“When you were meeting everybody at the club?” I asked.

“Well, I say research is me-search,” he replied, laughing.

The communication is key here. A backburner is not just someone who wanders into your thoughts every once in a while—the college sweetheart whose Facebook photos you occasionally browse, or the cute friend-of-a-friend you met on vacation and have always thought you’d really click with, if you lived in the same city. These “what-ifs” only become backburners if you actually reach out to them.

Dibble notes that sometimes backburners know they’re backburners and sometimes they don’t—I suppose it depends on whether the communication in question is more artful than a “hey, what’s up?” text sent at 1 a.m.

There are a couple of competing evolutionary imperatives at play when it comes to keeping people on the backburner. On the one hand, it makes a certain primal sense to explore all the potential mates available, to be sure to get the best deal. But having one long-term partner helps offspring survive, in the rough-and-tumble caveman world often invoked by evolutionary psychology. So commitment provides benefits, in exchange for letting go of other possibilities—the wouldas, the couldas, the shouldas.

According to the investment model of relationships, developed by social psychologist Caryl Rusbult in the 1980s, people who have invested more resources—time, energy, money—into a relationship should be more committed to it, and alternative partners should seem less attractive. One 2007 study found that love motivates people to shut down other options—people who thought and wrote about love for their partners were more able to suppress thoughts about attractive strangers. This is consistent with research that suggests people in relationships don’t pay as much attention to other members of the sex they’re attracted to, and tend to rate others as less attractive.

So, with all this as background, Dibble reasoned that people in committed relationships in his study would keep fewer people on the backburner.

He and Michelle Drouin had 374 undergrads self-report how many backburners they had, whether they talked to them platonically or were more flirty, and what technology they used to keep in touch with these people. Those who were currently in relationships also completed assessments of their investment in and commitment to their relationships, and rated how appealing they thought their alternatives were.

The most frequent ways that people kept up with their backburners were through texts and Facebook. Forty-five percent of participants reported texting backburners, 37 percent reported talking to them on Facebook. Thirteen percent of people still picked up the phone and called the person they were stringing along, and piddling percentages of people kept up with backburners through email, Skype, or Twitter.