10.1177/0095399702250182 ARTICLE FAMILY AND CONSUMER SCIENCES RESEARCH JOURNAL Crawford et al. / INFLUENCES ON COMMITMENT The Influence of Love, Equity, and Alternatives on Commitment in Romantic Relationships Duane W. Crawford Du Feng Judith L. Fischer Texas Tech University Lisa K. Diana Kadena Air Force Base This study investigated the connections between respondents’ feelings about their partners (love), evaluations of their relationships (equity), perceptions of relationship alternatives, and commitment to remain in their present relationships. It was predicted that love and equity would be better predictors of commitment than would perceived relationship alternatives. Respondents were 297 university students who reported they were involved in close relationships—typically, steady dating relationships—when the data were collected. Results indicated that (a) commit- ment was moderately associated with love, equity, and alternatives; (b) respondents’perceptions of the quality of their available relationship alternatives explained more of the variance in com- mitment than either love or equity; and (c) commitment and alternatives loaded on the same fac- tor in an exploratory factor analysis and thus were confounded. Implications of these findings are considered and directions for future research are suggested. Keywords: commitment; love; equity; alternatives Commitment to maintain a close relationship with another person has attracted the attention of both the scholarly community and its public constituency for some time. If asked to describe commitment, most people would probably include other attributes of close rela- tionships in their descriptions, perhaps proposing that individuals in 253 Authors’ Note: The findings reported in this article were presented at the 1996 Interna- tional Society for the Study of Personal Relationships biannual conference in Banff, Ontario, Canada. The authors wish to thank Michael P. Johnson for his helpful sugges- tions regarding the study’s preliminary findings. Correspondence concerning this arti- cle should be addressed to Duane W. Crawford, Department of Human Development and Family Studies, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX 79409-1162. Family and Consumer Sciences Research Journal, Vol. 31, No. 3, March 2003 253-271 DOI: 10.1177/0095399702250182 © 2003 American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences