The Dyadic Imaginary: Troubling the Perception of Love As Dyadic

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The Dyadic Imaginary: Troubling the Perception of Loveas DyadicDanielle Antoinette Hidalgo , Kristen Barber & Erica HunterVersion of record first published: 17 Oct 2008.

To cite this article: Danielle Antoinette Hidalgo , Kristen Barber & Erica Hunter (2008): The Dyadic Imaginary: Troubling thePerception of Love as Dyadic, Journal of Bisexuality, 7:3-4, 171-189

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The Dyadic Imaginary:Troublingthe Perceptionof Love as Dyadic

Danielle Antoinette HidalgoKristen BarberErica Hunter

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Available online at http://jb.haworthpress.com© 2007 by The Haworth Press. All rights reserved.doi:10.1080/15299710802170797

[Haworth co-indexing entry note]: “The Dyadic Imaginary: Troubling the Perception of Love as Dyadic.”Hidalgo, Danielle Antoinette, Kristen Barber, and Erica Hunter. Co-published simultaneously in Journal ofBisexuality (The Haworth Press) Vol. 7, No. 3/4, 2007, pp. 171-189; and: Bisexuality and Same-Sex Marriage(ed: M. Paz Galupo) The Haworth Press, 2007, pp. 171-189. Single or multiple copies of this article are avail-able for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service [1-800-HAWORTH, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.(EST). E-mail address: [email protected]].

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SUMMARY. In this paper, we offer a new theoretical framework for study-ing love and intimacy in the social sciences. We show that relationshipswhich are not dyadic are often rendered invisible in scholarly accountsof love and intimacy. After reviewing the literature, we apply our newtheoretical and methodological framework–the dyadic imaginary–toa case study: same-sex marriage and its relationship to bisexual andqueer identities. In this section, we explore how the dyadic imaginaryhighlights the assumed dyadism of marriage, its relationship to sexualpractices that do not rely on gender/sex binaries, and, finally, we discuss thesocial implications of our case study analysis.

KEYWORDS. Bisexuality, dyad, gender, love, marriage, queer, rela-tionships, same-sex marriage, sexuality

When love and intimacy are considered across disciplines, the dyador couple remains a definitional or assumed feature of intimate and sex-ual relationships. The dyad serves as an institution that “constitutes thestandard for legitimate and prescriptive sociosexual arrangements”(Ingraham, 1994, p. 204). Euro-American literature on love, romance,intimacy, and kinship is largely based on notions of dyadic relation-ships, to the point that theory and research “circulate [the dyad] as ataken-for-granted, naturally occurring, and unquestioned” social phe-nomenon (p. 204). As a result, love, as it is conceptualized across fields,assumes the following conceptual apparatuses: in dyadic intimate andsexual relationships, love is conceptualized as legitimate regardless ofgender and sexual identities, in non-dyadic intimate and sexual relation-ships, however, love is conceptualized as illegitimate. Using the con-ceptual framework of Ingraham’s (1994) heterosexual imaginary, wepropose that sociological, anthropological, psychological and historicalliterature is not only replete with ‘a heterosexual imaginary,’ but alsoimbued with a dyadic imaginary. We define the dyadic imaginary as anideology or hegemonic concept that renders non-dyadic intimate andsexual relationship forms invisible and unnatural.

This conceptualization of love and intimacy through the dyadicimaginary influences academic literature in two distinct ways: theoryand methodology (Rose, 2000). Theories fail to address how those inmultiple relationships might “do love” and romance. Methodologically,when love and intimacy are considered, couples and/or dyads are over-whelmingly chosen as research subjects.

Hidalgo, Barber, and Hunter 173

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In this initial paper, we seek to explore how the “ruling ideas” of thedyadic imaginary are produced. The dyadic imaginary has anexclusionary characteristic and thus silences other relationship forms;these dyadic knowledges and practices have real social consequencesfor issues related to both other-sex and same-sex marriage, sexuality,families, parenting, and love. We aim to illustrate how social dynamicssuch as family networks, sexual practices, gendered practices,childcare, and household maintenance must be rethought and re-con-ceptualized outside of a dyadic framework.

Sexual and gender practices that necessarily challenge the gender bi-nary, for example, similarly challenge assumed notions and practicespertaining to dyadic love. As a result, the dyadic imaginary forces us toask the following questions: What would love look like when couplingis disrupted? How do those who engage in multiple relationships dolove and intimacy? If queerness, as it has been discussed as a state offluidity that transcends both sexual and gender binaries, necessarilyopens up space for problematizing the relationship between heterosexu-ality and homosexuality, what does/would queer love look like? Does adisruption of binaries (male/female, feminine/masculine, heterosex-ual/homosexual) necessarily upset a coupled notion of doing intimacy?How is this disruption played out in the current debates on same-sexmarriage as well as bisexual and queer identity? What different socio-logical methods would we have to use to study non-dyadic relationshipforms? While we do not address all of these questions in this paper, wehope to provide a conceptual framework-the dyadic imaginary-that willbegin to bring these issues to the forefront of feminist and queer litera-ture. While some of these topics have begun to emerge through variousworks on polyamory (Rust, 1996; Sheff, 2006), marriage (Shanley, Co-hen, & Chasman, 2004), kinship (Weston, 1997), and other topics, wehave seen neither a critical analysis of the existing literature on love andintimacy nor suggestions for necessary revisions and reconsiderations.

LOVE AND INTIMACY AS SOCIAL PHENOMENA

Romantic passion is a complex multifaceted emotional phenome-non that is a byproduct of an interplay between biology, self, andsociety. (Jankowiak 1995: 4)

Love is a highly contested and thus far unresolved social science phe-nomenon (Felmlee & Sprecher, 2000; Jankowiak, 1995; Johnson, 2004;McCullough & Hall, 2003; Robinson, 1997; Rose, 2000; Seidman,

174 BISEXUALITY AND SAME-SEX MARRIAGE

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1991). Many scholars have offered theories about love, but few haveventured outside of a Western definition of the “normal” relationship ordyadic framework when conducting thorough, cross-cultural investiga-tions of sociological patterns of love (Fisher, 1995; Jankowiak, 1995).In Love and Intimate Relationships: Journeys of the Heart, Brown andAmatea (2000) write that “the concepts of bisexuality are so fluid thatthey challenge social norms and mainstream thinking about sexualityand identity” (p. 263). Although they recognize the fluidity of sexualityand gender, they fail to redefine love and intimacy as it relates to thesemore fluid identities. Research on polymorphous perversities, variedsexualities, and the like further illustrate our impoverished understand-ing of love and intimacy in relationships as social processes (Herdt,1996; Jankowiak, 1995). There are few systematic and sociologicallyrigorous discussions on how relationships that fall outside of the dyadicnorm are intimately negotiated (Rust, 1996). Research on polyamory(defined as the love of many), for example, is in its beginning stages.

In terms of research on monogamy (Robinson, 1997), non-monog-amy (a contested term that has been criticized for reproducing the idealnorm, monogamy),1 polyfidelity, polyamory (Lano & Parry, 1995), andopen relationships,2 we know far more about dyadic romantic love thanwe do about romantic love in triads and other multiple relationships(Felmlee & Sprecher, 2000; Hall & Pramaggiore, 1996). As Munsonand Stelboum (1999) show, multiple relationships can take many forms,such as the following: group marriage, primary and secondary relation-ships, and casual sexual involvement with two or more people, just toname a few. This research, which defines love as necessarily dyadic,also often fails to complicate the ways in which love changes through-out the life course and across different levels of social analysis such asrace, class, gender, and sexuality for those in relationships beyond thedyad. Thus, in order to gain a better understanding of the social processof love, we suggest two modifications: (1) The definition of love mustbe expanded to account for relations both in a dyad and beyond thedyad; and (2) Analyses of love must be historically and culturally spe-cific; ahistorical and ethnocentric accounts will necessarily impoverishfuture social investigations of love and relationships.

Jankowiak and Fischer’s (1992) definition of romantic or passionatelove captures the general way in which it is understood and discussed inthe literature, both in anthropological accounts and across other socialscience disciplines:


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Romantic love is “any intense attraction that involves the idealiza-tion of the other, within an erotic context, with the expectation ofenduring some time into the future.” (p. 150; adopted fromLindholm’s (1988) definition, emphasis added)

Jankowiak and Fischer’s interest lies in this earlier stage of love be-tween two people where there is both a specific erotic context and an ex-pectation that this love relationship will endure into the future. Thelatter attachment phase of a relationship, however, is understood as con-sisting of duration, less emotional intensity, and a more friend-ship-based relationship. Throughout this paper, we remain committedto investigating the “erotic” phase of love.

While there is a dearth of literature on different emotional experi-ences (for example, love and intimacy) in most social science research,anthropologists are the ones who have conducted studies that challengewestern preconceived notions of kinship, monogamy, and sexual prac-tices (see especially Hua’s 2001 study of the Na of China). In addition,Jankowiak, Sudakov, and Wilreker (2005) recently conducted a studyof co-wife conflict and cooperation in multiple marriages, Goldstein(1987) studies Tibetan fraternal polyandry, Weston (1997) discussesnew kinship patterns among gays and lesbians in the U.S., Dunne(2000) re-conceptualizes gay fatherhood, and Strassberg (2003) com-pares Mormon Fundamentalist Polygamy with “New Age” Polyamory.All of these studies challenge Western fundamental constructions ofkinship, dyads, and heterosexuality while highlighting how some newfamily forms, while not monogamous dyads, can still be very gendered(Strassberg, 2003).

THE DYADIC IMAGINARY

Unlike many anthropologists researching relationships in “non-Western” contexts, academics trained in the West continue to constructgender and sexuality within narrowly defined binaries and thus renderrelations outside monogamy, marriage, and kinship based on heterosex-uality unreal or illegitimate (Rubin, 1984). Butler (2004) considers the“ideology” of the dyad, suggesting that the “dyad is an achievement, nota presupposition” (p. 146). Just as she argues regarding gender, any re-lationship (between two, three, or four people) is not a “natural” occur-rence but, rather, an achievement and social process that shifts andcontorts, both spatially and temporally. For instance, instead of concep-


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tualizing intimacy as static, we could think about it as a kind of “doing.”Just as we “do” gender (West & Zimmerman, 1987) in our everyday in-teractions, intimacy and love changes over time, space, location, and asour bodies change.

In other work, Butler refers to these new possibilities of embodied in-teraction as a “materializing of possibilities” (Butler, 1990, p. 272).Butler (1990) adds that our understanding and experience of the dyad isdeeply wedded to a fantasy notion of our “one true love”; however,those in dyads are actually, in reality, faced with their lover’s past rela-tionships, feelings, and desires that are not entirely related to the currentdyad:

But if we accept the desire for the Other might be desire for theOther’s desire, and accept as well the myriad equivocal formula-tions of that position, then it seems to me that recognizing theOther requires assuming that the dyad is rarely, if ever, what itseems. (p. 146)

Further, this “idea” of loving another, one other person, also necessarilyrequires an acceptance of your lover’s love of others, both real andimagined, past and present. Following this imagined formation of thedyad, while we imagine romantic love as necessarily related to love be-tween two people, the real unintended consequence of this imagining isactually not truly dyadic. As Butler (1990) shows, our love of another isactually the love of many others: “when one recognizes that one is not atthe center of the Other’s history, one is recognizing difference” (p. 146).

Butler is not the first theorist to challenge the dyad. In 1973, JohnAlan Lee wrote: “pluralism has yet to become fully incorporated intoour vocabulary of intimacy” (p. 6). The lack of pluralism in theoreticaland empirical scholarship on love and intimacy is still felt today. Fol-lowing Jankowiak and others’ definitions of love as necessarily dyadicand anthropological constructions of kinship as heterosexual (Weston,1997), relationships outside of the dyad are consistently rendered invis-ible. Mainstream theoretical frameworks do not inclusively account fornon-dyadic relations as they relate to love, thus definitions and researchon love do not fully address the nuances of personal relationships thatdo not fit a dyadic framework. In the next section, an historical reviewof the institution of marriage and coupling further illustrates the powerand assumed legitimacy of the dyadic imaginary.


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COUPLING HISTORIES:MARRIAGE AND THE CONSTRUCTION

OF DYADIC LOVE

Consistent with the problematic status of the dyad and love as notedearlier, marriage and families are not terms easily conceptualized withina binary. A majority of the scholarship on marriage, couple relation-ships, and families historically and currently remain structured within aframework of “one true love,” emotional intimacy, and heterosexuality.The couple relationship is traditionally central to our understanding oflove and intimacy in families. Also, current accounts of historical con-structions of families and love are often filtered though a modern lens oflove- and intimacy-based relationships. Even with historical accountsof families consisting of more than just a couple and their children (i.e.grandparents, boarders, others’ kin in the household), the language usedto describe these families persistently constructs the couple as central tothe family and renders other members as ‘outsiders within’ the family.

HISTORICAL ACCOUNT OF MARRIAGE/COUPLING:PROBLEMS OF GENDER AND SEXUALITY

It is important to understand and view marriage as an historicallychanging institution. The problem with the current debate in the UnitedStates regarding the state of marriage is that it fails to account for thedramatic changes that occurred already in not only who marries, butalso the shape marital unions take and the meanings they have for theirmembers. Not only has the place of marriage in an individual’s lifechanged over time, but changing gender roles and the creation of sexualidentities have also revolutionized the way people view themselveswithin relationships. In order to better frame the need to recognize thedyadic imaginary to expand our notions of love, we will provide a briefhistorical overview of the three major periods of marriage in the UnitedStates: colonial/preindustrial, the Industrial revolution, and contempo-rary culture. As we note the historical trends in marriage, we will alsodiscuss the changes in gender and sexuality that helped co-createmarriage as both dyadic and heterosexual at various points in time.

Marriages in early American history centered on family-based pro-duction and economic survival; they were essentially economic ar-rangements (Coontz, 2005; D’Emilio & Freedman, 1988). Partnerselection was based on finding an other-sexed partner who could help


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provide what was needed to maintain a family-based production sys-tem. Men sought women who were capable of having children and as-sisting around the home. Women wanted to marry men who were ableto provide for a wife and children, either through a small business orfarm. The combination of marriage being both a gendered institutionand one rooted in reproduction provided an early basis for marriage be-ing seen as a heterosexual institution. Both high infant mortality ratesand the need for help around the farm necessitated large families. In ad-dition, the family was not seen as a private unit. Often families hadboarders and other extended family members living with them becausesociety lacked the resources at this time to support individuals who werenot based within a family. Men and women’s relationships were primar-ily economically-based; strong family units were central to survival,thus marriage choices and childrearing were rooted in economic andpractical choices, not those of love and romance.

One of the first major shifts in how marriage and love were under-stood occurred during the Industrial Revolution and shift to Victorianideologies of love (Seidman, 1991). The relationships between individ-uals and their families were restructured in dramatic ways; individualscould now choose to leave their families of origin and support them-selves in the new wage-based economy. In addition to supporting them-selves, individuals were able to purchase many of the goods they hadonce relied on their families for, such as clothing, food, and shelter. Thisresulted in a shift in how individuals viewed their own family choices.Women were no longer tied to finding a husband who had assets andmen did not have to wait to inherit land before marrying and starting afamily; individuals had more control over leaving or staying in theirfamilies than ever before. The market economy allowed both men andwomen to leave their families of origin and determine for themselveshow they wanted to live their lives (Giddens, 1992).

This change affected the way people sought marriage partners. Vic-torian ideologies of spiritual or romantic love started to appear, withgood marital relationships being based in companionship (Seidman,1991). Couples were seen as spiritually connected to one another, sup-porting ideologies of the time that understood pure partnerships as onesnot based on sexual attraction. Rather, love was desexualized and seenas separate from sexuality; while sex was conceived of as a central andhealthy part of a marriage, it was also seen as a force that could threatenmarriage (Seidman, 1991). Although the concept of how people couplebegan to change, sexuality at this time was still primarily based on no-tions of reproduction and heterosexuality. While there is mixed evi-


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dence as to the norms surrounding proper sexuality within and outsidemarriage (see D’Emilio & Freedman, 1988; Seidman, 1991), heterosex-uality remained the socially proper way of doing sexuality.

With this dramatic shift in how families were created as a result of in-dustrialization, gender expectations for men and women started to shift(Coontz, 2005; D’Emilio & Freedman, 1988). The ideology of the sepa-rate spheres became more prominent among the wealthier white classes,with men and women each taking on specialized roles within the family.Men were members of the public sphere: they negotiated family mattersthat were located outside the home, such as paid work. Women, on theother hand, were constructed as being nurturers of the family whosesphere was within the home. With this, femininity was seen as pure andnoble; in terms of female sexuality, women were seen as not interestedin the purely sexual pleasures of sex. With this co-construction of gen-der and sexuality, women found it their job to make sure that their hus-bands maintained themselves as good sexual citizens (Seidman, 1991).

Contemporary expressions of marriage and love take their influencefrom earlier times. Yet, like the shift that occurred during the Victorianera, today we understand marriage and love as personal and individual.No longer are individuals tied to either their birth or marital families, re-sulting in many changes over the past sixty years that have greatly re-structured the way we view intimacy and marriage. Individualism andideologies of self-fulfillment manifest themselves in many ways and of-ten compete with marriage. For example, nonmarital cohabitation, de-lay of first marriage, and high divorce rates have lead some sociologiststo argue that marriage is becoming deinstitutionalized, or that the normsand purposes that marriage held are loosing their “power” and meaning(Cherlin, 2004). However, marriage continues to maintain and promoteheterosexuality and dyadic love as normative (Ingraham, 1999). Al-though the overall percentage of women who ever marry has declined inrecent decades, there remains a great desire to marry: approximatelythree quarters of American men and women have married by age 34(Fields, 2004).

Love today is constructed around personal self-fulfillment and hasbecome re-sexualized. Unlike the Victorian love that was seen as cre-ating a complementary spiritual relationship, today’s love is centeredon personal fulfillment and enjoyment (Cherlin, 2004; Giddens, 1992;Seidman, 1991). When a relationship is no longer working, it is ac-ceptable to end it and move on to a new love relationship. The idea offinding one true love remains prevalent today, despite the actualitiesof how individuals couple and uncouple. However, this “serial mo-


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nogamy” is socially normalized and enforced; sex with multiple part-ners is not seen as a negative thing as long as it is done within dyads,i.e., one coupled relationship at a time. The re-sexualization of love ishighlighted in the ways we discuss sexuality today. For example,many now understand sex as a way of expressing love. This can mostclearly be seen in the fact that sexual intercourse is often referred to as“love-making.” This re-conceptualization also makes it possible to seesame-sex intimacies as legitimate. While sex and love are now con-nected, love and sex between two same-sex individuals is not seen ascompletely illegitim famate (as long as it is dyadic). However, theserelationships are still held inferior to heterosexual unions in terms ofcivil rights and marriage law.

Gender roles have also started to shift, both within and outside ofmarriage. Individualism leads men and women to take on tasks thathave historically been designated for the other sex. Most notable is thechange in the ways women experience the world. Many women todayenter into the paid labor force and maintain employment even after mar-riage and childbirth (U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2005). While theroles women play in families have opened up new possibilities of creat-ing new identities for women, male gender expectations in marriage andlove are still based in more traditional ideologies. Hochschild (1989) re-fers to the delay of men taking on more responsibilities in the home aswomen spend more time in the paid labor market as the stalled revolu-tion; while definitions of what is appropriate for women become morefluid, masculinity is still constructed as dichotomous to femininity. Theissue of power in families remains consistent; men have the social andpolitical power to structure the family around their interests and needs.When all is said and done, at the end of the day it remains the women’sresponsibility to cook, clean, and raise children, regardless of any otherstatuses she may hold.

Early family accounts are often structured on heteronormative mod-els, even though these constructions of gender and sexuality were notcreated until more recently. The assumption that the heterosexual natureof these relationships equaled heterosexual identities and that love andintimacy were the foundation of these relationships is problematic be-cause these couple arrangements were not as much based in mutual loveand affection but instead reflected the social and economic situations ofthe time. It was not until production was removed from the family thatthe emergence of an ideology of love-based couple relationshipsemerged. At this time we also start to see arguments for interracial and


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same-sex partnerships; the ideology of “loving” another was thought tobe strong enough to transcend old-fashioned social markers for whomade an appropriate couple. However, consistent across the history ofmarriage and love, the idealization of the couple remains strong. Eventoday, when having multiple partners over the course of one’s life is notconsidered out of the ordinary, the foundational ideal is that of a dyadicunion.

While this overview highlights how marriage and love have beenhistorically constructed as dyadic, there is one illustration that sup-ports our larger argument: an example of non-dyadic love during theVictorian era. Many changes to how couples viewed marriage oc-curred during this time, which may have made possible one of the firsttimes that non-dyadic love was an accepted practice. Romantic friend-ships allowed a woman to be married to a man yet have romanticfriendships with other women (Faderman, 1992; Seidman, 1991).While there is some debate as to the romantic/sexual nature of theserelationships, this example supports the notion that moving beyonderotic love as dyadic is crucial to fully understand it. For example, thedebate with romantic friendships is centered on whether or not thewomen were in what modern terminology characterizes as “lesbian re-lationships.” While we do see some evidence of non-dyadic love, pre-vious scholars have maintained the dyadic conceptualization of love.The question asked regarding the nature of the women’s relationshipswith one another-i.e., a woman loves either her husband or her femalefriend/lover-remains dyadic. The possibility for the women to loveboth is silenced under the current hegemonic conceptualization oflove relationships as dyadic.

The dyadic imaginary has important implications for marriage and,in particular, the current same-sex marriage debate. The same-sex mar-riage debates today maintain notions of marriage being a heterosexualunion because, critics argue, the history of marriage is based on hetero-sexuality and childrearing. However, with the changes to how love andintimacy are viewed and practiced, it is possible to explode the myth ofmarriage as an inherently heterosexual and dyadic institution. Thus,heterosexuality as an identity did not exist when marriage became thenorm for couples to startilies. With the variety of options individualshave today in terms of how they want to live their lives, we cannot main-tain that dyadic unions own marriage.


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THEORETICAL APPLICATION OF THE DYADIC IMAGINARYTO ISSUES ON SEXUALITY AND MARRIAGE

Next we apply the dyadic imaginary to issues of same-sex marriagefor those who identify as bisexual and/or queer. We do so in order to il-lustrate how the dyadic imaginary exposes the assumed dyadism sur-rounding and reinforced through contemporary discussions of marriageand intimate/erotic sexual relationships. The concept of the dyadicimaginary forces us to move beyond taken-for-granted notions of eroticrelationships as existing solely within couples, unveiling the differencebetween ideology, i.e. dyadic relationships as sole legitimate (happy)relationships, and reality, i.e. the existence and experience of innumera-ble forms of desires, relationships, and familial units.

Debates concerning monogamy, non-monogamy, and other relation-ship forms are slowly becoming a part of discourse concerning sexual-ity, gender, and marriage. For example, in “Queer Parenting in the NewMillennium,” Nancy A. Naples (2004) notes:

In the gay marriage debates, many scholars, students and activistshave become ‘quite impatient [with gay marriage discourse],stressing that this normalizing goal would lead inevitably to as-similation into a heterosexual regime, undermine radical queer or-ganizing, and further marginalize those who did not fit into amonogamous dyad. (p. 680)

That is, as current debates concerning love, relationships, and marriageinclude and highlight same-sex unions, heterosexuality is made salientthrough the perpetuation of the heterosexual/homosexual binary. Also,while the same-sex marriage debate appears hyper-progressive, it con-tinues to marginalize all other forms of relationships people constructand experience.

Using Demetriou’s (2001) theory of the hybridization of the hege-monic masculine bloc, we can understand the same-sex marriage debateas a response to critiques on, for our purposes, hegemonic notions oflove and relationships. Demetriou’s theory of the hybridization of thehegemonic masculine bloc explains that hegemonic masculinities pickup and adopt attributes of gay masculinity that appear useful and do soin a manner that ultimately maintains hegemony. That is, the hegemonicbloc only shifts as much as is required to appear progressive, veiling thecontinuation of hegemony. The gay revolution of the 1960s and 1970sbrought practices of hegemonic society under scrutiny and dubbed them


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homophobic and exclusionary. In response to this criticism, thesame-sex dyad is picked up and adopted into contemporary marriagedebates in a way that makes it appear as if hegemony is disintegrating.However, as Naples suggests, making the marriage debate the same-sexmarriage debate continues to render invisible and illegitimate all otherforms of relationships, including those that are typified by non-monog-amous dyadic erotic love. Thus, hegemony is shifting, but only insofaras it is able to maintain dyadic gender and sexual binaries. It leaves in-tact both the heterosexual/homosexual binary and the dyadic imaginary.The question then becomes, does same-sex marriage challengehegemonic notions of relationships? We suggest not.

This argument is in no way meant to marginalize the strides gays andlesbians have made within a society that institutionalizes heterosexual-ity in many ways, shapes, and forms (Ingraham, 1999). It is also notmeant to suggest that marriage is in no way being deinstitutionalizedand that this deinstitutionalization is not progressive. Rather, taking intoconsideration the dyadic imaginary, we believe it is important to lookcritically at the consequences of the same-sex marriage debate andhighlight the ways it veils the exclusion of all other forms of love andrelationships, including non-dyadic.

BISEXUALITY AND THE MARRIAGE DEBATE

Bringing bisexuality into contemporary debates on sexuality andmarriage may superficially appear to complicate the relationship be-tween sexuality, marriage, and the dyad. However, a closer analysis re-veals that both bisexuality and marriage are problematic concepts. Thisis because shifts in personal meanings and experiences of love, desire,family, sexuality, and gender over time reflect social hegemonic ideolo-gies that require people fit into narrowly defined gender and sexual bi-naries in order to participate in public, state-defined marriageceremonies.

It may be tempting to argue that because the marriage debate is con-structed along the lines of gay/straight, those who identify as bisexualare necessarily left out. But are they? If bisexuality is understood asone’s coupling with either a same-sex or other-sex partner, and whosepartners are divided by time, does bisexuality challenge/queer the con-temporary marriage debate or does it fit right in? It is important to notethat gender identities and experiences do not always reflect thewoman/man binary. However, for the purposes of this paper and for dis-


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cussion of the contemporary marriage debate as it relates to sexuality,we problematize same-sex and other-sex couplings because they rein-force an inaccurate gender binary.

Even if we intellectually understand non-dyadic love to include thosewhose partners are separated only by time (Anapol, 1997), perhapseven lengths of time, such non-dyadic love does nothing to challengethe current marriage debate. This is because state defined marriageand the marriage debate has not yet discussed gender and sexuality in amanner that focuses on embodiment and not identity. The state basesthe right to marry on the outward appearance of gender and sexuality,therefore a person who identifies as bisexual can indeed marry as longas it is with someone who embodies the other-sex, or, in Massachusetts,also the same-sex. The only stipulation then becomes that of a dyad. Bi-sexuality perpetuates dyadic notions of coupledom and love, leavingunchallenged female/male, femininity/masculinity, and heterosexual/homosexual binaries.

Ultimately, bisexuality perpetuates the dyadic notion of coupledom.For example, a bisexual woman couples with and/or marries a man.Though she may have love for multiple people of multiple genders, de-spite the complex reality of her desires, she forms a supposed dyad, thusnot posing a challenge to the current marriage debates. This is becauseshe fulfills the requirements, posed by most states, to marry: one womanmarrying one man. Taking into consideration our new concept of thedyadic imaginary, we must ask, if bisexuality and/or queerness is in-voked as an identity that fits with practices of “loving” multiple genders(i.e., those who identify as a woman, man, transgender, genderqueer),how does one continue practicing bisexuality when in a “monogamous”marriage and/or dyad? Is it practiced at all? Do desires queer the rela-tionship and thus the marriage? Or does the outward appearance andpractice of the dyad sustain the dyadic imaginary? Is dyadism inher-ently problematic for those who “desire” multiple genders? How doesone continue to practice queerness and/or bisexuality if they are fullyembedded in a monogamous dyad? These are important empirical ques-tions that explore the complex reality of erotic desires, love, andrelationships and may only begin to be explored by taking the dyadicimaginary into consideration.

Bisexuality is technically invisible, but as long as it is understood andexercised along the lines of the dyad, those who identify as bisexual areindeed inadvertently included in the current marriage debate, as the de-bate now includes both other-sex and same-sex couples. Thus, using thedyadic imaginary as a theoretical framework, the incorporation of bi-


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sexuality into marriage debates does nothing to complicate the notion of“one true love.”

Bisexuality does contradict the notion of “straight” marriage, but nomore than does homosexuality. Thus, we suggest that the overt incorpo-ration of bisexuality into the marriage debate would not challenge orqueer it. We argue that it is not homosexuality and/or bisexuality inwhich the marriage debate should be solely embedded. Rather, by offer-ing the theoretical framework of the dyadic imaginary, we encouragescholars and activists to also think critically about the notion of the dyador the couple in order to further problematize marriage as an institution.Contemporary marriage is really an optimistic ideology that does not re-flect people’s real gender and sexual identities and practices. Marriageis therefore an institution that only guarantees state benefits and protec-tion to very few.

The current marriage debate leaves much unsaid, concealing the vari-ety of people’s real life experiences and thus marginalizing non-dyadicrelationships and families. As the institution of marriage stands today,even taking into consideration the same-sex marriage debate, manyfamilies are left without the ability to legally call one another family.This inability leaves people without rights to visit partners and childrenin hospitals and without the ability to share health insurance and socialsecurity with loved ones who support one another financially and emo-tionally. Ultimately, the current benefits of marriage, such as legal rec-ognition of the relationship, tax breaks, and other forms of legalassistance, are regulated to heterosexual dyads, with the exception ofMassachusetts that recognizes same-sex dyadic unions throughmarriage.

IMPLICATIONS OF THE DYADIC IMAGINARYFOR GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND MARRIAGE

Compulsory heterosexuality is to mainstream gender theories(Ingraham, 1994) as “the dyad” is to Euro-American theories concern-ing love, intimacy, sexuality, and kinship. Taking into consideration thedyadic imaginary, we agree with work that suggests marriage is a prob-lematic institution. However, for the purpose of this paper, we are notsimply interested in sexuality along the lines of gender, but rather plu-ralism and non-monogamy. If both the same-sex marriage debate andbisexuality reinforce hegemonic and dichotomous notions of legitimatelove and relationships, we posit: What sort of non-dyadic love and rela-


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tionships would challenge or queer the marriage debate? Wouldnon-dyadic love where partners are not separated by time or dyadic andnon-dyadic relationships that are not rooted in erotic sexual love, butstill intimacy and dependency, challenge the marriage debate? For ex-ample, we plan in a later paper to expand the definition of love as eroticto include those relationships that are not sexual but are still rooted independency.3 We will discuss these relationships as they are associatedwith both the dyadic imaginary and the contemporary marriage debate.

This paper is the first in what we anticipate to be a series of papers ex-amining the dyadic imaginary as it relates to notions of love, gen-der/sexuality, families, and marriage. Given that little scholarship hasexamined non-dyadic love, we hope that this initial paper provides aninvitation to other scholars to reexamine how we currently investigatequeer and non-dyadic love, especially in how it is practiced in everydaylife.

We are not interested in resolving the debate on marriage and sexual-ity within the confines of this paper. Rather, our goal for this paper is toapply our new theoretical framework in order to demonstrate the insuf-ficiency and inaccuracy of both contemporary literature and debatesconcerning love, relationships, and marriage. We aim to spark debateregarding sexuality, marriage, non-monogamy, and the dyad. Thedyadic imaginary helps us more fully understand what is left unsaid inthe contemporary same-sex marriage debate and queer literature. Leav-ing the reality of non-dyadic love and relationships veiled by perpetu-ally evoking the taken-for-granted dyadic imaginary, the currentdebates continue to exclude people and experiences from both the theo-ries and methodologies used to study intimacy.

NOTES

1. To further complicate matters, Deporah Anapol (1997) argues that serial monog-amy is, in fact, closer to polyamory than we would assume. She claims that those whoengage in serial monogamy (different partners over time), in reality, have multiplemates that are only divided by time.

2. Terms and sexual practices have been contested: “it is a point of contention in thepoly community whether ”swinging” can be regarded as responsible non-monogamy”(Lano, et al. (eds.) 1995: vi).

3. We thank Steven Seidman for his suggestions regarding the definitions and termswe are using throughout this paper. In future work, we will expand these definitionsand address deeper questions concerning how the dyadic assumption has remained per-vasive in research and writing on romantic love/intimacy.


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The Dyadic Imaginary: Troubling the Perception of Love As Dyadic

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