Close Relationship Flashcards
What is love?
Passionate love and companionate love Love and culture Love across time Sternberg triangle Tradeoff: sex in and out of marriage
Passionate love
Strong feelings of longing, desire, and excitement toward a special person
Makes people want to spend as much time as possible together, to touch each other, engage in physical intimacy
Companionate love
Mutual understanding and caring to make the relationship succeed
Less strongly emotional
Love and culture
Passionate love seems to be universal but the forms and expressions vary from one culture to another
Love across time
Companionate love is what makes a good marriage or a stable, trustworthy, lasting relationships
Passionate love may be the most effective emotion for starting relationship; companionate love may be the most effective emotion for making it succeed and survive in the long run
Behavioural sign of the decrease in passion can be found in data about frequency of sexual intercourse
As time goes by, the average married couple has sex less and less often
James (1981): for most couples, sex is the most frequent during the first month and first year after the wedding and declines after
decline in sex frequency
If a couple has a long marriage, the frequency of sex goes down, but if they then divorce and remarry, they typically show a big increase in sexual frequency with their new partners (Call, Sprecher, & Schwartz, 1995)
Tradeoff: sex in and out of marriage
Married people: have more frequent sex, benefits from a partner who knows their responses and loves them (know each other better), sex conforms to a stable and regular pattern of familiar activity once or twice a week
Single people: have more partners, spend more time and energy on each sex act and try more things, life alternates between periods of exciting sex with new partner and period of no sex with any partner
Sternberg’s triangle
Passion
Intimacy
Commitment
Passion
Emotional state characterised by high bodily arousal, such as increase heart rate and blood pressure
Intimacy
Feeling of closeness mutual understanding and mutual concern for each other welfare and happiness
Commitment
A conscious decision that remains constant
The shift from passionate to compassionate love is explained by Sternbergs theory
Passion increases dramatically and tend to decline steadily over time
Intimacy starts low and tends to increase over time
Exchange relationships
Relationships based on reciprocity and fairness, in which people expect something in return
Communal relationships
Relationships based on mutual love and concern without expectation of repayment
More desirable healthier and mature
Clark (1984): Measure communal versus exchange orientation
Participants work on a puzzle either using different coloured pen or the same coloured pen
People who want or have communal relationship are more likely to use the same pen
Bowlby (1969)
Influenced by Freudian and learning theory
Believe childhood attachment predicted that the relationship is no longer in the majority opinions
Shaver
Describe attachment in adult romantic relationships: anxious/ambivalent, secure, avoidant
Two dimensions of attachment theory
A theory that classified people into 4 attachment styles (secure, preoccupied, dismissing avoidant, fearful avoidant) into 2 dimensions (anxiety, avoidance)
Secure attachment
Style of attachment in which people are low on anxiety and low on avoidance
They trusted partner, share their feelings, provide and receive support and comfort and enjoy their relationships
Generally have good sex lives
Preoccupied attachment
Low on avoidance, high on anxiety
They want and enjoy closeness but worry that their relationship partners will abandon them
May use sex to pull others close to them
Dismissing avoidant attachment
Low on anxiety, high on avoidance
They tend to view partners as unreliable and available and uncaring
May avoid sex, or use sex to resist initimacy
Fearful avoidant attachment
High on anxiety and high on avoidance
They have low options of themselves and keep others from getting close
Marlow: belongingness and love needs were more basic than self esteem needs
Low self esteem engage in behaviour can undermine a relationship: distrustful when partners express love or support
- doubt that they are lovable, so expect others to leave them
High self esteem: do other, different things that are bad for the relationships
- think they are lovable, so they think they can find a new partner relatively easily
Narcissists in relationship
High self-esteem; stronger, unstable self-love
Harmful to relationship
Less committed to love relationships
Tend to blame partner and not accept responsibility
Take all the credit when things go well
Self acceptance
Minimal form of self love and self esteem may be helpful for relationships
Regarding yourself as being reasonable person as you
Sprecher (1999): changes in love and related affect over time
Good relationships essentially stay the same over long periods of time
Relationships: Some stay the same, and others get worse
How to maintain a good long-term relationship…
To avoid the downward spiral from starting
Rusbult’s investment model
Theory that use three factors: satisfaction, alternative, investment to explain why people stay with their long-term relationship partners
Gender differences in married relationship
Men: bing married vs. Not married
Women: the quality of the relationship (happy vs. unhappy) seems more powerful
Relationship-enhancing style of attribution
Good behaviour = internal attribution
Bad behaviour = external attribution
Distress-maintaining style of attribution
Good behaviour = external attribution
Bad behaviour = internal attribution
Thinking processes in couples
Optimistic
Devaluing alternatives
Johnson & Rusbult (1989): rate attractiveness of potential dating partners
People in committed relationship gave low rating to the attractive possible dating partners
This suggests devaluation of alternative is a defensive response against the danger of becoming interested in someone else
People who failed to devalue alternatives, were more likely to break up
Honesty is the best policy
People fall in love with an idealised version of each other and this illusion may be difficult to sustain over the long run
Devaluating alternatives
Failed to devalue = break up
Sexuality: Diamond (2003) based on her studies of female sexuality
Human form relationships based on attachment system and sex drive. They are separated systems
Theories of sexuality (3)
Social constructionist theories
Evolutionary theory
Social exchange theory
Social constructionist theories
Theories assert that attitudes and behaviours, including sexual desire and sexual behaviour, are strongly shaped by culture and socialisation
Emphasise that sexual attitudes and behaviour are shaped by cultural influences
Evolutionary theory
Sex drive has been shaped by natural selection and that it’s forms thus tend to be innate
Social exchange theory
Seek to understand social behaviour by analysing the costs and benefits of interacting with each other; it assumes that sex is resource that women have and men want
Sex and gender
Men: have strong sex drive than women
- innate, biological needs
Women show more erotic plasticity than men
- sex drives can be shaped by social, cultural
- acts as gatekeeper who restrict sex and decide whether an when it will happen
Coolidge effect
The sexually arousing power of a new partner greater than the appeal of a familiar partner
Food for thought: Eating in front of a cute guy
Restraining one’s food intake may be more important to women seeking to make a good impression on a potential dating partner
Men retrain food intake as sen as politeness and general norms
Homosexuality: Bem
Exotic becomes erotic
Labelling of nevousness as sexual arousal, leading to homosexual self identification
Extradyadic sex
Having sex with someone other than one regular relationship partner such as a spouses or boy/girlfriend
Extradyadic sex: DNA test
Between 5 - 15% of children are not biological related to their father, suggest the child is through extramarital sex
This is true that men in North America and Western Europe have been fooled into raising children who are not their own
Reasons for straying
Men: desire novelty
Women: emotional attachment to lover
Jealousy and possession: cultural perspectives
Jealousy is a product of social roles and exceptions
Society can modify jealousy but cannot effectively eliminate it
Sexual possessiveness is deeply rooted in human nature.
It is normal and natural to feel jealous if your partner has had sexual relations with someone else
Evolutionary perspective: threat
Threat to man’s reproductive goal is the possibility the another man might make his wife pregnant
Women: possibility that man will become emotionally involved with someone else and therefore withhold crucial resources
Evolutionary evidence: Buss et al. (1992)
Would it be worse for your partner to have a one night stand or a lasting emotionally intimate relationship?
Majority men objected the sexual infidelity and majority women objected to the emotional infidelity
Causes of jealousy
Jealousy thus seems to be a product of both person and situation
False jealousy
Jealousy and types of interloper
Interloper: the third person
People are more jealous when the interloper is more similar to the self
Research found both men and women seem to object more strongly to a male interloper than a female interloper
Social reality
The more other people know about your partners infidelity, the more jealous and upsetting
Culture and female sexuality
All known cultures seek to regulate sex in some ways
Cultural regulation is more directed at women because of erotic plasticity and paternity uncertainty
Paternity uncertainty
The fact that men can’t be sure the children born to his female partner are his
Female sexuality is focused on double standard of sexual morality…
Specific sexual behaviour is acceptable for men but immoral for women
What makes us human?
Long term monogamous mating is more common among human then other species
Culture plays a role in monogamous
Culture gives permission for divorce
Culture influences love and sex
