NRE

What is NRE?

NRE stands for new relationship energy: the excited giddiness of a just-started intimate relationship. NRE is not a practice but a state, and it passes. Measured hormone differences in newly in-love people were gone after twelve to twenty-four months. The word is used mostly in polyamory circles.

What happens in your body during NRE

Something that looks suspiciously like an obsessive-compulsive disorder.

D. Marazziti and colleagues at the University of Pisa measured the serotonin transporter in Psychological Medicine in twenty people who had fallen in love within the past six months, in twenty people with an obsessive-compulsive disorder, and in twenty control participants. The in-love group and the OCD group both sat well below the control group, and did not differ from each other. So the grinding, all-consuming thinking of the first months has a measurable side.

Five years later Donatella Marazziti and Domenico Canale looked in Psychoneuroendocrinology at hormones in twenty-four newly in-love people. Cortisol was higher than in the comparison group, and in men FSH and testosterone were lower while women had higher testosterone. The sentence that matters comes at the end: on remeasurement after twelve to twenty-four months, all hormonal differences were gone.

Why NRE needed its own word

Because it touches more than the person it happens to.

In a monogamous relationship, falling in love is the start of the story. In an open or polyamorous arrangement, it is something an existing partner watches from up close, and there it becomes a word you need in order to say anything about it. Channing R. Clemons-Castaños and Sharon M. Flicker studied in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy how 122 polyamorous participants respond to a partner’s NRE with someone else. Those who scored higher on mindfulness reported less jealousy, and that link ran through emotion regulation and the ability to sit with tension. Mindfulness also went together with more compersion.

NRE is not proof. What in month two feels like finally the right person is partly just cortisol. That does not make it worth less, but it is a bad moment to scrap a hard limit or to renegotiate an agreement with your steady partner. Better to push decisions like that a few months down the line.

Where this fits on this site

If you notice that a new infatuation has stretched your agreements, that is not a disaster, but it is a conversation. What comes onto the table beforehand for an arrangement with three people is on the page about a gigolo for couples.

Sources

• Hormonal changes when falling in love. Donatella Marazziti & Domenico Canale, Psychoneuroendocrinology 29(7), 931–936, 2004 (DOI 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2003.08.006). Measurements in twenty-four people who had fallen in love within the past six months against twenty-four singles or people in a long-running relationship. Gives that cortisol was higher in the newly in-love group, that FSH and testosterone were lower in men in that group while women in it had higher testosterone, and that all hormonal differences were gone when the same people were measured again after twelve to twenty-four months.
• Alteration of the platelet serotonin transporter in romantic love. D. Marazziti, H. S. Akiskal, A. Rossi & G. B. Cassano, Psychological Medicine 29(3), 741–745, 1999 (DOI 10.1017/s0033291798007946). Gives that twenty people who had fallen in love within the past six months and twenty untreated patients with an obsessive-compulsive disorder had a lower density of binding sites for the serotonin transporter than twenty control participants, and that the two groups did not differ from each other. The authors give only their initials; they are reproduced here as published.
• Polyamorous Individuals’ Jealous and Compersive Responses to Their Partner’s New Relationship Energy. Channing R. Clemons-Castaños & Sharon M. Flicker, Journal of Marital and Family Therapy 51(4), article e70068, 2025 (DOI 10.1111/jmft.70068). Questionnaire study among 122 polyamorous participants. Gives the description of new relationship energy as “the excited giddiness of burgeoning intimate relationships”, and the findings that mindfulness went together with less jealousy through emotion regulation and the ability to sit with tension, and with more compersion. Only the abstract is freely available; the findings above are stated there verbatim.

Related terms

• Non-monogamist. The circle where the word NRE is used every day, with the numbers.
• Compersion. Enjoying it alongside instead of being jealous, measured in that same study among polyamorous participants.
• Polyamory. The relationship form the word NRE came out of, with the split between a primary and a secondary relationship.
• Frenzy. The other beginner’s rush: aimed not at a person but at a subject.
• Boundary. Where NRE starts to shift things without anyone deciding it.
• Monogamy. The agreement where falling for a third person needs no name, but does have consequences.
• Check-in. The tool for noticing that an agreement has quietly shifted.