Faithfulness and Unfaithfulness of Cyber Cohabitation ¡VAn Example of iPartment

Chien-Wei Lee1 , Raie-Kuan Chang2

1 Graduate Institute of Information & Computer Education, National Kaohsiung Normal University

2 Graduate Institute of Information & Computer Education, National Kaohsiung Normal University

Abstract

The booming development of Internet and its characteristics of free from boundary of time and space had made it become the new media for making friends and interpersonal interactions. As cyber friendship and cyber romance became unexceptional, cyber cohabitation was the fresh concept. In real life, cohabitation was a controversial issue, however, with the property of anonymous, people could temporarily deviate from the real life in the virtual world of Internet. Besides, even married or people in relationships could have cohabitation experience with others. For the users, such behavior was actually a representation of emotional unfaithfulness, however not all of them felt the same. Therefore this paper attempted to realize the cause of tendency of unfaithfulness for the users, to further discuss whether distinct perception of well-being by users would result in distinct perception of unfaithfulness, the influence on well-being from distinct attitude towards love and personalities, and the differences resulted in tendency of unfaithfulness and well-being from distinct attitude towards love and personalities.

Keywords: Attitude towards love, personality, well-being, tendency of unfaithfulness

1.     Introduction

The booming development of Internet brought new life style for human beings, since it broke through the boundary and limitation of traditional media, the Internet provided people with totally different mechanisms of communication and entertainment, and further made influences on interpersonal interactions. Rather than tools for acquiring information, Internet started to become an alternative for people developing intimate relationship. Cyber friendship and cyber romance offered a distinct experience and feeling in the virtual world.

The concept of cyber cohabitation introduced by the website iPartment was fresh and unusual. After all, the moral issue of cohabitation was still controversial in the real world. However, with the property of anonymous, people could temporarily deviate from the real life in the virtual world of Internet. Besides, even married or people in relationships could have cohabitation experience with others. For the users, such behavior was actually a representation of emotional unfaithfulness, however not all of them felt the same. Therefore this research attempted to realize the cause of tendency of unfaithfulness for the users, to further discuss whether distinct perception of well-being by users would result in distinct perception of unfaithfulness, the influence on well-being from distinct attitude towards love and personalities, and the differences resulted in tendency of unfaithfulness and well-being from distinct attitude towards love and personalities.

2.     Attitude towards love

This paper discussed relationships of love through comprehensive literature reviews, surveys and interviews. Lee introduced theory of love attitude in 1974 (Lee, 1977), considered the individuals should discuss the nature of love through their own style and attitude of love. Since there were few terms of love in English, Lee came up with color circle of loving and further named six kinds of love attitudes in Latin:

1.      Eros (passionate love): Eros refers to the romantic love that has tremendous passion, physical longing, deep intensity, and intimacy.

2.      Ludus (game-playing love): Ludas is called game-playing love. It is like the love of a knight for a princess. There are playful interactions here but little intimacy or deep intensity.

3.      Storge (friend love): Storge exemplifies friendship-based love. There is strong companionship and shared values here but little physical intimacy.

4.      Mania (dependent love): Mania is a combination of eros and ludus love. It is also known as the troubled love. This love has jealousy and dependence (often called co-dependency), great intensity, some intimacy, and many psychological symptoms related to the relationship.

5.      Pragma (practical love): Pragma, a combination of storge and ludus love, refers to practical or logical love in which someone actively searches for a partner with certain characteristics.

6.      Agape (altruistic love): Agape is also a blend of two other types of love, eros and storge. This is the love of altruism, of giving without asking anything in return, and of sacrificing oneself for one's partner. Many would consider it to be the purest form of love.

Lee considered love relationships of most people contained properties of six types of love above, only with distinct proportions. No one¡¦s love attitude was absolute and singular, and personality would also make influence on types of love. As for the other often seen research of relevance between attitude of love and satisfaction of love, Lin (1994) discovered the satisfaction toward relationship would be higher for individuals holding attitudes toward agape, eros and storge, and the satisfaction toward relationship would be lower for individuals holding attitudes toward mania and ludus, which is consistent with the results done by Davis and Latty-Mann (1987). In addition, in the research discussing love style of two-timers done by Su (2008), it discovered that the two-timers had higher scores in the aspects of ¡§pessimistic and conservative¡¨, ¡§play hard-to-get¡¨ and ¡§physical and sensory¡¨, while ¡§play hard-to-get¡¨ had no significant power in distinguishing people with/without two-timer experience.

3.     Personality

The background of theory of personality suggested each person owns a unique ¡§character¡¨ which was presented uniquely when dealing with external environment. Such unique character were formed through interactions among inheritance, learning and environmental influences.¡]Lin, 2006¡^

The recent theories of personalities included psychoanalysis, phenomenology, cognition, trait theory, behavioral theory and social cognition theory. (Pervin and John,1997) This paper emphasized the relationships between personalities and tendency of unfaithfulness, and therefore the five-factor model of personality introduced by Costa & McCrae (1992):

1.      Agreeableness (A): Trait indicating interpersonal style which involves the level of intimacy you maintain in your personal relationships and how helpful and sympathetic you are. People with agreeableness tend to be trusting, straightforward, altruistic, compliant, modest, and tender-minded.

2.      Conscientiousness(C): Trait indicating work style which involves your general dedication to activities; working hard, being efficient, and focused. Conscientious people tend to be competent, orderly, dutiful, achievement striving, self-disciplined, and deliberate.

3.      Extraversion (E): Trait referring to one's style of expression which involves sociability, positive emotionality, assertiveness, and activity or energy level. Extraverts tend to be warm, gregarious, assertive, active, seek excitement, and optimistic.

4.      Neuroticism / Emotional Stability (N): Trait regarding emotional style which involves the extent to which one experiences negative emotions such as worry, self-doubt, stress and tension. Neurotics often display anxiety, angry hostility, depression, self-consciousness, impulsiveness, or vulnerability (or some combination of these characteristics).

5.      Openness to Experience (O): Trait regarding intellectual style which involves the extent to which one is open to new ideas and innovative approaches, and has an active imagination. Some characteristics of openness include fantasy, appreciation of art, the tendency to have a variety of emotions, action (not reaction), and individual ideas and values.

Most researches supported certain correlation between love attitude and personalities. Woll (1989) discovered that personality could be more effectively predict ludus, mania and pragma, while White, Hendrick and Hendrick(2004) discovered positive correlation between conscientiousness and eros, storge and pragma, and negative correlation between ludus and conscientiousness & agreeableness. In addition, Chen (2002) suggested people with higher extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and lower neuroticism would feel a higher well-being. In 2008, Su pointed out personality had no significant power in distinguishing people with/without two-timer experience.

4.     Well-being

Modern western scholars had many terms for the concept of well-being, including happiness, well-being, subjective wellbeing, psychological well-being, objective well-being and life satisfaction. (Shih, 1995) According to distinct definitions of well-being, it focused on different aspects. In general, we could categorize them into emotional, cognition, emotional & cognition and mental health. (Shih, 1995; Huang, 2000)

1.      Well-being from emotional aspect: individuals considered well-being as an emotional reaction, and it would become greater with strengthened positive emotion, and vice versa.

2.      Well-being from cognition aspect: it laid stress on the influence of cognitive function on well-being, and reflected individuals¡¦ well-being through overall life satisfactions.

3.      Well-being from emotional & cognitive aspect: Andrews and Withey (1976) considered well-being was subjective experience of individuals, which included positive emotion, negative emotion and overall life satisfactions.

4.      Well-being from emotional health aspect: it considered well-being as a state of individual¡¦s health physically and mentally, and measure individual well-being through mental health measure.

From above, individuals with more positive activities and satisfaction from relationships with others felt a higher degree of well-being and satisfaction upon life. The research also pointed out certain that the extraversion and neuroticism in personalities could significantly validly predict the sense of well-being of individuals. Besides, the mix effect of love attitude and personality had significant power in distinguishing people with/without two-timer experience. In our view, there exists some logical evidence proved the correlation among well-being, personality, love attitude and unfaithful tendency.

5.     Unfaithful Tendency

The unfaithful tendency discussed in this paper denoted the level of users¡¦ tendency of unfaithful behaviors during cyber cohabitation. Lin (2009) defined unfaithful behaviors of the interaction of emotion or sex that violated the relationship boundary of emotion and exclusiveness with original partner under the circumstances of secret, unknown and rule-breaking. Barta and Kiene (2005) concluded four possible unfaithful motives: demand for sex, dissatisfaction, neglect and anger toward original relationship, few of them belonged to positive emotions. Other research also pointed out that love attitude & personality had correlation with unfaithfulness.

6.     Conclusion

The booming development of Internet provided distinct mechanisms of communication and entertainment, and further made influences on interpersonal interactions. Therefore, people seek satisfaction and social life that were unachievable in real life. Cyber cohabitation was another form of cyber friendship, the controversial concept of cohabitation in real life was tolerable in the virtual world, and provided alternatives for people seeking for romance. Some of them found true love, perfectly combine the reality and virtual, but some were seeking opportunities of two-timer, become an unfaithful phenomenon in real life. This paper pointed that people with distinct personalities and love attitudes had different feelings about well-being. This paper expected to made analysis and discussion through literature reviews, to develop a questionnaire and further survey the profound correlations deep within. 

References

English Literatures:

1.    Andrews, F. M., & Withey, S. B; ¡§Social Indicators of Well-Being,¡¨ New York and London: Plenum,1976.

2.    Barta, W. D.,& Kiene, S. M.; ¡§Motivation for infidelity in heterosexual dating couples:The role of gender, personality differences, and sociosexual orientation,¡¨ Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 22(3), 339-360,2005.

3.    Davis, K. E. & Latty-Mann, H.; ¡§Love styles and relationship quality: A contribution tovalidation,¡¨ Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 4,409-428,1987.

4.    Pervin, L. A., & John, O. P.; ¡§Personality: Theory and reseach(7th ed.),¡¨ New York: John Wiley,1997.

5.    Lee, J. A.; ¡§The styles of loving,¡¨ Psychology today, 8(5), 44-51,1974.

6.    Lee,J.A.; ¡§The Colors of Love,¡¨Englewood Cliffs, N.J, Prentice Hall,1976.

7.    Lee, J. A.; ¡§A typology of styles of loving,¡¨ Personality and social Psychology Bulletin, 3(2), 173-182,1977.

8.    White, J. K., Hendrick, S. S. & Hendrick, C.; ¡§Big Five personality variables and relationship constructs,¡¨ Personality and Individual Differences, 37(7),1519-1530,2004.

9.    Woll, S. B.; ¡§Personality and relationship correlates of loving styles,¡¨ Journal ofResearch in Personality, 23(4), 480-505.1989.

Chinese Literatures:

1.    Chen, Yien-Gu.; ¡§Personality Traits, Real and Internet Relationships, and Well-being Among Senior High School Students,¡¨ Master Essay, NPUE.2002

2.    Huang, CHiung-Miao.; ¡§Discussion of students seeking stimulus motives and mental happiness,¡¨ Master Essay. PCCU,2000

3.    Lin, Yi-Wen.; ¡§Love Type, Jealousy and Relational Satisfaction,¡¨ Master essay, NCCU,1994.

4.    Lin, Kai-Chin.; ¡§The Relationship between Big five Personality Factors and Social Loafing,¡¨ Master Essay, PCCU,2006.

5.    Lin, Yu-Chi.; ¡§The Process of Trust Restore with Intimate Relationships in Narrative Research after Experiencing Love¡¦s Infidelity,¡¨ Master Essay, NUTN,2009

6.    Shih, Jain-Bin.; ¡§Discussion of Source of Happiness and Correlative Factors,¡¨ Master Essay, KMU,1995.

7.    Su, Chiao-Yin.; ¡§Comparative Research of personality, Love Style and Conflicts Strategies of Two-timers,¡¨ Master Essay, PCCU.2008