Study Examines Personality Functioning and Openness to Sugar Relationships
A survey of 500 young women in Hungary found correlations between openness to sugar relationships and several measures of personality functioning and coping. It measured attitudes rather than participation and cannot establish cause or direction.
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 rather than 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.
These results describe correlations among survey measures, not a diagnosis of people who sugar date. They may help researchers form more precise questions about vulnerability and choice, but willingness, actual participation and harmful outcomes are not interchangeable. 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.