The study of same-sex couples and their relationships has grown over the past several decades. While great gaps in our knowledge still exist, the past 15 years have shown substantial interdisciplinary growth of the literature. The literature has proliferated so much that a comprehensive but brief overview is difficult to accomplish. This chapter will confine itself to a few central themes: courtship, maintaining relationships, dissolving relationships, and several problem areas including AIDS, intimate violence, and the political climate in the United States toward same-sex couples. With a few exceptions, our review is limited to research in the United States on gay and lesbian couples.

Nomenclature is especially difficult in these days of interdisciplinary research, since many disciplines have discipline-specific, nonoverlapping terms. Therefore, we will state our working definitions before our substantive discussion. The term “homosexual” describes individuals with a same-sex sexual preference; “same-sex” refers to all homosexual couples; “lesbian” refers to women with a same-sex preference; “gay” refers to men with a same-sex preference; and “bisexual” refers to individuals who are either sequentially or contemporaneously attracted to same-sex and opposite-sex partners. We ask the reader, however, not to reify these labels. These terms are tools to describe behavior. They do not describe strict categories of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, or the wide varieties of identities in between and among the different social-sexual arrangements people move in and out of over the course of a lifetime.