The best book I've ever read about relationships is by Winnifred Cutler, Ph.D. called Searching for Courtship. She writes about these issues.    She is a biologist and has specialised in behavioral endocrinology. She studies animal behaviour including courtship and she also started to look into how human behaviour has very strong links with animal behaviour, despite the human arrogant view that we are "above all that" due to our capacity to intellectualise. It's a very controversial book but it made so much sense to me when I found it a few years ago. Wish I'd read it when I was a teenager. It would have saved me a lot of grief.

She writes about why someone will be attracted to someone who is attached in a marriage or committed relationship. If the one that person is attracted to was not in a committed relationship then they would probably be less attractive.

So the statement above makes sense in the light of that book:

" She says, "I wouldn't want to be involved with a man that wasn't attractive to other women--there'd be no one to take him away when I got sick of him!""

Not just for the time when you get sick of your partner, but also when you are looking for the partner in the first place.

There is too much to say about that book here but there is a lot of info on it via the link above.

Another comment, from my own observations: Sometimes I see people get into very long-term, long-distance relationships or falling heavily for someone who is in a committed relationship, and when they stick to this pattern over a long period of time then I start to ask myself whether this person wants a real, healthy relationship because if they did they would just go out and look for one. In some of the people I have observed I suspect that this behaviour provides a good cover for maintaining the life they actually prefer - which is to be outside of a real, healthy relationship. Sorry if I am stepping on any toes here, but Clueless Joe was wondering why the woman he is talking about would hang on for so long to a fruitless attraction.

Helen