF. Girard wrote an extensive essay about this, in which he described in detail that this mimetic desire often occurs among people they really like or whom they really dislike (or both at the same time).

There are more psychologists and philosophers who believe in this, and recently research has even been done on it. The phenomenon was called ‘gaze cuing’ , which means that we tend to like things faster if those things are also liked by others. And your BFF naturally finds his/her partner very likable, so you are more inclined to adopt that view. Dangerous.

So it happens a lot, but you still have your own reasoning; you know that your BFF's partner is off-limits. And even better: maybe you've already realized that you only suddenly see that person so positively because your friend sees them that way. Still, it's a common phenomenon, just look at Ariana Grande: she became friends with co-star Ethan Slater, went to his home with his wife and child, and thought: hey, that's nice, I want that with him too. Just before that, the same thing happened on Vanderpump Rules: Ariana Madix found out that her BFF Raquel Leviss had been having an affair with her then-boyfriend Tom Sandoval for months. And that's exactly what you shouldn't do, because mimetic desire or gaze cuing is never an excuse for ugly actions, that should be clear.

Source: IFLScience