Faithfulness and
Unfaithfulness of Cyber Cohabitation –An Example of iPartment
Chien-Wei Lee1 , Raie-Kuan Chang2
1 Graduate Institute of Information & Computer
Education,
2 Graduate Institute of Information & Computer Education,
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.
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