Your Cheatin' Heart: monogamy at Miami University

Introduction and Relevance:

The Decline and Fall of the Famous "Miami Merger": Your Cheatiní Heart

QUESTION: Are monogamous relationships preferred by Miami students?

additional thoughts:
--does divorce of parents affect these students' perspectives?
--do Western students' opinions differ significantly from those of main campus students?

monogamy: (n) the custom that allows a person to be legally married to one spouse at one time. Appearing in two general forms, monogamy may imply a lifelong contract between two individuals that may be broken only under penalty--as prevails in the Roman Catholic and Hindu prescriptions for marriage--or it may imply that persons are required to be
monogamous but may change spouses repeatedly, a practice called serial monogamy.

-encyclopedia Britannica online

Monogamy is a cherished tradition in American culture, and certainly our generation experiences pressures to not only seek out monogamous marriages but also to engage in monogamous relationships even before marriage. Monogamy is the way of our parents, of the Church, and of the middle-class, suburban, nuclear family.

As current college students, we shoulder the expectations of previous generations: pick a career, get the grades, prove yourself to be smart and successful, and find a mate. Specifically on the campus of Miami University, the mad rush to find a partner drives herds of boys and girls up to the bars and to fraternity parties every weekend. Somehow in the blur of beer, music, dancing, and fake IDs, students hope that they will run into a Special Someone.

But will that person be their mate for life, or just for the night? Are Miami students looking for life-long love or just a good time? Is there a gender difference in expectations and hopes for a partner? Are male students less inclined to monogamy? Are female students just looking to get laid? And what is the genetic motivation for these desires? Has evolution instilled in us a predilection for monogamous relationships? Or non-monogamous relationships? Or, as the pendulum of sexual liberalism and conservatism swings back and forth over the years, has natural selection equipped us a flexibility which allows us to adapt to either monogamous or non-monogamous circumstances dependent on which situation will most help us and our offspring to survive?

According to Wright, it may not be human nature to be confined to one relationship. In fact, Wright proposes that "the anthropological record suggests that polygyny is natural in the sense that men given the opportunity to have more than one wife are strongly inclined to seize it" (Wright 91).

But what about a society that discourages polygyny, i.e. American society? If it is true, as we proposed earlier, that humans have the ability to adapt to monogamous or polygamous systems according to the potential for survival in those circumstances, then Americans must have adapted to monogamy for some reason, for some benefit that will help them survive.

Are all Americans perfectly happy in monogamous relationships? Here are some statistics on the state of love, sex and romance in America.

A survey of women subscribers by New Woman magazine yielded these results:
*58% of respondents confessed to having an affair
*21% of those surveyed report having frequently thought about having an affair. 31% report having sometimes thought about having an affair.
*31% of those surveyed reported having sex with one man other than their husband. 14% report having had sex with two men other than their husband.
*61% of wives who had resisted an affair and remained faithful admitted that they thought is was possible to be in love with more than one man at a time.

A Playboy survey of college students yielded these statistics:
*41% of the men and 54% of the women who responded described themselves as being in a steady relationship with one person
*39% of the men and 24% of the women who responded described themselves as single and dating around.
*25% of the men and 29% of the women reported having had three to five sexual partners in their lifetime.
*25% of the men and 24% of the women reported having had six to ten sexual partners in their lifetime.
*43% of the men and 29% of the women said they had met someone they couldnít resist while otherwise committed in a monogamous relationship

Are Americans living in monogamous bliss? Are Americans either repressing their non-monogamous desires or indulging with considerable guilt in affairs or adultery? And for what purpose? Certainly monogamy in this society is beneficial to our selves and our offspring because of the cultural approval it provides, along with material and financial benefits. A monogamous man or woman and the offspring of a monogamous union are given "upstanding moral citizen" points, and are therefore considered normal and worthy of a job, a spouse, a role in the community or church, and certain legal rights.

Furthermore, we are living in a capitalist society where resources must be earned and then distributed to one's dependents. Frequently, then, it is more profitable for a person to distribute their earnings or resources to just one partner and one set of children, as opposed to trying to distribute a limited amount of resources over multiple partners and sets of offspring.

Yet why, according to our hypothesis, is our generation and the population of this particular campus showing tendencies towards non-monogamous relationships and/or less serious or committed relationships? A variety of factors may be at play here:

-the high divorce rate of our parents' generation
-the Peter Pan syndrome: desire to delay as long as possible situations that imply growing up with a job and a family, i.e. responsibilities
-an unusual number of extremely attractive single people who are all interested in casual, non-monogamous relationships (probably the least likely factor)

Whatever the factors at play, Wright suggests that each generation experiences a trend in sexual morality, metaphorically described as a pendulum swinging toward and away from sexual reserve. Which trend predominates over our generation? Or are we possibly at the point of change? According to Wright, ěthe pendulum may tend to reverse when a large fraction of one sex or the other (or both) find its deepest interests not being served and begins to consciously reevaluate its lifestyleî (142).

Materials and Methods:

Our experimental design will involve distributing a survey to as many students on the Miami campus as we can (no number is too much-- the more the better!!). If we can collect as many surveys as possible, the surveys will reflect the opinions of all of the students at Miami much more specifically, so a large number of surveys is critical to receive diverse data. We will pass them out in our classes, at social gatherings, and have had some of our friends volunteer to pass them out as well. By collecting these surveys, we will be able to use Miami students' opinions and participation in monogamy as a major source of our data. The survey will address monogamy as a personal issue for each individual, where every participant will reflect upon their own relationships and their feelings about and participation in monogamous relationships. We have purposely made the survey unbiased towards heterosexual or homosexual relationships because this issue is not a major concern to us, as we are focusing on the monogamy within either or both types of relationships.
After distributing and collecting all of the surveys, we will compile their data. Our data will be shown in the forms of graphs, with categories to distinguish between male/female and western/main campus. Bar graphs will probably best display our data, providing a visual representation of the results. With this visual representation, it will be easy to compare and contrast the differences and similarities of the students ' opinions, as well as allowing us to organize our data in an easy-to-understand fashion.
Our distinction between students of different majors will be in an effort to compare the results of students involved in the Western program to students who are not. We believe this to be a significant distinction because the Western program is very different from the rest of Miami's programs. By comparing and contrasting the opinions of Western Students to the opinions of other Miami students, we hope to determine whether the Western program either includes and attracts students with opinions that differ from those of main campus students, or perhaps that Western allows for or results in students developing opinions that differ from those of main campus students.
We also plan to consider the role that divorce plays in the development of monogamy values, and have included a question on our survey that addresses the issue of parental divorce. We question the possibility of an increase in polygamous behavior or values in students whose parents have been divorced.
We do not anticipate the use of more materials for we feel the survey will be the most critical portion of our project. On a smaller scale, however, we can compare and contrast our survey to other surveys that have been published (for instance, Playboy's college survey). These other surveys will be used as material that will support or dispute our results.
There is a good possibility that we will be able to post some kind of electronic survey or public survey, so that people that we do not personally give the survey to will be able to participate in the survey. This would definitely increase the number of surveys we would receive as data. Public surveys could result in one of our biggest error considerations, however, for some people could try to sabotage our data collection by filling out more than one survey, or answering questions in such a way that our data would be farther from accuracy. Another error in our data could occur due to the over-simplification of questions on our survey, and given a public survey, we would not be able to clarify the intention and meaning of our questions personally.
We have already begun the distribution of or surveys, although we have not starting compiling the data. We plan to continue the distribution of our surveys throughout the duration of or project, until all of our data must be compiled and concrete to present. We will probably not compile the data collected until near the very end of the project, or few times throughout the project, so that we have huge chunks of data to work with at a time, and to preserve the anonymity of the participants. After compiling all of the data, we will be able to make the graphs and reflect upon them. The results and support/disproval of our project and hypothesis will be based on this data.
After establishing the results of the project, we will refer to our literary research materials to emphasize our results and explain them according to popular theory. Whatever our results may be, we will try to reinforce them with theories that Wright and others have presented regarding the biological and cultural emphasis on monogamy, and apply these theories to the relationships of students on the Miami University campus.

MONOGAMY ON THE COLLEGE CAMPUS:
A project on monogamous relationships at Miami University for WCP 222

1. Are you: male female

2. What is your academic division?
Western/Arch Arts/Science Fine Arts Business
Applied Science Education Other:______________

3. Do you consider yourself a monogamous person? yes no

4. How many serious relationships have you been in? none
1-2
3-4
5 or over

5. How many of these have not been strictly monogamous? none
1-2
3-4
5 or over

6. Have you ever ěcheatedî on a partner? yes no

7. Has your partner ever ěcheatedî on you? yes no donít know

8. Do you believe that you can be ěin true loveî with more than one person at a time? yes no

9. When in a serious relationship, do you: (check all that apply)
___still find other people attractive?
___still flirt with others?
___still pursue othersí affection and attention?
___regard many others as potential future relationships

10. Do you prefer people who:
___play ěhard to get?î
___are promiscuous?
___are conservative?

11. Are your parents divorced? yes no

12. If so, how old were you? younger than 2
2-5
5-10
10-15
15-20
older than 20

**THIS SURVEY IS STRICTLY ANONYMOUS, please do not put your name on it. Written comments or further explanations to your answers are welcome but not necessary**

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