Conjugal Relationship Research Articles

Da pluralidade dos afetos: trajetórias e orientações amorosas nas conjugalidades contemporâneas

Num contexto em que a construção do casamento como relação de amor adquire hegemonia nas sociedades contemporâneas, trazemos à arena empírica o debate sobre a sentimentalização da conjugalidade e a crescente complexidade promovida pelos processos de individualização. Analisando discursos de mulheres portuguesas vivendo em conjugalidade, descrevemos a pluralidade das orientações amorosas nas conjugalidades atuais. Observamos o entrecruzamento entre romantismo e aliança, companheirismo e paixão erótica, autonomia individual e fusão amorosa. Revela-se, assim, um cenário heterogêneo, onde o amor adquire múltiplos significados, percorre diversos caminhos e se articula a formas de construir o cotidiano na vida a dois.

The Psychology of Bariatric Patient: What Replaces Obesity? A Qualitative Research with Brazilian Women

Obesity has serious implications on a woman's quality of life and body image. We propose a qualitative investigation aimed at understanding the postoperative significance of bariatric surgery for women suffering from morbid obesity and how these factors influence the outcomes, with an emphasis on body image and on the possible psychological complications that may jeopardize the operation's success. This study uses a clinical qualitative method, through a semidirected interview with open-ended questions in an intentional sample, closed by saturation, with seven women operated in a period of 1.5-3years, following the definition of emergent categories and qualitative content analysis. Bariatric surgery is a procedure that brings about rapid physical, social, and emotional changes, and it is seen by patients as a possibility of being reinstated and accepted socially. The reencounter with the feminine body after surgery is experienced as a means of reinstatement but also with a feeling of defenselessness, which may lead to the development of phobic symptoms. Imbalance in family and conjugal relationships may be factors that discourage the continuation of the treatment. The patient sees the skin folds, flaccidity, and the scars as therapeutic failures, which can lead to a constant quest for plastic surgery. We observe the necessity of studies that allow the health team to identify those aspects of a patient's psychological makeup which would be expected to improve or worsen their prognosis and to provide the necessary preoperative and postoperative psychosocial interventions.

Marriage Against Their Will

This article addresses the regulatory regime governing the relationships between unmarried cohabitants. In the article I challenge the conventional divide between conservative and liberal approaches: on one hand, moral condemnation of non-marital conjugal relationships and public policy in favor of marriage lead conservatives to reject the application of marriage law to cohabitating partners. On the other hand, drawing on principles of freedom, tolerance and equality, liberals tend to equate the mutual legal commitments of cohabitants with those of married partners. I break with conventional analysis by offering a novel liberal model that separates between the mutual obligations of cohabitants and married partners. The proposed model is based on a pluralist constitutional theory that underscores the responsibility of the liberal state to create a range of social institutions that offer meaningful choices to individuals. The article thus argues that the law should develop two distinctive legal regimes-one for marriage and another for cohabitation - and provide couples with substantive freedom to choose between them. The article offers arguments rooted in morality and efficiency to support the proposed bipolar default systems and the role of marriage as screening mechanism. It further delineates the refinements and limitations necessary to address liberal objections to the distinction between marriage and cohabitation within the pluralist approach. Hence, the article offers a detailed and comprehensive legal model that unlike existing all-or-nothing approaches, selectively applies marriage law to cohabitation and distinguishes between different types of cohabitants.The article further illustrates how the pluralist theory goes well beyond standard cohabitation law to provide a framework for an innovative spousal relationship regulation. It demonstrates the potential contribution of such a framework by analyzing three publicly disputed topics: same-sex marriage and civil unions; covenant marriage; and secular regulation of religious marriage.

A Liberal Analysis of Western Cohabitation Law

Enclosed please find an article manuscript, aiming to shed a new light on the regulation of spousal relationships. In the manuscript I challenge the conventional divide between two regulatory extremes: On one hand, censure of non-marital conjugal relationships and public policy commendation of marriage lead conservatives to reject the application of marriage law to cohabiting partners. On the other hand, resting on principles such as freedom, tolerance and equality, liberals tend to equate the mutual legal commitments of cohabitants with those of married partners. I break this dichotomy by offering a novel liberal model, founded on the pluralist constitutional theory that underscores the state's obligation to create a range of social institutions that afford meaningful familial choices to individuals. This model sets up two default regimes - one for marriage and another for cohabitation - and allows same-sex and heterosexual couples to choose between and customize those defaults.

Human Rights and the Family

The conjugal family seems to be under assault from the rights revolution. Rights claims have relentlessly sliced into the family from diverse angles: divorce rights, reproductive rights, gender rights, sexual orientation rights, marriage rights, children’s rights, birth rights, affiliational rights, parental rights, de facto parenting rights, custody rights, families of choice rights, and so on. Some lament that this historic institution is dying under the trauma of these rights assaults. Others see this trauma as the creative turmoil of renewal, rebirth, and re-creation. In The Rights Revolution, Michael Ignatieff, former director of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and current leader of Canada’s federal Liberal party, points out that the last thirty years have been marked by new conflicts over the status of marriage and the family in liberal democracies. According to Ignatieff, the “rights revolution” aims at transforming society’s most basic conjugal and kinship relationships (85). Its “central idea” is that each individual has “the right to choose the life we lead and that we must fight to exercise this right against all comers” (99). Whether this passion for rights means the death of the traditional family or its radical metamorphosis into new forms, nevertheless it is evident that this revolution has set itself against the historic institution of marriage. Ignatieff denounces as “downright tyranny” political attempts to sustain a public ethos protective of the traditional conjugal family (102). Claims that the historic Acad. Quest. (2009) 22:63–78 DOI 10.1007/s12129-008-9098-y

“Family building in inner quarters”: Cojugal relationship in Tang families

Conjugal relationship has a predominant role in ancient Chinese familial life. Yet most researches on conjugal relationship have tended to focus on the arrangement of marriage, disregarding marital life after wedding. It is the general impression that matrimonial relation follows the ethics of Confucian doctrine of “the husband as principle of the wife,” or relevant code of laws like “Seven Outs,” edited according to these principles. There are three factors that contribute to marital relationship in the Tang Dynasty: ideology, ethics, and written laws. Although written laws are influenced by Confucian ideology, and hence following Confucian system of manners, on the practical level, ordinance still appears as the most reliable source to analyze familial relationships. People in the Tang Dynasty stress family status when they marry wives, yet when marrying concubines, versatility is of interest. Whereas records in official history documents and epitaphs are not entirely accountable, the complicated relationships between husband and wife, husband and concubine, and that between wife and concubine need to be further illustrated.

Claiming Fatherhood: Race and the Dynamics of Paternal Involvement among Unmarried Men.

In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued that the black family was nearing "complete breakdown" due to high rates of out-of-wedlock childbearing. In subsequent decades, nonmarital childbearing rose dramatically for all racial groups and unwed fathers were often portrayed as being absent from their children's lives. The authors examine contemporary nonmarital father involvement using quantitative evidence from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study and qualitative evidence from in-depth interviews with 150 unmarried fathers. The authors find that father involvement drops sharply after parents' relationships end, especially when they enter subsequent relationships and have children with new partners. These declines are less dramatic for African American fathers, suggesting that fathers' roles outside of conjugal relationships may be more strongly institutionalized in the black community. The challenges Moynihan described among black families some forty years ago now extend to a significant minority of all American children.

Relações conjugais de parceiros HIV soropositivos concordantes: uma visão masculina

Tomando como ponto de partida a vulnerabilidade feminina à infecção por HIV e a conseqüente feminilização da epidemia de aids, este estudo buscou identificar algumas representações de relações conjugais tendo como referência homens que transmitiram o HIV à companheira. Entrevistas semi-estruturadas com dez homens HIV-soropositivos que contaminaram a parceira permitiram a identificação de conteúdos relacionados com algumas categorias temáticas: a) provedor masculino, que relega o trabalho da mulher à condição de um complemento no orçamento doméstico; b) dialética passivo-ativa, que contrapõe o caráter contemplativo dos papéis femininos à iniciativa, característica do masculino; c) naturalização da infidelidade masculina, com conteúdos sobre assimetria de gêneros relacionada à liberdade do homem nas questões sexuais; d) feminilização do cuidado, que destaca o caráter continente do feminino, naturalizado pelas atribuições domésticas da mulher. Estes resultados poderão oferecer subsídios importantes para a concepção de programas de orientação sobre relações conjugais e questões de gênero, dentro do contexto da feminilização do HIV/aids.

Relación entre peso al nacer y algunas variables biológicas y socioeconómicas de la madre en partos atendidos en un primer nivel de complejidad en la ciudad de Manizales, Colombia, 1999 al 2005

Objetivo: describir la relación existente entre el peso al nacer y algunas variables socioeconómicas y biológicas de la madre.Materiales y métodos: se llevó a cabo un estudio de corte transversal. Se revisaron 1892 historias clínicas de partos atendidos entre enero de 1999 y diciembre del 2005 en la Clínica La Enea de ASSBASALUD, ESE. Las variables estudiadas fueron el peso y sexo del recién nacido; edad cronológica, escolaridad, nivel socioeconómico, procedencia, tipo de unión conyugal de la madre y el diligenciamiento de la hoja del Centro Latinoamericano de Perinatología.Resultados: la prevalencia de bajo peso al nacer fue de 4,4%. El tipo de unión conyugal inestable (p=0,03) y recién nacido de sexo femenino (p=0,00) fueron las variables de mayor significancia de estadística.Conclusión: la prevalencia de bajo peso al nacer es menor a las descritas en otras poblaciones en Latinoamérica. No se encontró asociación con otros factores previamente descritos.

Três modos da experiência de ser-com e ser-si-mesmo em situação conjugal: Um estudo exploratório

This work aims to comprehend the experience of “being oneself” and “being with” in conjugal situation in the contemporaneous world. To articulate a possible comprehension such subjective landscape, we discuss the dominant processes in our culture to constitute the subjectivity, taking into account the individualistic subject’s ethics of efficacy and of consume. The social and conjugal relationships in such scenery are a critical preoccupation among clinical and social psychologists; they are concerned by the modes of being as a thing, which promote exclusion of difference: “being oneself” and “being with other” have been suffering tension by the individualization which creates a rupture in the mode of “being with”. To reflect upon that experience, three couples, living different modes of conjugal situation, were interview. The interpretation followed the Analytical of Sense Method. Each couple presented his own proper comprehension mode for “being with” in conjugal situation. A comprehension of the man’s mode of being, by the scrap in conjugal situation would be undertake like “being among tension”. The conjugality could be characterized by wobbliness least or minor among moments of fusion and moments of differentiation between the couples. Also pointing to a “well being” as the sense direction to be with the other. The participants elaboration of experience made possible to show how culture articulates with a clinical existential dimension and the culture towards the contemporaneous man’s mode of being as being-in-the worldwith-others by being oneself. The contribution of this work is introduce the difference like possibility by being oneself including the collective and the others. Key-words: Experience of being oneself with. Conjugality. Contemporaneous world. Clinical Psychology.

Males unveiling the different forms of conjugal violence

OBJECTIVES: To identify the forms of unveiling violence from the discourse of a male group that perform violent acts against their partners. METHODS: Qualitative approach study. Seven males were interviewed and they beat their partners, residing in the outskirts of Salvador, BA. The subjects speeches were analyzed by means of content analysis. RESULTS: The study showed that the males interviewed experienced conjugal violence, which is revealed psychologically, sexually, morally and physically. CONCLUSION: The conjugal relationship is marked by an asymmetrical relation between males and females. When males feel they are being threatened, they use some means to control their partners, resorting to physical violence, inclusive. It is imperative to implement public policies that guarantee interventions with males and females, leading them to understand the social construction of gender identity.

«Se marier pour aller jusqu'au bout ensemble ? » Ruptures conjugales et transmission des exploitations agricoles dans la lignée

" Married once and for ail ?" The breakup of conjugal unions and the transmission of family farms in the lineage. Farmers who live in a couple tend to be married more often and to divorce less than members of other social groups. Based on statistical data from the survey Etude de l'histoire familiale (INSEE/INED 1999) as well as on long term ethnographic fieldwork carried out among wine-growing families in the area of Cognac, the author shows however that farmers and their female partners experiment the same transformations of conjugal relationships as do other social groups. Marriage is not systematic any more, the number of divorces bas risen and more generally farmers and their partners have to live with the always present possibility of breakup. The article analyses how the breakup of conjugal unions in farmers' families implies specific consequences, because of the presence of family businesses and the transmission of the farm in the lineage.

Human Lactation, Pair-bonds, and Alloparents : A Cross-Cultural Analysis.

The evolutionary origin of human pair-bonds is uncertain. One hypothesis, supported by data from forgers, suggests that pair-bonds function to provision mothers and dependent offspring during lactation. Similarly, public health data from large-scale industrial societies indicate that single mothers tend to wean their children earlier than do women living with a mate. Here we examine relations between pair-bond stability, alloparenting, and cross-cultural trends in breastfeeding using data from 58 "traditional" societies in the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS). Analyses show that stable conjugal relationships were associated with significantly later weaning among the societies in the SCCS. The relationship between pair-bond stability and age at weaning was not mediated by women's ability to provision themselves or women's kin support. Availability of alloparental care was also inversely related to age at weaning, and the association was not significantly reduced after controlling for frequency of divorce. This study indicates that among a woman's kin relationships, a pair-bond with a child's father is especially supportive of breastfeeding. These cross-cultural findings are further evidence that human pair-bonds may have evolved to support lactation.

Holy Weddings, Unholy Marriages: Christian Spouses and Domestic Discords in Early Colonial Lesotho, 1870–1900

In the Lesotho Archives in the capital Maseru, lies unreferenced, scattered files containing testimonies of Christianised BaSotho couples embroiled in marital litigations in the last third of the nineteenth century. Reading these testimonies in relation to one another, and engaging in an in‐depth qualitative examinations of the narratives embedded in the texts offers a rare opportunity to explore the texture of conjugal relationships among Christianised spouses in this period. The compelling picture that emerges is one of extreme instability of Christian marriages. We behold here conjugal lives teeming with conflicts and intrigue. Adultery accusations and spousal violence punctuated the conjugal lives of these spouses in unexpected intensity. This study concludes that after over half a century of missionising the BaSotho, evangelical missionaries seemingly had had little impact on the texture of BaSotho conjugal relations. The rampant “adultery” and spousal abuse that seemingly plagued these Christian spouses were expressions of pre‐Christian patterns that were manifestations of gendered conflicts.

Expanding the Compass of Domestic Violence in the Hanoverian Metropolis

Recent historical scholarship has exposed the role of violence within the multiple dynamics of family life, providing important insights into gender relations and the abuse of power within domestic, conjugal relationships. With good reason, the analysis has privileged the experiences of women as victims of such violence in the past. Without denying this important characteristic of domestic violence, it may be helpful to expand the range of actions and actors to be considered when exploring its history. By scrutinizing the leading role played by women who used violence in the home, and by interrogating untapped sources such as newspaper accounts, the records of magistrates' courts or administrative records from charitable institutions, for example, for evidence of how other subordinate persons such as servants, apprentices and, of course, children, were also subjected to harsh physical correction and, in some terrible cases, systematic abuse, a clearer understanding of the eighteenth century thresholds of tolerance for such violence emerges. By expanding the compass of domestic violence, the subjective and discretionary application of the law in specific cases becomes better contextualized as the wide continuum for the role of violence in everyday life in eighteenth-century England comes more fully into focus.

The meaning of the rubella vaccine for pregnant women

The research was aimed at describing the meaning of the rubella vaccine to women who were discovered pregnant after having received the measles-rubella vaccine during the 2001 campaign against rubella, and who lived in 10 cities within the region of DIR XX from São João da Boa Vista. The theory of Social Representation was used as a reference framework for the research, and data were collected through the Collective Subject Discourse technique, involving 18 women who either were pregnant or became pregnant within 30 days after having received the vaccine. Through their discourse, it was possible to unveil the diversity of meanings the rubella vaccine has when dispensed during pregnancy, characterized as a threat to their and their children's physical integrity and to their conjugal relationship. The meanings constitute an important source of information that allows health professionals and administrators to reflect, so they can reconsider their role as health promoters.

'Wild geese fathers' and a globalised family strategy for education in Korea

This article examines one interesting form of global householding practised among Korean middle-class families: transnational families split across oceans for the purpose of children's early education, called kirogi families. Based on statistical data and interviews with a small sample of kirogi fathers, this study describes the rapid growth in the numbers of Korean students going abroad for early English education and examines the main motivations for the kirogi family arrangement. Our analysis suggests the growing power of English as a critical asset of occupational mobility and the problems of the exam-oriented Korean educational system as the main sources of this phenomenon. Our interview data suggest that the fathers are not mere passive or reluctant participants in the family splitting and that they seem to maintain a stable conjugal relationship as well as a strong supportive role for the children despite their physical separation from the family.

Sobrevivendo à tempestade: a influência do tratamento oncológico de um filho na dinâmica conjugal

O diagnóstico de câncer infantil altera o padrão de funcionamento familiar, fazendo com que a atenção dos pais se concentre sobre o filho doente. Por essa razão, é freqüente a relação conjugal perder espaço, o que pode levar ao aumento da incidência de conflitos entre os cônjuges. O presente estudo tem por objetivo investigar a influência que o acompanhamento do tratamento oncológico do filho exerce sobre a conjugalidade. Para tanto, foi realizada uma pesquisa qualitativa, da qual participaram três casais cujos filhos realizavam tratamento oncológico em um hospital pediátrico. A coleta de dados foi feita por meio de entrevistas semidirigidas, que foram gravadas, transcritas e submetidas à análise de conteúdo. Os resultados encontrados apontam a necessidade de intervenções dentro do âmbito hospitalar no sentido de minimizar conflitos e resgatar a conjugalidade. Este artigo, pois, apresenta algumas possibilidades de intervenção.

Gender Relations and Household Economic Planning in the Rural Philippines

This paper lies at the intersection of the considerable scholarly literatures on household livelihood strategies and on the role of women in Southeast Asia. Focused ethnographically on rural Philippine households engaged primarily in various combinations of fishing and farming activities, and analytically on how gender relations figure in the decisions that the co-heads of these households make regarding their economic plans for the future, it considers how the livelihood diversification that characteristically accompanies rural development affects – and is in turn affected by – the conjugal relationship.

Autonomy and Conjugal Love: A Reply to Golash

In my response to Golash I distinguish between two steps in my original argument. The first relates to the special value of conjugal (two-person) love relationships. I defend this step against criticisms, arguing that the two-person relationship provides a form of recognition that is of special importance to us and cannot be found in other sorts of relationship. The two-person relationship is one that, at least as private individuals, we have special reason to pursue. The second step concerns the claim that the special value of such relationships tends to promote the autonomy of those who have them. It is this second step that is important for the argument that a liberal state – one, at any rate, that takes itself to be in the business of safeguarding the pre-conditions of autonomy – could have reason to favour marriage or some form of civic partnership over other forms of intimate adult tie. However, I admit that Golash puts forward plausible – if anecdotal – arguments against this second step. I therefore agree that I need to be more tentative about this step than I was in the original paper.