Everyday loyalties and betrayals in personal relationships

Scholars typically have conceptualized loyalty (and its opposite, betrayal) 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 relationship parties face a cross-current of competing and oppositional loyalty demands. As a consequence, when parties are loyal to one relational expectation they simultaneously are likely to be disloyal to another expectation. Two-hundred and seventy-three informants provided accounts of everyday competing loyalties of two kinds for a friendship and for a romantic relationship: external competing loyalties in which one faces a dilemma between the relationship and some other demand outside the boundary of the dyad; and internal competing loyalties in which one faces a dilemma between one relational expectation and another within the boundary of the dyad. We analyzed the 1092 accounts using the constant comparative method, resulting in nine kinds of external competing loyalty dilemmas and six kinds of internal competing loyalty dilemmas. In addition, findings address how relationship parties managed the dilemmas.