It would be trite to see young same-sex couples’ refusals to innovate with respect to sexual commitments simply as an illustration of how they mimic heterosexuality. Nevertheless, couples’ and partners’ investments in the link between commitment and sexual monogamy were clearly influenced by a sense of what mature committed relationships should be like. Even in the most secular cultural contexts sexuality has not been wholly disembedded from morality: how you do your sexuality can still be interpreted as saying much about the kind of person you are. As our partners wanted to be, and wanted to be seen to be, legitimate couples, it is unsurprising that they would model their sexual lives on monogamy. However, given that their monogamous couple commitments provided a certain kind of ontological order, it is also unsurprising that they were reluctant to move beyond the boundaries of the monogamous couple. The risks this presented for the ‘little world’ that partners had constructed (with the help of their significant others) could be considerable (cf. Berger and Kellner, 1964, see Chapter 5). In the following chapter we explore the issue of innovation further.
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