Fusional relationship definition of cheating

fusional relationship definition of cheating

But really (and this is the second definition) "Platonic love" refers to Plato's . To avoid "emotional cheating," I'd be forced to have a lot less. In a recent study published in Personal Relationships, Weiser and her colleagues explored how people defined cheating IRL and found that “it. When it comes to sex and relationships, potential problems are constantly brewing for couples. Though some may have a slightly different definition of what .

  • fusional relationship definition essay

How to differentiate oneself in the wide catalogues in which these websites have transformed themselves into? How to translate ichnographically the best part of ourselves? Living this experience took me closer to the people on the website.

fusional relationship definition of cheating

I was faced with ethical challenges once my profile had to be sufficiently credible and attractive, but it could not be a "trap". It would not be honest to create expectations for the possible dates only to disappoint them with my research intentions. The solution I found, after testing the website for a while using a profile with a nickname similar to my own name Lari Silvawas to create another profile, as Pesquisadora Researcher Pesquisadora was also a "trap", once in my presentation sentence I chose the ambiguous "exploring the field I reflected on this aspect a lot, but I considered that this kind of previous announcement would create an immediate bias, which would prevent me from knowing how many men would be interested in a profile like mine: Apart from the "winks" all other gifts are paid services to male users.

That situation made my commitment even more complicated because people accused me of making them spending money in vain and told me I should be more honest in my presentation on the website. Every time I received custom messages, I mean, messages that were written by the users, I answered them also with a custom message telling them about my research.

Some of them never wrote me again. Others were rude and few others, precisely 32 of them, agreed to exchange emails with me and with some of them this exchange lasted for months.

This article is about these mature men aged between 38 and 70 years old. Better, this essay is about masculinities, conjugality and technologies, whose field was consolidated in a website called Ashley Madison. This is a website oriented to sexual and love encounters among married people who want to remain married. However, this is also a text about methodology and ethics in researches oriented toward the uses of digital media.

In short, they were men who could be considered "successful people" in the mainstream values.

Fusion and Fused Relationships

Still, there was something about solitude 7 in the answers they emailed me. Avoiding victimizing them, I began to consider that our conversation about happy family lives, which were tensioned by the existential emptiness of those middle-aged men, could be a seduction feature, calling upon not only my solidarity, making me a kind of accomplice of their small treasons, but, especially, a captive reader of the reports they sent me by email and an interested interlocutor.

fusional relationship definition of cheating

Days before he gave me another clue also by email: Maybe because you certainly don't belong to this environment, despite being so interested in it".

Not being a native, using an anthropological term, was advantageous exactly because it presupposed another kind of hearing about what people were doing on the website. The emails were central as a means of communication for this research.

I had worked with digital media before. In my doctoral research 8 I collected significant part of my data in conversations I had on Orkut communities 9emails discussions lists, blog posts and MSN instant messaging.

The latter, because of its synchronicity, became at that moment a great tool for interview which often happened to be spontaneous conversations. It cost me a lot to realize that for this research that tool would not fit my needs exactly because of its synchronicity and the possibilities it opened for my interlocutors to ask for webcam conversations which eventually caused persistent harassments 10but those situations helped me rethink the means of dialogue that I would use and make me realize that those means could also base the exercising of a certain masculinity.

In other words, they had someone to interact with them. Sherry Turklein her research about the increasing use of media for personal communication, notes that the rapid interaction, the response to electronic messages received from people with whom we are not intimate with or even with people we never met outside the screen, is an enchantment factor.

fusional relationship definition essay

This is a different kind of interaction in relation to face to face contact, or, as Baym What is different about this communication, for many of my interlocutors, has to do exactly with the lack of specific social cues that force them to guess who a person is through written language.

What I like about it is what happens behind our eyes: I think that the seduction has to be complete: Adilson, the only collaborator I met in person, also enjoys the pleasure of that self-textualization game: We can only realize personally", he concludes.

Still, he is delighted with the tasty emails he receives from one of his dates on the website, his "friend from Santos" 12a woman who is more than 50 year old, who amuses him with the stories of her day to day life. When he saw the photo of her breasts, which she "prankishly" sent him, he was moved. He would not have approached her if it wasn't for her verbal sagacity, he confesses me, and, then, share with me one of her chronicles by email. The uses assigned to each media change over time because the very people who use them attribute them different meanings.

We might just remember our personal and professional experience with the telephone, for example. For those who were adolescents during the 70s and 80s that technology carried a sense that has been largely lost nowadays, not only for the new generations, as well as to other people who have a number of other media available for both leisure and for work.

Indeed, this is a line that was quite blurred in the routine of my interlocutors. I confess that this connected mobility used to invade my day in a disturbing way. Thus, protected by passwords or by tacit codes that stipulate the private use of certain devices, my interlocutors learned that communication made in transit could provide, also, fortuitous encounters at work breaks.

Fusion in Relationships

In one of the emails he sent me Geraldo justified the hasty writing: She is 46 and unmarried, unlike her adventure's partner, but she says so, "saying that they don't think I want to marry them. I don't want to. But this kind of relationship has a downside, right?

And we must learn that we will have to face Christmas alone, weekends too and many Skype conversations [laughs]". The relationship became possible, and muy caliente, in Lia's account, because digital media, portability and connectivity made it so. A different kind of sex of that she is having, also using Skype, with her foreign boyfriend. Her boyfriend lives abroad and she brings to their relationship many things she learned about emotions and technologies.

I like Bruna Bumachar's argument: As I have pointed out earlier, the emails granted me more control over the ways of interacting with those men. More than that, the emails allowed me to come back to the messages before answering them, unlike the instant messaging service MSN. Still, there was the possibility of being alone while immersing in the screen textualizing our subjectivities Illouz, yearning for the receiver's reading.

I found that there is pleasure in this process, not only for me. Adilson, a literature lover, 49 years old, professionally working with Exact Sciences, also felt some excitement in those permutation games which would precede the meetings what would make them even more interesting.

In reference to a great love he had in the late 's at a chat room on UOL website, he writes: The sociologist and psychoanalyst Sherry Turkle theorizing about the relation between the writing and the personal expectations of changes and transformations declares in an interview: In an important correspondence by mail and other forms of electronic communication, there is, on the one hand, the intensity and the fantasy of this kind of instant communication, but, unlikely a conversation, you can read and re-read a message.

A supplement of meaning joins the power of conversation. There is an aspect of the order of participation in online conversation which can be frequent and can facilitate the coordination among different and geographically dispersed people Turkle, I live this power in me through the pleasure my interlocutors said to obtain using the digital communication technologies to intensify emotions which were numb to many among them.

After all, what kind of man gives up "hunting" women to be "researched"? After all, who are those men that desire to be desired and, curiously, desire to talk about themselves to someone who declares herself "a good listener", but who is actually collecting research data with them?

The first two have recently separated; the latter has been a widower for three years. Despite having a girlfriend, Fernando, the older man that I talked with, does not feel like he is really committed.

The average wedding time is about 13 years. One should also consider, as many authors have already pointed out, that online and offline are spaces that determine each other reciprocally. The emergence of online services for married people dating and cheating asks for accurate consideration of the present, of the off-screen life. My collaborators would argue that romantic love ruled the engagements that today seem to bore them.

They are faithful to it, more than to their wives, and they are looking for a reunion with that feeling described as rapturous and theorized by Social Sciences at least since Georg Simmel's [] essays.

The faithfulness to this relationship model leads them to bet on the permanence of marital life as a secure foundation in a changing world. Marriage does not seem to be an institution which makes them unhappy. Despite cultivating the individual freedom, romantic love lost its transgressive and erotic qualities Costa,in order to fit the social logic of gender and family alliance.

In search of that lost dimension of romantic love they signed up in the AM seeking an emotion, among others, that is somewhat vague but which launches a good discussion about contemporary masculinities: This is an expression that acquires different meanings in the writing of eight among the 32 men with whom I interacted more consistently.

Symptomatically, they are also the ones who expressed more clearly the challenges to a model of masculinity that has been transformed by changes in gender relations more markedly in the societies of a Western matrix since the s. I tell Ricardo that many interlocutors I have give much importance to the writing skills of women they are interested in. While I am writing to him, I think about Luiz who told me de is 'turned off' by crass misspelling.

But Karl has the most eloquent text about the capacity of writing seduction. I reproduce an excerpt below from one of his messages in which he tells me about the ravishing passion he was living: We used to talk all the time, only through words. We felt so much desire for each other, a different desire because what erotized this desire were precisely the distance and the words. Always the words Karl, 41 years old, two marriages, 5 years in the actual marriage [at the time of the research], plastic artist and works with Communications Sarcastic, Ricardo does not believe in this "grammatical turn-on".

Not even in the possibility of the women subscribed in AM of expressing themselves in a textually fascinating manner. When I ask him if he is seduced by the messages he receives, his answer is caustic and reproduces, unintentionally, the classical dichotomy brain versus body that organized the distribution of power in gender relations in western matrix societies: You ask me how women textually seduce me? And I tell you that it did not happen, at least not yet. I 'textually seduce' them, seeking in their bodies the sensuality of our face to face meetings.

It is interesting to suppose that women in AM could seduce someone using only a keyboard. I guarantee that 'many images and few words' is the form of female expression. Using the keyboard, they send data not always correct data about their age, etc. In short, whether they are seduced through 'keyboard' or they make simple contact; they open their Gallery 18 and show their real power of seduction Ricardo, 46 years old, married for 23 years at the time of my research, engineer.

I suspect that Ricardo used to like to cast these provocations precisely to "feel alive" because of his criticism. I imply that the feeling revealed in this phrase is related to the idea of risk and to the notion of masculinity which guide these men.

Each one of his provocations made him feel the risk of the interruption of our relation. We even had some disagreements which led to periods of silence in our mailing exchanges. To some extent, all of them were under some kind of risk: However, many were betting on their ability to manage and control those risks. Members do not relate to outsiders the same way as insiders. Being a romantic interest however immediately makes one an insider.

fusional relationship definition of cheating

However, very differentiated people will not seem attractive to fusion-prone people. There is constant squabbling over what everyone 'should' do, even in minor issues. In healthy differentiated relationships, very few actions require consensus. Usually there is constant fighting but no resolution of issues. Alternately there is compulsive avoidance of any conflictual subject, the list of which grows longer in time.

Life becomes stilted and boring. Sometimes there are stretches of the latter with cyclical explosions of the former. There is a 'war' against true autonomy. If any member acts truly differently, he or she is deemed crazy or bad, and strong united pressure is borne on him or her to change back.

It is considered wrong for any member to thrive when others are not. While the most 'symptomatic' member doesn't dictate a ceiling on achievement achievement is often high among the over-functioning members he or she does dictate a ceiling on enjoying success, No one trusts their own desires, motives or impulses, and no one trusts the desires, motives or impulses of the others.

There is actual confusion about who is doing what. Participants, despite being obsessed with the traits and behaviors of the others, have a very difficult time actually describing what the others are actually like, or actually doing.

Without the vantage point of a self, others cannot really be seen. If any member is a strong narcissist, fusion will be present but the relationship is probably better understood according to my page on pathological narcissism.

Why does this happen? When people first come together the bond they form begins to create the feeling and experience of being in a relationship. One way of creating that sense of being in a relationship is through fusion.

Partners do this initially by turning a blind eye to the differences between them. As long as you are thinking the same way and feeling the same things and wanting to do the same things you can feel connected. However, when either partner expresses their differentness the couple, metaphorically, feels torn apart and suddenly separated.

This can be a hard transition and one or both of the partners may try to pull the relationship back into the illusion of safety, by acting as if they are one person again in this fused relationship. The feeling of being torn apart can activate intense anxiety, anger, and abandonment. Conflict occurs in all relationships and represents a difference in desire that is being expressed. In a relationship based on fusion conflict represents the possibility of the relationship ending.

One or both partners will either avoid the difference or coerce the other into conforming to the one experience or idea. Communication that uses criticism, debate, persuasion and control are all ways that try to coerce the other into being the same as you. Because we all have our own individual desires and feelings it is impossible to continue for any length of time in a fused state.