Study: People (Including Marrieds) Use Facebook to Keep Up with Exes and ‘Back Burners’

The allure of Facebook has long been its unique ability to allow us to easily connect with people from our past. The best part? You can increase your relationship with people you actually like, but keep those you just sort of like in the distance. So it's easy to spark up a conversation with a friend you lost touch with, or to only casually engage with a buddy from high school. While this is what makes Facebook good, it's also what makes it bad. A new study found that a lot of people — even those in relationships — use the site to keep in constant contact with old flames.

In a report titled "Using modern technology to keep in touch with back burners: An investment model analysis," two researchers from Purdue and Indiana University found that we cannot help ourselves when it comes to communicating with our exes. And Facebook is a great way to do that. Of course, it's obvious that single people use Facebook to keep the flames burning, but even those in relationships were doing this. The experts — Jason Dibble and Michelle Drouin — found that people love their "back burners." Just what are those? Well, it's a pretty broad swath.

Back burners are "people we are romantically and/or sexual interested in, who we are not currently involved with, and with whom we keep in contact in the possibility that we might someday connect romantically and/or sexually," explained Dibble and Drouin in their paper. "People can have back burners even if they are already in a romantic relationship with someone else. Also, a former romantic and/or sexual partner can still count as a back burner so long as we still desire a romantic and/or sexual connection with them."

To find out how rampant back burner communication was, the team asked a group of college students to count how many back burners they had and how many of those they contacted in what they considered a platonic and/or romantic manner. Those people in romantic relationships reported platonic connections with about three people, and romantic connections with about two people. Men, of course, were worse than women. Men reported having eight back burners, while women reported having half that, at four back burners.

Dibble and Drouin's findings only back up other research, which shows we're all digitally cheating. According to poll from a British research company, more than 50 percent of married women said they had a "back-up husband," just in case their current guy doesn't do it for them anymore. The bottom line? Yes, your spouse has someone as a back burner. So just make sure you do too.

[Image via Flickr - Don Hankins]