EVERYDAY LOYALTIES AND BETRAYALS IN PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS

Scholars typically have conceptualized loyalty (and its opposite, betr ayal) as a manifestation of individual dispositions of a state-like or trait-like nature. By contrast, the present study takes a dialectical perspective, arguing that loyalty is a social experience in which rel ationship parties face a cross-current of competing and oppositional l oyalty demands. As a consequence, when parties are loyal to one relati onal expectation they simultaneously are likely to be disloyal to anot her expectation. Two-hundred and seventy-three informants provided acc ounts of everyday competing loyalties of two kinds for a friendship an d for a romantic relationship: external competing loyalties in which o ne faces a dilemma between the relationship and some other demand outs ide the boundary of the dyad; and internal competing loyalties in whic h one faces a dilemma between one relational expectation and another w ithin the boundary of the dyad. We analyzed the 1092 accounts using th e constant comparative method, resulting in nine kinds of external com peting loyalty dilemmas and six kinds of internal competing loyalty di lemmas. In addition, findings address how relationship parties managed the dilemmas.