Polyamory And Monogamy

There is a relative paucity of literature aimed at understanding individual’s perceptions regarding polyamory and monogamy practices. Rather, existing research on romantic relationships more commonly focuses on quantitatively assessing relationship satisfaction such as in Schmookler and Bursik (2007). For example, a measure in their study assessed specifics on whether a person viewed monogamy as enhancing or viewed monogamy as a sacrifice in relation to how this affected their satisfaction with their relationship. They found that people who valued emotional and sexual monogamy tended to have higher relationship satisfaction compared to people that did not value monogamy, but instead perceived it as a sacrifice. While Balzarini and colleagues …show more content…
Cui, Fincham, and Pasley (2008) discusses the influence of having divorced vs. married parents on the quality of the relationship that the participants have in adolescence. For example, they found that being raised in a household of parental marital conflict and divorce made participants more susceptible to having difficulty resolving problems with their own romantic partner. Tyrell et al. (2016) used attachment theory, which states that family relationships can be a groundwork for the child’s later romantic relationships. Ryan, Franzetta, Schelar, and Manlove (2009) presents a similar statement using socialization theory, in that parental relationship structures serve as role models for their children to follow. Both quantitative studies looked for influence over quality of romantic relationships by family structures (single parent home versus two-parent home), gender, with an emphasis on culture in Tyrell et al. (2016). Ryan et al. (2009) expands on family structure dynamics by assessing types of familial transitions, number of familial transitions, and duration of familial transitions. Their findings suggest that the type of experienced transition has a stronger influence on a young adult’s relationship formation than the number of experienced transitions. They also suggest that having …show more content…
(2008), Tyrell et al. (2016), and Ryan et al. (2009) supported their hypotheses that there is an association between early experience with families and later romantic relationships in adolescence and young adulthood. The limitations include, but are not limited to: the focus on monogamous familial structures, an influence of gendered ideas on the perspectives of relationships, age, and a lack of clarifications on the adolescent’s choice of romantic relationship structure (monogamous or polyamorous relationships). These quantitative approaches do not allow for open-ended questions regarding the adolescent’s choices and perspectives over different relationship structures, which could have been influenced by their family’s experiences, as shown by the supporting