Loss of Social Support
Due to strong social disapproval of open marriages, people in open marriages frequently try to hide their lifestyle to family, friends, and colleagues. Blumstein and Schwartz note:
"Openly non-monogamous married and cohabiting couples often feel they are thought of as bizarre or immoral by the rest of their world. They have to work out their sex lives in opposition to the rest of society. They may have an understanding with each other, but they usually keep it secret from family, friends, and people at work." (Blumstein & Schwartz, 1983, pages 294-295).
Keeping their lifestyles secret reduces the amount of social support available to people in open marriages. Numerous studies have shown that social support carries many psychological and physical health benefits. Thus, strong social disapproval of open marriage may lead to a loss of psychological and health benefits for couples in open marriages.
Read more about this topic: Open Marriage Acceptance
Famous quotes containing the words loss of, loss, social and/or support:
“The cultivation of one set of faculties tends to the disuse of others. The loss of one faculty sharpens others; the blind are sensitive in touch. Has not the extreme cultivation of the commercial faculty permitted others as essential to national life, to be blighted by disease?”
—J. Ellen Foster (1840–1910)
“The greatest dangers have their allurements, if the want of success is likely to be attended with a degree of glory. Middling dangers are horrid, when the loss of reputation is the inevitable consequence of ill success.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art—and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position.”
—Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968)
“Parents everywhere, trying to bring up kids in a plugged-in, supercharged, high-tech world, need all the information and support we can give each other.”
—Ron Taffel (20th century)