A preliminary comparison of serial daters and multi-daters on their evaluation strategies, dating goals, and perceptions by others

The topic of how many potential partners one should casually date at the same time has been widely debated among the general public. Serial daters are those who only date one person at a time, whereas multi-daters are those who date multiple people at the same time. Despite the fact that these dating approaches appear to play a major role in the partner selection process, differences between serial daters and multi-daters have not been studied empirically. As such, the current research presents the first investigation of potential differences between serial daters and multi-daters regarding their strategies for evaluating and selecting potential partners, individual differences related to their dating goals, and how they may be perceived by others on the dating market. The results of two studies (total N = 460) revealed that multi-daters have a more unrestricted sociosexual orientation and may experience more decision difficulty than serial daters. Furthermore, serial daters are perceived as more genuine, intentional, and interested in commitment, whereas multi-daters are perceived as less trustworthy and more interested in casual or sex-only involvements. However, serial daters and multi-daters did not differ significantly in their evaluation strategies, nor in their implicit theories, commitment readiness, or general maximization tendency.