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Abstract: It is conventional to point out the disintegrative and dysfunctional effects of violence and relegate it to processes outside the social realm. Yet this study argues that a reflexive [...]

IN MEMOIRS OF A REBEL PRINCESS. Princess Abida Sultaan of Bhopal wrote frankly of the first night in 1933 other brief married life with the man who had been her [...]

ALMOST FIFTY YEARS AGO, the Second Vatican Council acknowledged that the face of the Church is not always resplendent with the light of Christ. This constitutes a fundamental concern in [...]

How the Internet disputes definitions of the practice of gossip is explored through the queer performances of Stephen Karam's comic play 'Speech & Debate.' The play depicts three high-school misfits who share sexual secrets that begin to circulate online. Its implications on the evolution of networking sites and technologies as platforms for new forms of counter-intimacy are discussed.

The history of human progress is a history of gaining control over our blind, animal urges, urges often tampered with for the worse by the early stages of civilizations. This [...]

The certainties that characterized modern intimate life, and supported a hegemonic male sexuality defined by action and virility, are less present in contemporary men's intimate lives. In-depth interviews with ten heterosexual and gay men were conducted to explore how they organize their sexual and relational lives in contemporary Australia. Participants were committed to a 'late' modern notion of intimacy characterized by reciprocity, and placed emphasis on committed relationships where opportunities to disclose vulnerability and relinquish the burden of responsibility for sexual activity were present. However, casual sex appeared to be ordered by more conventional discourses related to male sexuality. These men reveal the importance of particular definitions of sexual intimacy to a meaningful sense of self in late modernity. Keywords: intimacy, late modernity, masculinity, men, sexuality, How do men conduct their sexual and relational lives in contemporary Australia? Certainly, their circumstances have changed. Australian women now have increased autonomy compared with earlier generations and demand equality [...]

This article focuses on experiences of the domestic--of houses, of intimacy and privacy--and what relation these bear to the kinds of sentiments about life which are given expression as fragile, endangered or fleeting. We think of singularity as lying in the potential for multiple domesticities that emerge at different times and are neither coterminous with family nor indeed with household. Based on fieldwork with African-American and Caribbean families in Miami, Florida and Baltimore, MD, the article tracks how intimacy and alienation marks the constant moves from, to, and through households. This oscillation engenders an itinerant domesticity and life lived in the interstices of the house, the clinic, the prison, and the street. These spaces and places come to bear on what comes to be marked as so-called 'African-American kinship.' Given the disproportionate incarceration of African-American men in US prisons, the article contemplates the permeable relation between carceral institutions and the home, as well as the constitution of kinship as 'criminal.' All names used in this text are pseudonyms to protect the confidentiality of respondents. KEYWORDS: domesticity, prison, intimacy, kinship, criminality, On a late evening in April 2003, we were taking a stroll by the water in Florida with Kathy and her brother Chris, both in their early twenties and both [...]

This introduction highlights what we call 'Compelling Intimacies'--the multiple desires, affects, and affinities that arise at the intersection of institutions, actors, technologies, and ethical discourses to exert persuasive pressures on subjects. Each article animates different facets of the intensities born of intimacy as they operate across social and relational fields. The authors separate agency from intention in their efforts to identify the vitality of human and nonhuman relations. Together, the articles demonstrate how domesticities arise through diverse sets of circumstances, emerging in multiple incarnations--often in the same household--in such a way as to generate a wide range of affects and affinities. Finally, each author turns attention to the so-called 'small events' that come to affirm or deny life as given form in everyday household arrangements, kin relations, friendships, and institutional settings, thereby suggesting the political stakes evoked by differing forms of care. KEYWORDS: domesticity, sexuality, intimacy, affect, affinity, The title, 'Compelling Intimacies,' refers to the multiple desires, affects, and affinities that arise at the intersection of institutions, actors, technologies, and ethical discourses to exert persuasive pressures on social [...]

Online dating and the impact of online technologies on relationship formation and maintenance are presented. Findings suggest that online dating activities produce new norms and opportunities for interaction and at the same time reinforce traditional norms and networks enabling intimacy to take place.

Social contexts in which confidants get to know each other affect the composition of their personal networks, inter alia the similarity among confidants. Results from analyses on a representative sample of the Dutch population between 18 and 65 years of age (SSND 2000), support the idea that differences in similarity among confidants can be explained by 1.) the social composition of a context, 2.) the extent to which interactions within a context are enforced, and 3.) the amount of time people spend in a context. Moreover, there is a certain degree of path-dependency in the use of social contexts, that leads to reinforced context effects on similarity among confidants., Introduction Since the 1980s, sociologists pay increasing attention to the supply-side perspective on the emergence of personal networks. For example, Blau (1977:79) stated that 'social associations depend on opportunities for [...]

A study was carried out to find out if spouses who had relatively equal status were more likely to be intimate with one another than in societies where there exists spousal status inequality. Results indicate that intimacy in spousal relationships is significantly predicted by female status.

An essay about single people being treated like sexual minority and the demand to be oriented towards sustained intimate relationships is presented.

The article discusses about love and intimacy among young women takes a different perspective given their better exposure to higher education, access to better employment and cohabitation becoming an accepted norm.

A study investigates the associations between communication and outcomes of the initial sexual encounter between partners. Findings reveal that communication corresponds with the emotional, cognitive, and relational outcomes of initial coitus, over and above the effects of individual and relational factors.

Meta-awareness of bias in intimate partner judgments was investigated in 3 studies. In Study 1, participants rated fictional partners in happier relationships as more positively biased in their partner perceptions. In Study 2, participants thought their judgments of their own current partners were positively biased and that they were judged by their partners in a positively biased fashion. Using a sample of couples, Study 3 showed that metaperceptions of bias were anchored to actual levels of bias at the individual and relationship levels. In addition, positive bias was accentuated for traits that were more relevant to mate evaluation. These findings (as expected) suggest that positive bias in partner judgments can be a normative and consciously accessible feature of intimate relationships. Keywords: partner perceptions, metacognition, bias, accuracy, relationship satisfaction

Previous theorists have suggested that figurative language may be an especially salient means by which speakers and addressees establish and recognize specific feelings of interpersonal closeness. To explore readers' sensitivity to this interpersonal function of figurative language use, brief stories were created that described interactions between two ambiguously related characters. In the course of these conversational narratives, one character always used either a metaphoric or literal referring expression to refer to some antecedent information from the story. Across three experiments, readers consistently judged these story characters as knowing each other better when their interactions contained metaphoric references. Moreover, this occurred even when addressees failed to give explicit evidence of having understood the critical expressions. To the extent that language use highlights assumptions about commonalities, readers may generate inferences about social relationships alongside more meaning-driven comprehension processes.

The poet who famously bemoaned her lack of literary grandmothers was not lacking in gratefully acknowledged male forebears, particularly Shakespeare and Homer, whom she describes as the 'colossal borderers of [...]

Henry James's 'The Papers' (1903) is found to be among the first works of fiction to identify changing conceptions of intimacy brought about by new communication technologies. A number of conversations involving unspoken intimacy intimate that the lesson of 'The Papers' is that intimacy with people one do not know is far easier to establish than intimacy with people one do know.

The authors define relationship talk as content messages that reference the nature of the relationship between people. They seek to contribute to the literature by (a) conceptualizing relationship talk in ways that attend to its nuances, and (b) evaluating how intimacy predicts the production and perception of relationship talk. They conducted an observational study of conversations between 120 dating couples. Length of romantic interest, compared to intimacy, was the more proximal predictor of the prominence, explicitness, depth, and negative valence of relationship talk. In general, relationship talk was positively associated with people's perceptions of the relational impact of conversation, but intimacy was unrelated to relational impact. The prominence of relationship talk noted by third-party judges was positively associated with relational impact when intimacy was low but not high. The authors discuss how their findings illuminate content messages about relationships. Keywords: intimacy; relationship talk; conversation; courtship

The recent television and film representations of globalization in which bodily intimacy is a central concern are examined. It is argued that television and films are ambivalent representations that use the most global of contemporary media to visualize one of the most visible elements of globalization, its penetration and movement through bodies

Summary This article examines intimacy from a sociological perspective. It reveals that 'over-involved' or 'intimate' nurse-patient relationships do not tend to be welcomed by nurses. The work of certain theorists [...]

Results indicate that children view their relationships with grandparents entirely different from those of parents and their close relationships depended on the extent of closeness to grandparents. Data suggest that their greater closeness to grandparents is associated with fewer adjustment issues between them and grandparents.

This study evaluated the effects of two versions of a six-week group forgiveness intervention for college women who had been wronged in a romantic relationship. Participants (N = 58) were randomly assigned to a secular, religiously integrated, or no-intervention comparison condition. Participants completed a variety of forgiveness and mental health measures at one-week pretest, one-week posttest, and six-week follow-up. Participants in both intervention conditions improved significantly more than did those in the comparison condition on two measures of forgiveness and a measure of existential well-being. Program effects were maintained at six-week follow-up. Contrary to hypotheses, there were no differential treatment effects when comparing participants in the secular and the religiously integrated conditions. Participants generally rated the programs favorably. Forgiveness strategies utilized by participants also were examined. Keywords: forgiveness; romantic relationships; college students; coping with wrongdoing; religious intervention

The present study examined the effects of the degree of female partner provocation on cognitive attributions and affective responses in verbally abusive and nonabusive college males. In Phase 1 (N = 116), subjects listened to audiotapes of hypothetical dating situations in which the female partner's behavior was nonprovocative or moderately provocative; in Phase 2 (N = 105), the female partner's behavior was nonprovocative or highly provocative. The major hypothesis was that abusive males would make greater negative intent and responsibility attributions and report more powerful feelings of jealousy, rejection, and abandonment in response to moderately and highly provocative partner behavior but not in response to nonprovocative partner behavior than would nonabusive males. Results from Phase 1 showed that abusive males reported reliably greater negative attributions and feelings of jealousy, rejection, and abandonment in response to moderately provocative partner behavior than did nonabusive males. No group differences were associated with nonprovocative partner behavior. Results from Phase 2 showed that abusive males attributed greater negative intent and feelings of rejection and abandonment to both highly provocative and nonprovocative partner behavior than did nonabusive males. Negative attributions and feelings of jealousy, rejection, and abandonment increased reliably from moderately provocative to highly provocative female behavior for abusive and nonabusive males, who differed reliably from each other. Implications for the assessment and treatment of abusive men were discussed. KEY WORDS: intimate abusiveness; causal attributions; provocative partner behavior.

The experience of loneliness has not been adequately investigated using the psychoanalytic method. Theoretical controversies bias and unbalance the treatment of loneliness in practice. An understanding of loneliness is hindered by conventions of linguistic terminology used to describe experiential differences. Loneliness is difficult to define and explain.

This research advances an evolution-based model of the function and content of investment in romantic relationships. In developing this model, theory testing has proceeded concurrently with the validation of a multidimensional measure of partner-specific investment (PSI). Ten strategies of investment were identified through factor analysis and scaled to form the PSI Inventory. These scales form a diverse set of investment measures that are reasonably independent, internally consistent, and reliable across raters. Both gender and sociosexual orientation predict use of specific PSI strategies. Overall PSI scores correlate positively with partner's feelings of love and felt security in the relationship, correlate negatively with degree of sexualizing of others by partner, and do not correlate with the self's performance of mate retention behaviors. It is concluded that the PSI Inventory possesses adequate psychometric properties and satisfactory convergent, discriminant, and incremental validity, thus suggesting that it constitutes a viable means of assessing individual differences in investment. These investigations show how a multidimensional, adaptationist approach to investment can further our understanding of these individual differences.

I [Lady Holdernesse] is tenderly attach'd to the polite Mr. Mildmay, and sunk in all the Joys of happy Love notwithstanding she wants the use of her 2 hands by [...]

Young people's age expectations for the initiation by boys and girls of a range of sexual practices were elicited from a sample of 522 15- and 16-year-olds. As expected, there was a progression n the modal ages nominated from the least intimate (kissing) to more intimate behaviors (sexual intercourse). There were few gender difference, either for age expectations of the practices of boys and girls or between male and female respondents. There was a strong relationship between sexual timetables and timetables for autonomy and use of common drugs such as alcohol, an several 'maker' sexual behaviors were identified that may signify the appropriateness of a range of sexual practices. It is suggested that there is a group of young people whose desire for early autonomy, substance use, and belief in early sexual activity may put them at risk.

Two studies examined intimacy in adolescent friendships. In the first, 7th-, 9th-, and 11th-grade students completed a questionnaire assessing perceived friendship intimacy. Age and sex differences were identified in emotional closeness, self-disclosure, emphasis on individuality, control, and conformity. Across ages, emphasis on individuality increased, whereas control and conformity declined. There were no age differences in emotional closeness and self-disclosure. Females reported more emotional closeness and self-disclosure than males. In the second study, individual differences in friendship intimacy were examined in a sample of 9th-grade adolescents. A joint problem solving task identified interdependent and disengaged friends. Perceived intimacy among interdependent and disengaged friends was contrasted with that in a control group of subjects without friends. Adolescents with friends reported more closeness than those without friends. Interdependent friends reported greater levels of respect for individuality than disengaged friends. The results underscore the salience of intimacy for peer relationships during the adolescent years and suggest that intimacy may be an important construct distinguishing between different types of close friendships.

Four sexuality educators discuss their respective observations on love and intimacy. They dwell on the significance of such concepts as commitment, self-awareness, trust, competition, honesty, respect, and compassion in one's search for a meaningful relationship. A good relationship is one that fulfills the most profound needs of the individuals and contribute to an environment of caring and loving.

This study tested the hypothesis that individuals with different attachment styles vary in the degree to which they display intimacy and nonverbal involvement to their romantic partners. Eighty dyads currently involved in enduring romantic relationships participated in an observational study, with one partner from each dyad representing one of Bartholomew's (1990) four attachment styles. A team of coders viewed videotapes of the dyads' conversations and rated the degree of intimacy and involvement exhibited. Preoccupieds and Secures surpassed Dismissives and Fearful Avoidants on measures of trust/receptivity, gaze, facial pleasantness, vocal pleasantness, general interest, and attentiveness. Preoccupieds engaged in more in-depth conversation than Dismissives. Fearful Avoidants sat furthest from their partners and displayed the least fluency and longest response latencies. Finally, Preoccupieds and Fearful Avoidants were the most vocally anxious. These findings, which provide preliminary behavioral validation of Bartholomew's four-category model of attachment, are interpreted in light of the dimensions underlying attachment styles and the principle that communication reinforces mental models of self and others. Key words: Attachment Style, Intimacy, Involvement

This follow-up study examined how bereaved couples' grief reactions change over time and how the quality of the marriage can predict these reactions for men and women. A group of 31 bereaved couples who 2 to 4 years earlier had lost an infant (>20 weeks gestation and

Research indicate a positive relation between individuation and the psychosocial resolution of identity and intimacy and that gender difference exist in the developmental patterns. An analysis of gender difference in levels of individuation, the relation of individuation and psychological development and its semblance to a curvilinear nature was done. A sample of 224 students (95 men, 129 women) representing wide age and sociocultural range participated in the study.

This paper examines how individuals in intimate relationships come to decide whether their relationship is equitable. We study two types of intimate relationships - married couples and heterosexual cohabiting couples - using questionnaire data to analyze how a variety of factors affect the judgment of equity. We examine characteristics concerned with traditional role differentiation, the functioning of the couple as a small group, and status-conferring attributes. Our results show striking differences from one type of actor to another in the resources that are related significantly to the judgment of equity and in the impact of different classes of variables on equity.

Two studies, one conducted on incarcerated sex offenders and the other on nonincarcerated sex offenders, revealed that loneliness and lack of intimacy are more common among sex offenders than among other offenders such as wife batterers. Rapists and child molesters showed the greatest deficiencies in intimacy. Lack of intimacy was found to be a better predictor of violence than was loneliness. The results suggest that loneliness and intimacy deficiencies should be taken into account during the treatment of sex offenders.

This research examined whether strongly held beliefs in the importance of either intimacy or passion in producing success in close relationships would facilitate the automatic processing of information in specific close relationships. As predicted, when deciding whether belief-relevant relationship adjectives described their intimate relationships, Ss with strong beliefs made decisions about as fast under concurrent memory-load conditions (memorizing digits) as when no memory load was present. In contrast, weak-belief subjects were considerably slower in the memory-load condition than in the no-load condition. In addition, these results remained reliable when a variety of other variables were controlled for, including the decision latencies of Ss when judging belief-irrelevant relationship descriptors, relationship quality, digit-recall performance, and the percentage of yes responses. Results are discussed in relation to the nature and function of automatic processing in close relationship contexts.

Commitment to an intimate relationship involves a feeling of satisfaction and reward in the absence of a possible alternative. This process continues due to relevant factors that disrupt free recourse to alternative relationships. The consideration of desirable eligible leads to a commitment to the existing relationship and the judgment of acceptable alternative is biased by the satisfaction with current relationship. Women are able to establish better and more lasting relationships and have less desirable alternatives than men.

This article reexamines the social ecology of intimacy and some meanings we assign to public and private. Historically, structural differentiation turns the home world into a segregated compartment of society, but it similarly structures the 'public' realm. Intimate refuges may then arise throughout the differentiated social structure, as people intermingle in functionally specific settings to pursue their purposes, and as they find or create private spaces to elaborate this intimacy. I use the General Social Survey and the Northern California Community Study to generate findings on co-workers. Finally, I note some advantages of conceptualizing intimacy, private worlds, and institutional locales as analytically distinct, and I consider how co-worker intimacy is an active, constructive process, whether it has conservative or transformative consequences., The concept of structural differentiation points to a historical process in which institutional structures move toward increasing complexity and functional specificity. Economic production, home maintenance, child rearing, health care, education, [...]