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When Two Become One? Communal Orientations and Their Challenges Among Married Gay Men and Lesbians
Sat, August 8, 10:30am to 12:10pm PDT (10:30am to 12:10pm PDT), Hilton San Francisco Union Square, Floor: 6th Floor, Nob Hill 10Abstract
Although a body of literature on same-sex marriages has begun to develop, it remains unclear how gay men and lesbians approach their marital relationships, what these approaches look like in practice, and what challenges, if any, gay men and lesbians experience with respect to these approaches. A well-established body of literature shows that gay men and lesbians tend to be individually-oriented in their non-marital relationships, but scholars have yet to examine whether they approach marriage in the same way. It is possible, after all, that gay men and lesbians may be more communally oriented to marriage given the still-dominant construction of marriage as a companionate relationship. In this paper, I draw upon in-depth interviews with a sample of 28 currently married gay men and lesbians to explore how they approach their marriages. Results indicate that many gay men and lesbians hold communal rather than individual orientations in that they see themselves as part of a larger unit or “team,” which is reflected in the ways they arrange housework and decision-making. However, many also recognize that a communal orientation can be challenging given their unique life experiences and individual personalities, which must be reconciled within a communal marriage. As a result, many invoke the marital work ethic to address these challenges, which most often involves communication and making sacrifices. Overall, then, these results suggest that the individual orientations that scholars have long found to organize non-marital same-sex relationships may not be as common within same-sex marriages. To conclude, I discuss two possible explanations for the different orientations gay men and lesbians bring to their non-marital versus marital relationships and suggest several directions for future research.