Study Examines Personality Functioning and Openness to Sugar Relationships

Researchers surveyed 500 Hungarian women aged 18 to 35 in December 2024 to examine whether openness to sugar relationships was associated with early maladaptive schemas, personality functioning and cognitive emotion-regulation strategies. The sample was designed to reflect Hungary’s population on education, region and community type, but it measured attitudes—not confirmed participation in sugar dating. Validated questionnaires measured willingness to consider a sugar relationship, negative belief patterns often linked to unmet early emotional needs, personality functioning and coping strategies.

Higher openness was associated with greater difficulty in overall personality functioning, including areas related to identity and stable mutual relationships. Openness was also associated with maladaptive coping such as rumination, catastrophizing or self-blame; adaptive emotion-regulation strategies showed no relationship with acceptance of sugar dating. The researchers’ model suggested early maladaptive schemas had an indirect association: stronger schemas predicted current identity and emotion-regulation difficulties, which in turn predicted greater openness.

The result is best understood as a map of correlated psychological variables, not a diagnosis of people who sugar date. It may help researchers ask better questions about vulnerability and relationship choices, but it should not be used to pathologize participants or assume that willingness, actual behavior and negative outcomes are the same thing. The study is cross-sectional and based on self-report, so it cannot establish direction or causation. It includes only young women in Hungary and measures openness rather than lived arrangements; cultural context and unmeasured factors may explain part of the associations.