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Sexuality** Now |
Dating: Fun or Serious Business?
Types of Dating
■ SEX IN REAL LIFE Is Dating Dead on College Campuses?
■ SEX IN REAL LIFE Marriage and African-American Women Sexuality in Dating Relationships
■ PERSONAL VOICES Sports and Virginity Cohabitation: Instead of, or on the Way to, Marriage?
Marriage: Happy Every After?
Having Children or Remaining Childless
■ SEX IN REAL LIFE Eye-Rolling, Marriage, and Divorce Marital Sex Changes Over Time
Marriages in Later Life Extramarital Affairs: “It Just Happened”
Open Marriages: Sexual Adventuring
■ SEX IN REAL LIFE What Is Polyamory?
Marriages in Other Cultures
■ HUMAN SEXUALITY IN A DIVERSE WORLD Arranged Marriage
Same-Sex Relationships
Sexuality in Same-Sex Relationships Same-Sex Marriage
■ PERSONAL VOICES Same-Sex Marriage Same-Sex Relationships in Other Cultures
Divorce: Whose Fault or No-Fault?
■ HUMAN SEXUALITY IN A DIVERSE WORLD Reasons for Divorce in Four Cultures
Why Do People Get Divorced?
■ SEX IN REAL LIFE Point-and-Click Divorce Adjusting to Divorce
Divorce in Other Cultures
Chapter Review
Chapter Resources
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et’s imagine that you meet someone at a campus party tonight. The two of you joke, laugh, arid talk the night away. Although you’ve just met this person, it feels like you’ve known him/her forever. You wish the night would never ettd, but eventually it does. What will your next move be! Will you call him/her! Email! Instant message? Hope to run into each other again? The relationship rules have been changing on campuses across the country. Today couples “hook up” and “hang out,” and dating relationships often aren’t as clear as they once were.
We know that every society has rules to control the ways that people develop sexual bonds with other people. Until recently, in many parts of the world, parents or other family members arranged for their children to meet members of the other sex, marry them, and begin their sexual lives together. The expectation was that couples would remain sexually faithful and that marital unions would end only in death. In such societies, adult sexual relationships were clearly defined, and deviating from the norm was frowned upon.
In our society today, people openly engage in a variety of adult sexual relationships, including premarital, marital, extramarital, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered relationships. (Note that a term like “premarital sex” assumes eventual marriage; for people who never marry, their entire lives’ sexualities are considered “premarital”!) These relationships can change and evolve over the course of a lifetime, and at different times a person might live alone and date, cohabit with a partner or partners, marry, divorce, or remarry. In this chapter, we will look at adults’ sexual relationships with others.