Chapter 11- Close Relationships:Passion, Intimacy, and Sexuality • What Is Love? • Different Types of Relationships • Maintaining Relationships • Sexuality
Close Relationships:Passion, Intimacy, and Sexuality • Princess Diana and Prince Charles • People who marry live longer, healthier lives • People who stay married live longer and better than those who divorce • Happy marriage is an important consideration • What does the research tell you about the advantages of marriage?
What Is Love? • Passionate Love • Strong feelings of longing, desire, and excitement toward a special person • Companionate Love • Mutual understanding and caring • Physiological difference • Presence of PEA
Love and Culture • Passionate love as a social construction • Romantic love is found in most cultures • Forms and expression vary by culture • Attitude varies by culture and era
Love Across Time • Passionate love is important for starting a relationships • Exists for a brief period of time • Companionate love is important for making it succeed and survive
Tradeoffs - Sex In and Out of Marriage • Married people have sex more often, more satisfying • Married people more likely indicate physical or emotional satisfaction from sex • Single people spend more time at each sexual episode • Single people have more sexual partners
Sternberg’s Triangle • Passion • Emotional state with high bodily arousal • Intimacy • Feeling of closeness, mutual understanding and concern • Commitment • Conscious decision; remains constant
Different Types of Relationships • Exchange relationships • More frequent in broader society • Increases societal progress and wealth • Communal relationships • More frequent in close intimate relationships • More desirable, healthier, and mature
Attachment • Bowlby • Influenced by Freudian and learning theory • Believed childhood attachment predicted adult relationships • Shaver • Identified attachment styles to describe adult relationships • Anxious/Ambivalent – Secure - Avoidant
Attachment Theory • Theory developed along two dimensions • Anxiety and Avoidance • Four attachment styles • Secure attachment • Dismissing avoidant attachment • Fearful avoidant attachment • Preoccupied attachment
Attachment Styles • Secure attachment • Low anxiety; low avoidance • Positive attitude toward others and self • Preoccupied attachment (anxious/ambivalent) • Low avoidance; high anxiety • Positive attitude toward others; negative attitude toward self
Attachment Styles • Dismissing avoidant attachment • Low anxiety; High avoidance • Negative attitude toward others; positive toward self • Fearful avoidant attachment • High anxiety; High avoidance • Low opinions of self and others
Attachment and Sex • Secure • Generally have good sex lives • Preoccupied • May use sex to pull others close to them • Avoidant • Have a desire for connection • May avoid sex, or use it to resist intimacy
Self-esteem and Love • Popular belief that you need to love yourself before you can love others • Not demonstrated in theory or facts • Self-esteem • Low self-esteem – may feel unlovable • High self-esteem – may feel more worthy than present partner
Self-Love and Loving Others • Narcissists • High self-esteem; strong, unstable self-love • Harmful to relationships • Less committed to love relationships • Self-acceptance • More minimal form of self-love • Linked to positive interactions
Maintaining Relationships • Good relationships tend to stay the same over time • Popular myth that they continue to improve • Key to maintaining a good relationship is to avoid a downward spiral
Is Bad Stronger Than Good?Good and Bad Relationship Partners • Bad interactions are stronger than good • Positive interactions must occur at least five times as often as negative • Reciprocity of negative behavior • Sign of a downward spiral for the relationship
Investment Model • Three factors to explain long-term relationships • Satisfaction • Alternatives • Investments • Considered together they predict the likelihood of maintaining the relationship
Thinking Styles of Couples • Difference in terms of attribution • Relationship enhancing • Good acts - internal; bad - external factors • Distress-maintaining style • Good acts - external factors; bad - internal
Thinking Styles of Couples • Optimism in the relationship • Happy couples have an idealized version of their relationship • Devaluing alternatives • People in lasting relationships do not find others appealing
Being Yourself: Is Honesty the Best Policy? • Discrepancy between idealization view and complete honesty • People in passionate love often idealize and overestimate their partners • Relationships thrive when couples retain their best behavior in front of their partner
Sexuality • Humans form relationships based on two separate systems • Attachment system • Gender neutral • Sex drive • Focus on opposite sex (procreation) • Love comes from attachment drive; independent of gender
Theories of Sexuality • Social Constructionist Theories • Evolutionary Theory • Gender differences based in reproductive strategies • Social Exchange Theory
Sex and Gender • Men have a stronger sex drive than women • Coolidge effect • Separating sex and love • Men are more likely to seek and enjoy sex without love • Women are more likely to enjoy love without sex
Food for ThoughtEating in Front of a Cute Guy • People eat sparingly in the presence of attractive person of the opposite sex • Reduced eating correlated with desire for social acceptance • Restraining food intake may be more important to women seeking to make a good impression than to men
Homosexuality • Homosexuality challenges theories of sexuality • Most cultures condemn homosexuality • Natural selection does not support it
Homosexuality • EBE – Erotic becomes exotic (Bem, 1998) • Explains sexual arousal is labeled from the emotional nervousness resulting from exposure to exotic • Difficult to test and verify this theory
Extradyadic Sex • Most reliable data suggests infidelity is rare in modern Western marriages • Tolerance for extramarital sex is fairly low • Extramarital sex is a risk factor for break ups • Can not demonstrate causality
Reasons for Straying • Men desire novelty • Sometimes engage in extramarital sex without complaint about their marriage • Women’s infidelity characterized by emotional attachment to lover • Usually dissatisfied with current partner
Jealousy and Possessiveness • Cultural theory of jealousy • Product of social roles and expectations • Sexual jealousy found in every culture • Forms, expressions, and rules may vary • Society can modify jealousy but can not eliminate it
Jealousy and Possessiveness • Evolutionary theory of jealousy • Men – ensure they were not supporting someone else’s child • Women –if husband becomes emotionally involved with another, may withhold resources
Jealousy and Possessiveness • Jealousy can focus on either sexual or emotional connections with another • Men may focus more strongly on sexual aspects than women
Causes of Jealousy • Jealousy is a product of both the person and the situation • Many suspicions of jealously are accurate • Paranoid (false) jealousy is fairly rare
Jealousy and Type of Interloper • The less of a threat from the other person, the less jealousy • Jealousy depends on how their traits compare to the third party • Both men and women are more jealous if the third party is a man rather than a woman
Social Reality • Social reality • Public awareness of some event • Important role in jealousy • High social reality = High jealousy • The more other people know about your partner’s infidelity, the more jealousy
Culture and Female Sexuality • All culture regulate sex in some ways • Cultural regulation is more directed at women • Erotic plasticity • Paternity uncertainty
Culture and the Double Standard • Double standard • Supported more by women than men • Weaker than usually assumed
What Makes Us Human? • Long-term monogamous mating is more common among humans • Culture plays a role in monogamy • Culture gives permission for divorce • Culture influences love and sex • Face-to-face position is used by most people
