First defined by C. R. Carpenter in 1942, “consortship” has retained a central role in the conceptual tool kit used by students of the mating behavior of multimale group‐living primates. Systematic coding of 48 published works revealed that a heterogeneous set of phenomena has been subsumed under the consortship concept, ranging from brief copulations neither preceded nor followed by other social interaction to long bouts of social interaction including no observed copulations. Furthermore, many researchers have used “consortship” without defining it, and only a minority have provided rigorous definitions. Inconsistency in the use of the consortship concept is problematic because of its widespread use in measuring male reproductive success and in formulating scenarios of primate, including hominid, behavioral evolution. As an alternative to the consortship concept, a conceptual framework is developed in which variation among male/estrous‐female dyads is characterized in terms of three functionally relevan...