Romantic Encounters Research Articles

Exchanging intimacy for favors and nude photos among ninth graders

Introduction: Sharing nude photos and exchanging intimacy favors transcends the threshold from hidden and private content into public consciousness. Ever-present is the differentiation between an image shared by consent and those not consented to and distributed as part of harassment, revenge and abuse. Similarly, the continuum of exchanging intimacy moves across normative boundaries some see as unproblematic and occur in many sexual and romantic encounters, while others can be experienced as problematic. The purpose of this quantitative study is in a low-risk setting to investigate basic characteristics in the spread of the phenomenon of sugar-dating and nude photo sharing among adolescents. Methods: An anonymous questionnaire was sent to all 9th grade classes at schools in a single Danish municipality for three consecutive years from 2020 to 2022 with pupils and teachers not notified in advance. The survey included questions on gender identity, sugar-dating, sharing nude photos, and, from 2022, consent and setting up boundaries to sex. Results: Of 729 pupils 541 (74%) answered the questionnaire. More pupils with sexual debut sent nude photos of themselves via tablet/phones/computers, received nude photos and had passed them on than those without sexual debut, while no gender difference was found. More than four times as many pupils had received nude photos than pupils who had sent nudes of themselves. Ten percent stated they had exchanged intimacy for favors like presents or entry to parties; the intimacy act was spelled out as oral sex, hand job or sexual intercourse (vaginal penetration). Sugar-dating and knowledge hereof were associated with sexual debut but was not exclusively performed by debutants. Of those who gave sexual favors, 40% were non-debutant pupils. Conclusion: The survey found a 10 % prevalence of sugar-dating and 53 % receiving nude photos amongst 9th graders. The implication of the phenomena on behavior has obvious perspectives on adolescents’ mental and physical health.

The Power of a 😉: Emojis Reducing Ambiguity in Digitally Mediated Romantic Encounters

Digital technology has long provided new ways of initiating romantic relationships as people communicate through text messages, social media, and dating applications. Emojis have been widely adopted as a means of conveying nonverbal cues in digital communication. However, what role do platform‐provided social cues, such as emojis, play in fostering or impeding clear communication and shared romantic expectations from a flirtatious text message conversation? In this study, 713 college students were randomly assigned to read a Snapchat conversation with or without emojis and, they were subsequently asked to infer the characters' thoughts and feelings, clarity of the characters' intentions, and indicate their own discomfort with receiving a similar Snapchat message. The results showed that emojis increase the clarity of the main character's intentions. Moreover, the participants' cognitive efforts, the extent to which they were emotionally affected by the conversation, and the presence of emojis reduced comfort level with receiving a similar Snapchat message. These findings suggest that emojis provide clarity to romantic conversations, which can amplify the interpersonal discomfort of receiving text‐based sexual overtures.

Chineseness in Sino-Malay printing: a triptych of self-criticism

ABSTRACT From late-colonial times, Chinese-Indonesian writers began formulating competing notions of belonging and diasporic identity. Two political ideologies coexisted. The first and oldest was rooted in the ideals of the 1911 Revolution and encouraged the Indies Chinese to devote themselves to the “fatherland.” This movement attempted to resinicise those culturally hybrid Peranakan families in particular. The second group perceived the Indonesian archipelago as its home and advocated for more integration into the Indies society, often in solidarity with Indigenous people. The resulting tensions manifested themselves on the pages of vernacular publications. This article juxtaposes journalism, fiction and poetry as mutually reinforcing platforms to articulate, problematise and debate Chineseness. These genres and the slightly different messages they produced reveal evolving worldviews and a lack of consensus as key Indies Chinese experiences. Periodicals started exhibiting a greater diversity of opinions by the 1930s. A similar tendency is seen in novels and short stories in which pro-China and pro-Indies factions were often criticised in roughly equal measure. These fictionalised debates offer valuable insights into society’s faults and fissures. Fiction is relevant as it grappled with otherwise elusive social taboos, such as romantic encounters between different communities. Lastly, poetry was the genre par excellence to express frustration, aided by the rhetorical devices of sarcasm and translingual creativity. Across these genres, language proves crucial to understanding society’s conflicting expressions of Chineseness. While most of the discourse took place in vernacular Malay, acculturation through profuse borrowing from Hokkien helped to forge a discourse of identification and belonging.

The Life-Giving Efficacy of Beauty and Desire in Stoppard's Drama

Abstract: In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967), Arcadia (1993), and Indian Ink (1995), the playwright Tom Stoppard poses existential questions about the inevitability of both cosmic and individual disintegration and death. However, as characters from Arcadia and Indian Ink engage in romantic encounters and acts of aesthetic creation driven by desire, they interrupt the cyclical inevitability of death embodied in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead , and they oppose entropic disintegration by instigating encounters with beauty and desire that lead to reconciliation over time. This generative impulse of love and desire parallels Elaine Scarry's assertion in On Beauty and Being Just that encounters with beauty and desire are fundamentally life-giving.

The Life-Giving Efficacy of Beauty and Desire in Stoppard's Drama

Abstract: In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967), Arcadia (1993), and Indian Ink (1995), the playwright Tom Stoppard poses existential questions about the inevitability of both cosmic and individual disintegration and death. However, as characters from Arcadia and Indian Ink engage in romantic encounters and acts of aesthetic creation driven by desire, they interrupt the cyclical inevitability of death embodied in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead , and they oppose entropic disintegration by instigating encounters with beauty and desire that lead to reconciliation over time. This generative impulse of love and desire parallels Elaine Scarry's assertion in On Beauty and Being Just that encounters with beauty and desire are fundamentally life-giving.

Love Sick: Attachment Anxiety and COVID-Era Romantic Encounters Among College Students

The current research explored how attachment anxiety influences attitudes and behaviors in romantic contexts among single emerging adults during COVID-19. Study 1 ( n = 242) revealed that, despite increased risk perceptions, emerging adults high in attachment anxiety report decreased cautiousness and a greater percentage of hook-ups outside their pod/bubble. Attitudes about masking with a romantic partner mirrored those of low anxiety emerging adults. In study 2 ( n = 186), we used a quasi-experimental design to explore whether romantic (vs. control) contexts differentially impact attitudes toward masking. High anxiety emerging adults reported somewhat increased risk perceptions across condition, but more negative attitudes toward masking and less confidence in helping a partner mask in the romantic (vs. control) condition. Low anxiety emerging adults’ attitudes and confidence were unaffected by condition. Results suggest that emerging adults high in anxiety, while generally more concerned about COVID, appeared to reduce cautiousness in romantic contexts.

The language of champagne in nineteenth-century Britain

ABSTRACT Sparkling champagne has a uniquely multivocal register. In the nineteenth century it was a ‘new’ wine distinguished not just by the pop of the cork and the fizz of the bubbles but by the marketing language that evolved around it and by its metonymic link with Victorian social life. Building on Karrebæk, Riley and Cavanaugh’s 2018 assertion that food and language are ‘mutually constitutive’, I develop their four-way heuristic of language through, about, around and as food to stress the uniquely agentic quality of champagne. Using contemporary sources, the article shows how the ‘language’ of champagne penetrated all levels of British society – from the songs of the music-hall to the corridors of power. Uniquely among wines, champagne acquired popular nicknames. It was very widely advertised using language that focused on its associations with celebrity, power and status. Unlike other wines, champagne did not develop a connoisseurial language. To use Michael Silverstein’s term, it did not attract ‘oinoglossia’. Unlike other foodstuffs, champagne also had agency. Contemporary accounts of public dinners, domestic supper parties, romantic encounters and even marriage negotiations accord champagne a significant role. The sound and ‘language’ of champagne conveyed meaning and cued action as other alcoholic beverages did not.

Kissing has been part of romantic encounters for at least 4500 years

Kissing has been part of romantic encounters for at least 4500 years

Serological Analysis of HBsAg and Anti-HCV Antibody in Patients Received at the Mali Hospital Laboratory

Introduction: Viral hepatitis is a public health threat that has long been underestimated. This infectious disease is the seventh cause of death in the world and even ahead of HIV in terms of epidemiological prevalence. Objective: highlight the seroprevalence of hepatitis B and C viral infections in patients seen in the medical analysis and pathology laboratory department of the Mali hospital. Method: This is a prospective and retrospective study that took place from July 2021 to August 2022. This study included 1540 samples from eligible patients with HBsAg, Anti HBe IgG Antibody, Anti HBc Antibody, HBe Ag, Antibody Anti HBs and/or anti-HCV antibodies. Results: These different methodologies allowed us to have the results of 1540 samples concerning this study. The female sex was more represented with 62.92% compared to the male sex or 37.08%. The HBSAg was mainly found positive in the male sex with 5.45%. The average age was 38 ± 17 years with extremes ranging from 2 to 92 years. The age group 21-39 years was the most represented with 47.47% and the most affected by the positivity of the HBSAg with 5.65%. 64.03% of our patients were married and also with increasing positivity for HBS Ag and anti-HCV Ac with 5.91% and 0.91% respectively. The seroprevalence of HBV, HCV and HVB/HCV co-infection were 10.06, 0.9% and 0.84% respectively. Conclusion: Hepatitis B remains largely unknown to the general public but also to many medico-social actors. This lack of knowledge represents a major obstacle to prevention and screening. It also has as a corollary the stigmatization of people who are affected, in romantic encounters or at work in particular. A high seroprevalence of HBsAg obtained indicates the spread of hepatitis B in the Malian population.

Is it Still Ok to be Ok? Mental Health Labels as a Campus Technology.

This article uses ethnography and coproduced ethnography to investigate mental health labels amongst university students in the UK. We find that although labels can still be a source of stigma, they are also both necessary and useful. Students use labels as 'campus technologies' to achieve various ends. This includes interaction with academics and administrators, but labels can do more than make student distress bureaucratically legible. Mental health labels extend across the whole student social world, as a pliable means of negotiating social interaction, as a tool of self-discovery, and through the 'soft-boy' online archetype, they can be a means of promoting sexual capital and of finessing romantic encounters. Labels emerge as flexible, fluid and contextual. We thus follow Eli Clare in attending to the varying degrees of sincerity, authenticity and pragmatism in dealing with labels. Our findings give pause to two sets of enquiry that are sometimes seen as opposed. Quantitative mental health research relies on what appear to be questionable assumptions about labels embedded in questionnaires. But concerns about the dialogical power of labels to medicalise students also appears undermined.

Indeterminacies: Queer Tales of Love and Suffering

This is a meditation on love and suffering, pleasure and pain. Despite common sense, public discourse and scholarship narrating these states as diametrically opposed, the lived experience of queer romantic love cannot be disarticulated from the social realities of loss and pain. Suturing love and suffering is the metaphysic of indeterminacy, with the unexpected and uncertain marking romantic encounters and ambitions with precarity and impermanence. Drawing from vignettes gained through an ethnography on queer erotics in Sri Lanka in 2016, I explore how queer love manifests and perishes in the most inexplicable fashion, against the backdrop of structural violence and the vagaries of intersubjective relationalities. A sensitivity to indeterminacy enables an excavation of the elsewheres that inhere to and are conjured by queer romantic love, from the entanglements that live outside of the binaries of heterosexual-homosexual to the utopic futural imaginaries that are made possible at this site. Meanwhile, the suffering engendered by indeterminacy gestures to the precarities of elsewhere, and the transient nature of queer futurity. I engage scholarship on social suffering and romantic love to demonstrate how both corpora of literature are united at the site of the Sri Lankan queer figure, and how centring indeterminacy troubles epistemic projects that seek to know love and the lover with certainty.

Is (Actual or Perceptual) Personality Similarity Associated With Attraction in Initial Romantic Encounters? A Dyadic Response Surface Analysis

A central assumption in lay and psychological theories is that people are attracted to potential mates who are similar to themselves in personality traits. However, the empirical findings on this idea have been inconclusive. Only a few studies have considered real-life dating contexts, and the statistical approaches they applied have sometimes spuriously identified similarity effects. In our study, 397 heterosexual singles (aged 18–28) participated in real speed-dates (N_dates = 940). Using dyadic response surface analysis, we investigated effects of actual similarity (similarity between self-reported personality trait levels) and perceptual similarity (similarity between an actor's personality and his/her perception of the partner's personality) concerning the Big Five traits. Neither type of similarity was related to initial romantic attraction. That is, the empirical evidence contradicted the idea that attraction occurs when people's personalities match. We conclude that understanding initial attraction requires a deeper understanding of interpersonal dynamics in first encounters.

A Blaze of Colour——Romantic Encounters with Anthocyanin

A Blaze of Colour——Romantic Encounters with Anthocyanin

On Dankwa's Gift

On Dankwa's Gift

Exploring Sexual, Romantic, and Platonic Features and Functions of the Imagined Interactions Framework

Imagined interactions (IIs) involve interpersonal contact with another individual within one's mind. Although primary attributes and features of IIs are well-established in the literature, the present study sought to identify which features and functions related to sexual and romantic encounters, particularly with ostensible strangers. As part of a larger study investigating online dating during the COVID-19 pandemic, we asked 315 online daters to describe their IIs with someone they recently matched with on an online dating platform. Through a qualitative coding process, six key themes emerged from their responses: (1) imagined interactions as sexual pleasure and sexual release; (2) imagining plans that lead to sexual interaction; (3) planning for future cybersex; (4) imagining first-date scenarios; (5) compensating for in-person platonic interaction; and (6) the inability to have IIs. Implications for online partners who have not met offline and contributions to the literature on IIs are discussed.

Design fiction exploration of romantic interaction with virtual humans in virtual reality1

This article discusses the possibilities and potential issues with romantic and sexual interaction with virtual humans in virtual reality, using the design fiction Into thin air as a starting point for these reflections. Design fiction, a dramatized story by engineers/designers, speculate and critically reflect on advantages and risks with future technology. The primary purpose of the design fiction story utilized in this investigation is to highlight the advantages with air ship traveling (concerning climate impact), but since this was a concept that was difficult to dramatize, I choose to have that as a background setting, and instead foreground a bitter-sweet story about seeking love and sex in different virtual reality simulations during the time onboard an air ship. In most cases these attempts at sexual encounters are with actual women, but in one sequence I bring in the concept of virtual humans. The user wears a full-body haptic feedback suit, so he/she can see, hear and feel the virtual agent. In the design fiction and in this article, I speculate that such virtual agents could be created by including three agents to choose between (automatically generated by algorithms); A) a generic blend of celebrities, B) a recreation of the user’s high school love interest, and C) a recreation of a woman the user just had flirted with. In this article I compare this design fiction scenario with real-life VR applications, trying to explore the feasibility of different virtual human scenarios. Virtual reality developers have so far avoided sexual or romantic content in their experiences, possibly to a large extent because the major distribution platform – Oculus – is controlled by Facebook. Facebook have quite strict regulations concerning what is deemed as appropriate as content, and thus curates the available experiences quite strictly. Some experiences subtly hint at romantic encounters, such as the dating simulators Falling in love and Focus on you. I argue that these two experiences are highly limited and linear. In order to create a more complex and convincing romantic/sexual encounter, the virtual agents would need to be driven by a dialog system and AI. One attempt in that direction is the smartphone app Replika, a chat and voice based virtual agent that tries to give the impression of a caring friend (who can venture into text based sexual encounters). The conclusion is that it seems likely that the VR dating simulations will gradually evolve and become more convincing, primarily depending on Facebook’s control over the market, and the slow but steady progress in dialog systems. The possibility to physically/virtually interact with the beloved virtual agents and have satisfying intercourse seems possible, but not something to expect in the near future. Link to the design fiction: https://chalmersuniversity.box.com/s/xmo1dkihicfxgo6qo4zb2onez45m49fl

Boundaries and Desire: Censorship and the Articulation of Romantic Encounters in the Works of Radclyffe Hall

Radclyffe Hall suscitated vigorous antagonistic reactions among her contemporaries, readers and critics alike, through her rendering of same-sex romantic encounters, which often provoked heated disputes on the literary stage and in society at large, ultimately leading to obscenity charges materialised in the banning of the books under investigation. This article focuses on the articulation of love and desire between women in the works that this author wrote and/or published in the 1920s, pointing to the narrative manifestation of self-censorship, as well as to the workings of external censorship and to the effects of these personally inflicted and socially imposed boundaries.

Intimacy despite distance: The dark triad and romantic parasocial interactions

Individuals who score high on the dark triad of socially aversive traits—narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism—are prone to engage in short-term, non-committal romantic encounters. However, little is known about the transferability of this behavior to these individuals’ intimate interactions with media characters (i.e., romantic parasocial interactions). To close this research gap, we conducted a two-level-between-subjects experiment with young adults in Germany ( N = 116). Our results reveal that, although individuals who score high on the dark triad traits are particularly prone to engage in the specific sub-dimensions emotional love and responses to the media character of romantic parasocial interactions, they are not particularly prone to experience physical love for the media character. Moreover, our results show an alternative negative effect operating through an enhanced tendency to perceive a narrative as “corny” among those with Machiavellian and psychopathic personalities. To underline the similarity between parasocial and real-life romantic interactions, we further investigated the relationship between romantic parasocial interactions and an individual’s perceived relatedness gratification. The results suggest that interacting with and responding to the media character enhance perceived relatedness gratification, but that the romantic connotation of the parasocial interaction is not crucial for the feeling of relatedness during media reception.

First impression sexual scripts of romantic encounters: Effect of gender on verbal and non verbal immediacy behaviors in American media dating culture

The current study investigates sexual scripts in reality dating shows—in particular, how the gender of the communicator affects the choice of verbal and nonverbal immediacy behaviors aimed at making a first impression. Data were drawn from 331 couples of opposite-sex heterosexual strangers interacting for approximately 30 seconds on two reality dating shows: The Bachelor and The Bachelorette (2012–2019). As a result, a codebook of verbal immediacy cues ( N = 1623) and nonverbal immediacy cues ( N = 3021) was derived. The findings showed that verbal behavior encompassed 11 categories of verbal immediacy cues, while nonverbal behavior included 32 categories of nonverbal immediacy cues. Results also showed gender-related preferences for verbal immediacy behavior; for instance, men were more likely to outline the probability of relationship development and pay compliments; conversely, women were prone to intriguing men to arouse curiosity and interest. As for nonverbal immediacy behavior, men were predisposed to use clothes straightening, while women tended to communicate immediacy through head tilt, shoulder shrug, gaze down, gaze side(s), eyebrow flashes, hand-in-hand, hug, pat, holding hands in front of their bodies, and hair grooming. Nonetheless, the similarities between men and women were found to be greater than the differences. These findings could have wide-reaching implications for theorizing on social and cultural norms, gender stereotypes, and traditional gender roles in intimate relationships in the form of sexual scripts, along with contributing to the study of reality television.

As many rules as necessary, as few as possible. The traps of deregulated sex positive spaces with a focus on gender inequality

In order to explain suffering in contemporary romantic relationships, Eva Illouz (2012) looks at the consequences of the detachment of erotic and romantic encounters from committed relationships such as marriage. While this detachment is often referred to as a triumph of free choice and liberal loving, Illouz argues that it causes systemic inequalities between male and female agents. The article takes Illouz’s analysis as an incentive and a basis to study deregulated sex-positive spaces with regards to their risk to involuntarily reproduce features of socio-political domination. The discussion is driven by an interest in the question how options to explore sexual and romantic relationships can be developed without reproducing systemic disadvantages of heteronormative culture.