Sex, Love, and Fidelity: A Study of Contemporary Romantic Relatio ...

Relational Terminologies, Definitions, and Assumptions

Investigating relational concepts like love, sex, monogamy, nonmonogamy, and ultimately fidelity requires a basic understanding of their definitions. Researchers (rather than subjects) have usually operationalized these constructs in their studies; however, this is problematic given mononormativity’s pervasiveness in social science research. For example, whereas a range of studies have examined why monogamy exists (Kanazawa and Still 1999), how monogamy fails (Reibstein and Richards 1992; Hafner 1993), and whether monogamy is biologically “natural” (Barash and Lipton 2001), all assume that monogamy is synonymous with sexual fidelity. However, Fisher (1992) disagreed, citing the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of monogamy as “the condition, rule or custom of being married to only one person at a time.” Fisher suggested that this definition, which incidentally relies on marriage, says nothing about sexual faithfulness. But a closer look at the second part of the definition offers the following: “Now, also (in extended use): the practice or principle of remaining faithful to one person during the course of a sexual relationship other than marriage.”² The second part of this definition introduces temporal augmentation (“now”) and a distinction between ideology and behavior (“practice or principle”); moreover, it invokes fidelity (“remaining faithful”) in a possibly finite (“course”) type of engagement (“sexual relationship”) that, though similar to it, does not have to exemplify the exact master template (“relationship other than marriage”).

Barash and Lipton suggested that monogamy usually implies mating exclusivity, referring to a “social system in which the reproductive arrangement appears to involve one male and one female” (2001, 9). The key word, argued Barash and Lipton, is appears; their data on biological patterns of animals and humans suggest that the social system of monogamy is much more complex than mere mating exclusivity. For example, Cherlin’s (1999) definition of monogamy, “having just one sex