You have full access to this open access article. The article presents results of research on academic youth attitudes on love, intimacy, and infidelity in Poland. The research goal was to determine how modern adolescents define a relationship, what role is played in this regard by the sociocultural understanding of love they adopted, and how their ideas about relationship and love translate into faithfulness in the relationship.
The research was conducted using quantitative methods with computer assisted aided web interviews on an Internet channel supervised by Lime-Survey system. Factor analysis enabled distinguishing three analytic areas: relationship, infidelity and causes of infidelity. Within every definitional range, the number of variables extracted from the question pool was reduced to two dimensions.
In each case, the definitional variants clearly fit into a distinct dualism of cultural forms of love, which distinguished between romantic love and pure relationship. On the one hand, they look for romantic love, on the other, one can observe a need of sexual experiences and pleasures. Adolescents define infidelity in corporal terms, but they do not forget about its emotional aspect. Their opinions about infidelity point to a rather elusive nature of traditionally applying norms and prohibitions.
What is crucial in this regard is the way the relationship is perceived and the strength of emotional involvement and ties binding the couple. Deception and lies about intimate relationships may take many forms. Commonly, infidelity is understood as intimate physical contact with someone outside the relationship, including marriage. In this case one can talk about a physical affair, also referred to as adultery.
In a situation when intimacy is shared with a third party but there is no physical contact, one can talk about an emotional affair. Of significance here is the question of how love is understood. Love, as Eva Illouz notices, becomes nowadays a project subject to optimization, or even a cultural practice regulated by market mechanisms Illouz, These attitudes lead to further cultural influences shaping the character of intimate relationships, turning fidelity today more to a personal challenge and choice rather than a social or religious obligation.
