When one considers feelings and emotions in close, romantic relationships, many thoughts may come to mind: love, caring, understanding, and happiness, to name a few. Of course, romantic relationships are not always so rosy. When considering the dark side of relationships, plenty of negative feelings also arise: jealousy, arguing, and resentment, for example. However, this is not the whole picture. What is often left out or forgotten are the stretches of indifference or lethargy. Practically everyone who has been in a relationship, particularly long-lasting relationships, has experienced these slow, unemotional, un-arousing spells. We refer to these periods as relationship boredom.

Everyone gets bored from time to time. What do you do when you have these everyday feelings of boredom? In some cases, psychologists found that during such bouts, people sometimes watch porn, masturbate, or become preoccupied with thoughts about sex to deal with the adverse nature of boredom. What is less commonly known, however, is that an everyday experience like boredom can also threaten people’s sense of meaning in life. Did you know that people watched more porn during the Covid-19 pandemic [1]? Not surprisingly, many people also reported feeling more bored than usual given the...

In class, during exercise, at work: boredom is an everyday experience that is generally regarded as an annoying and rather useless nuisance. In keeping with this attested uselessness, boredom had not gathered much research interest for a long time. Fortunately, this has changed and new and exciting research paints a different picture of boredom, highlighting its function and its relevance for human behavior. Indeed, boredom appears to play a key role in goal-striving because it acts as a catalyst for change. Simply put, boredom tells us that we are wasting our resources and that we should look for other things to do. To provide an overview of the emerging research on boredom, this article covers what boredom is, when it occurs, what it does, and why it matters.