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| The Basics of
Behavior Analysis
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| Love & Sexuality
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| OneScience
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Intimacy and Loneliness
A Behavioral Explanation
Public Commitment - We stand before groups of people and promise each other that we will remain in the relationship, and that we will continue to engage in behavior that will result in feelings of intimacy. We depend on these groups of people to hold us accountable to the commitment we made. Actually, it is more likely that we depend on the community to hold our spouses accountable to their commitment to us.
Legalization of the Commitment - We create a union in law that requires judges and lawyers to separate. This creates a significant barrier to dissolving the relationship. Overcoming this barrier may require more effort than would resolving conflicts in the relationship. Historically, separation wasn't even allowed by law. We have witnessed over the past several decades that, as divorce becomes easier, divorce rates increase.
Financial Interdependence - We don't simply share a residence with each other and split the rent. We place our names together on legal documents that make us responsible for the residence as a unit, rather than individually. Often, one member of the union will be the sole provider for the other's financial needs, while the other takes on the responsibilities of daily maintenance of the residence. This has changed in recent times as well. It is now more common that both partners in the relationship maintain their own financial independence. This also has reduced the resistance to dissolving a relationship when conflict arises.
Behavioral Manipulation - As with most things we enjoy, in time we come to desire it less frequently. It is no different with the feelings of intimacy upon which we began a relationship. In the beginning, we engage in the behaviors that build intimacy almost constantly. But as time goes by, we get comfortable in the fact that we are no longer alone. Loneliness ceases to be a condition we work to escape from because we have escaped it. Why would we continue working to escape something we've escaped? But from time to time circumstances will compel the partners in a relationship to seek intimacy again. At those times, they will return to the activities in which they engaged when they were building their intimate relationship. So, at any given time, the partners in a relationship are either seeking intimacy or avoiding it. Invariably, the times when one member of the union needs to re-engage the intimacy-building process will coincide with the times that the other member is motivated to avoid that process. This is when the members will begin engaging in behavioral manipulation to satisfy the needs they've learned to satisfy within the relationship.
Behavioral manipulation can take over an intimate relationship with potentially damaging results, on the next page we examine some examples.
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What's really going on between two people?
Are we defined by what we do...in private? |
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