Facebook Ruined My Marriage: Digital Intimacy Interference on Social Networking Sites

This study employed a mixed method approach to understand how Facebook interferes with romantic relationships. The methods included a qualitative textual analysis of 53 Facebook interest groups about marriage dissolution as a result of Facebook. The text consisted primarily of wall comments. However, images, links, and Facebook likes were also analyzed. Concepts were organized into themes that detailed how Facebook contributes to computer-mediated relationship dissolution, a concept dubbed digital intimacy interference (DII). The textual analysis also unveiled how and why individuals use Facebook groups to discuss DII. The textual analysis was then used to inform a quantitative study of individuals\u27 Facebook behavior and feelings about Facebook\u27s role in romantic relationships. The survey measured participants\u27 Facebook behavior and whether their behavior related to their feelings about Facebook and it\u27s role in romantic relationships. Correlation and independent sample t-tests were run to establish whether there is a relationship between certain Facebook behaviors and feelings about romantic relationships. The two methods were designed to generate a holistic understanding of the phenomenon of digital intimacy interference on social networking sites

Seeking Help for Intimate Betrayal Trauma: The Lived Experience of Unsuspecting Wives Receiving Counseling Messages from Mental Health Professionals after Discovering Their Sexually Addicted Spouse\u27s Out-of-Control Behavior

After unsuspecting wives (UWs) discover their sexually addicted spouse’s (SAS’s) out-of-control behavior (OCB) outside of their committed relationship, they may seek support from mental health professionals. Depending on a mental health professional’s theoretical framework for treating sexual addiction (SA) and partner betrayal, women may receive messages based on a family systems approach for addiction counseling or from a trauma model that prioritizes the client’s need for safety, stabilization, and grief work, with the goal of reconnecting the UW to a redefined sense of reality. Components of trauma work along with validation of an UW’s experience offers UWs the safety to cope with the nature of an intimate betrayal trauma (IBT) and experience growth as part of the process. This transcendental phenomenological study explored the experience of UWs who sought counseling after discovering their SAS’s OCB, and how messages they received from their mental health professionals impacted their recovery. Semi-structured interviews were used for data collection, and data were analyzed and coded based on conceptualizations from the Multidimensional Partner Trauma Model (MPTM), transcendental phenomenological approach required the researcher to suspend bias and work intentionally to honor participants\u27 narratives with objectivity and curiosity. Phenomenological data analysis revealed three themes and eight subthemes. A subsequent discussion included an expansion of the literature, its application in practice, implications, recommendations for actions, and recommendations for further study

Come Together: Desire, Literature, and the Law of the Sexual Revolution

While some scholars have viewed the Sexual Revolution as a “war” with winners and losers, this project finds that all Americans were subject to the fantasy of liberation. This fantasy takes different forms during the era, including relaxed sexual strictures against pre-marital sex, the availability of birth control, and an increased focus on sexual pleasure. However, the seemingly liberatory quickly becomes conservative, coming into focus through the analysis of court cases and legal mandates that protected the declining structures of marriage and heteronormativity. Beginning with widespread fears about interracial mixing in the early 1950’s, escalated by the end of segregation by Brown v. BOE and ending with the availability of divorce on a nation-wide level in 1972, this project is concerned with the literary imagination and the radical cultural and political changes affecting sexuality. This dissertation places literature and film in conversation with major legal cases to show how fictional texts make evident the legal cases’ potentialities, including their gains and their failures, focusing on cultural paradigms in literature and film concerning interracial couples, homosexuality, non-monogamous marriage, and divorce. This dissertation finds that all Americans simultaneously benefited and suffered from cultural and political changes regarding sexuality during the Sexual Revolution

Reasons for Romantic Breakups in Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood: A Developmentally Informed Examination

Objectives: Using a developmentally informed perspective, two studies were conducted towards systematic investigation of breakup reasons, their associated processes and outcomes in adolescence and emerging adulthood. In Study 1, a developmentally-framed measure of breakup reasons was developed, and differences in breakup reasons by age, gender, and dating stage (casual versus serious relationship) were examined. In Study 2, the link between depressive symptoms, reflecting poor post-breakup adjustment, and breakup reasons was examined. The mediating role of negative cognitive style, and moderating effects of gender and dating stage were tested. Methods: In both studies, a sample of 796 youths (15-25 years old, M = 17.76, 60% girls) reporting breakup reasons responded to questionnaires examining variables related to their development and romantic participation. Results: In Study 1, we developed a five-subscale measure reflecting youths breakup reasons. Youths most important reasons for breakups captured problems related to a) romantic affiliation, b) intimacy, c) autonomy, d) own infidelity, and e) partners status. Lack of romantic affiliation was the most important reason for breakup for all the youths. Boys reported dissolution due to own infidelity more often than did girls. Casually dating youths broke-up due to lack of romantic affiliation more often than youths at a serious romantic relationship stage; the latter reported inadequate intimacy as breakup reason more frequently. In Study 2, breakup reasons and depressive symptoms did not form a significant direct link. However, path analysis revealed that negative cognitive style significantly mediated the relationship between status breakup reasons and depressive symptoms. Further, the path between intimacy-based breakup reasons and depression was moderated by dating stage of youth. Gender did not moderate the link between breakup reasons and depressive symptoms. Conclusions: We discuss the multi-faceted and complex nature of romantic dissolution attributions in adolescence and emerging adulthood. The role of developmentally-framed breakup reasons as mechanisms that can help explain poor, as opposed to non-problematic, post-dissolution adjustment among adolescents and emerging adults is reviewed. The findings underscore the importance of developmentally-informed understanding and investigation of breakup reasons, as well as the need for further, longitudinal examination of their role in youths individual and interpersonal development

Negotiating intimacies in China's online social milieux

This is a cultural study into China’s cyberspace focussing on romantic relationships. The research asks: how does culture influence the ways Chinese Internet users conduct romantic relationships online; and how might these relationships be seen to reproduce, extend and/or challenge the Confucian tradition governing social and familial practices, and the communist party-state’s ideologies? While the first question explores the issue of how culture may shape the ways the Internet is used in China and impact on users’ experiences of online romance, the second question examines how Chinese cultural traditions may in turn be shaped by the Internet. The aims are to understand: (1) how Chinese define and make sense of their online romantic relationships; and (2) the significance of the Internet in influencing the ways Chinese negotiate their intimacies in relation to wider familial relations, the party-state’s paternalism and the social climate of growing individualism in the society

Unpacking change to inform intimate partner violence prevention: Exploring couples’ processes of change and the influence of intervention and social network factors in Uganda

Background and aims: Intimate partner violence (IPV) prevention ultimately hinges on change at the level of the household where relationships are conducted. There is little research examining the process of relational change among couples with a history of IPV following exposure to a community level IPV prevention intervention, particularly in low-income settings. This thesis aims to fill this gap by examining how relational change occurred (or did not) among couples in Uganda exposed to SASA!, a community mobilization intervention aimed to prevent IPV and HIV. The study first explores relationship change processes among couples exposed to the intervention. Secondly, it examines the key aspects of the intervention and social network factors that influenced these changes, illuminating the pathways through which the intervention diffused. Methods: This thesis comprises: i) a methodological examination of qualitative dyadic (couple) data collection and analysis; ii) a qualitative study of couples exposed to the SASA! intervention using in-depth interviews to examine processes of relationship change; iii) a mixed methods analysis of the influence of intervention and social network factors in the diffusion of new ideas and behaviour around intimate relationships and IPV. Findings & Conclusions: Through examining relationship trajectories from both partner’s perspectives the sphere in which IPV occurs comes through clearly, revealing the common challenges couples faced, how they were shaped by gender roles and, also, how they were able to change, preventing IPV. Change is possible through key community-level interventions working with both men and women that generate hope and belief in an alternative way of achieving fulfilling relationships and family life. This includes providing simple tools to improve relationships and local change agents to support change, all within the context of a wider community that is changing together, generating new norms in the process. Thus, the IPV prevention field may benefit from the inclusion of relationship education/skills and support for both men and women at the community level

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for the Treatment of Compulsive Pornography Use: A Randomized Clinical Trial

Compulsive pornography use (CPU) is generally defined by the inability to control the use of pornography and the resulting negative effects on quality of life or general functioning including damaged relationships, loss of productivity, impaired performance at work or school, job loss, financial expenses, guilt/shame, and personal distress. Statistics indicate that CPU may be as common as other psychological disorders and that the effects of the behavior can be just as severe. It is estimated that 1.5% to 3% of the adult population of the United States meets the criteria for compulsive pornography use. A review of the literature found no randomized controlled investigations of psychosocial treatments for this problem. This study reports the results of a randomized clinical trial of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) for the treatment of compulsive pornography use comparing an active treatment condition (n = 14) with a waitlist control (n = 14). The results showed a significant 93% decrease in self-reported hours viewed per week from pretreatment to posttreatment compared to the control condition, which experienced a 21% decrease. In a 20-week follow-up assessment, the treatment group did not change significantly from posttreatment to follow-up with an 84% decrease, indicating relative maintenance of the treatment gains. The control condition received the active treatment after the waiting period and was combined with the treatment group to calculate an overall effect size from pretreatment to posttreatment of 1.86. This is supported by clinical effectiveness data that shows 54% of the participants completely stopped viewing at posttreatment and another 39% of participants reduced viewing by at least 70% of pretreatment levels by posttreatment. Additional measures of quality of life, sexual compulsivity, and negative outcomes of sexual behavior were also completed and support the behavioral self-report results. These results are significant because they provide the first randomized group evidence of an effective treatment for compulsive pornography use. Implications and future directions are discussed

Wearing A Mask to Each Other : Masculinity & the Public Eye in Victorian Sensation Fiction

Sensation fiction, as a genre, offers a field to explore the ways in which ideologies of masculinity are negotiated, contested, and enforced. The Victorian man has no respite from social surveillance; the public is always watching, always evaluating the performance. As these sensation fiction novels build on each other, a portrait of male claustrophobia in response to unceasing surveillance is revealed. The pressure this constant scrutiny puts on Victorian men is immense and sensation novels derive many thrilling plot twists from the dramatic lengths men to which men must go to protect themselves from this gaze. These habits persist even when the actions of the men are relatively innocent or disconnected from the secrets they keep. These patterns of concealment and displacement craft a protective distance from society, but fundamentally isolate the men involved. Rather than effortlessly assuming patriarchal authority, male characters act in desperate ways to maintain their position and their manliness, highlighting the fractures and contradictions inherent in Victorian gender ideology. These strategies of concealment mirror the division between the private and public spheres and England and the colonies, exhibiting a foundational pattern of concealment in Victorian society

THE DOUBLE BED: SEX, HETEROSEXUAL MARRIAGE AND THE BODY IN POSTWAR ENGLISH CANADA, 1946-1966

Sex and sexuality are embodied experiences that are highly constructed by society. Sexual acts are subject to varied historical meanings, both dominant and subversive, which change over time and space. This dissertation explores how embodied heterosexual married sexual experiences were constructed for, and by, women in the immediate postwar era (1946-1966) and how that sexuality interacted with related social paradigms such as gender roles, motherhood, and femininity within English Canada. Using the body as a lens, this dissertation explores how three main sites of authoritative discourse attempted to police postwar sexual bodies through the creation of ideal, or Leviathan, bodies and associated systems of encoded knowledges and mores called “body politics.” The first case study examines the medicalized body, using the Canadian Medical Association Journal demonstrating how mothers were constructed as the keystones of their families; it reveals the intimate ties between familial gender and sexual role deviance and reproductive illnesses in women’s bodies. The second case study examines how the Anglican, United and Roman Catholic Churches reframed sex as sacramental for English Canadian married couples encouraging them to engage in sexual coitus to both strengthen their marriages and renew their spiritual connection to God. The third case study uses I Love Lucy to interrogate how mass media created and reflected postwar sexual and gender norms while simultaneously subverting them, generating a carnivalesque situation of tightly contained deviance. This dissertation then moves on to examine how the discourses of the previous three chapters affected actual women as demonstrated by a series of eighteen interviews with women who married between 1939 and 1966. The oral histories establish that actual corporeal bodies were at best distorted, or “fun house,” mirrors that only ever reflected imperfect copies of the ideal bodies they were supposed to emulate. In addition to making significant contributions to the historiographies of each of the case studies contained therein, this dissertation adds new knowledges about the ways that “normal” bodies work throughout history, creating simultaneous continuity and change, as well as how sexuality and gender norms are intimately connected within the realm of the body