Unspoken, yet understood: Exploring how couples communicate their exclusivity agreements
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although monogamy (i.e., romantic and/or sexual exclusivity) remains the most common arrangement for romantic partnerships, there is little research exploring how couples communicate about exclusivity to one another. The current study assessed the ways in which couples discuss and negotiate exclusivity agreements, and whether those agreements change over time. Participants were 573 North American adults (mean age = 28.86 years; 52% identified as female) in romantic relationships who completed an online survey asking them to describe their current exclusivity agreements using both structured and open-ended survey questions. Open-ended data were subjected to inductive content analysis, and eight primary themes were identified. Although most (91%) indicated that they have an agreement to remain romantically and sexually exclusive in their relationships, only 43% reported coming to the agreement during an explicit conversation with their partner. More often (52%) the agreements were described as implied, meaning they had never actually been discussed. Of those with exclusivity agreements, 87% reported no change to their agreement throughout the relationship. Implications are discussed in terms of the value of direct communication between partners about exclusivity and infidelity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".