Abstract
The article examines the relational organization of close relationships. It identifies ‘the intimate couple’ as central in organising close relationships. The analysis draws from 35 configurations of intimates and personal narratives of heterosexual Finns, examining who they cite as intimate and how their intimacies are organized and narrated. The analysis shows how living with a partner in ‘the family setting’ generates ‘exclusive family intimacies’ pushing other intimates, such as friends and wider families, further. Alternative, more inclusive intimacies are examined both within and outside the family setting. Those living without a partner often cite friends, parents and/or siblings as intimates. Outside the family setting there is no other structure for close relationships than ‘the individual’ and her or his capability to construct relationships. This leaves some in isolation. The article analyses the interplay between structure and agency in the contexts of intimacy, family and the contemporary organization of close relationships.
Keywords
Introduction
This study examines the organization of close relationships from a relational viewpoint as ‘chains of interdependency’ between particular people and relationships (Elias, 1978; also Emirbayer, 1997). From this perspective, relationships are seen as bonds between particular others, not in dyadic terms, but as embedded in wider webs of relationships.
Questions of intimacy and family are typically examined together. Roseneil and Budgeon (2004) challenge this association and suggest that a ‘queering of the social’, the decentring of partnership and an emphasis on friends in the intimate lives of people, is taking place in western nations. This calls for alternative imageries to the family-centred heterorelationary (Roseneil and Budgeon, 2004; also Stacey, 1996). I argue that it is essential to create ‘anti-categorical’ ways of analysing people’s relationships even when studying ‘mainstream families’. As Jamieson (2005) points out, little research focuses explicitly on the boundaries between familial and non-familial close relationships. In this article I take up this task.
I analyse close relationships and their relational organization from the study participants’ definitions of closeness with those others significant to them. Drawing from a systematic analysis of their configurations of intimates, I show how being coupled often means demarcating family from all other intimates, while those living without a partner often maintain a wider pool of intimates such as friends, parents and/or siblings. I analyse not only how close relationships are organized into intimate configurations exclusive to ‘the family’ versus more inclusive configurations, but also how the relational patterns vary depending on the people and their settings. Stacey (1996: 269) proposed that ‘the family’ was not here to stay, and McKie et al. (2005) claim it to be a flexible social category. I look beyond the category and empirically analyse the dynamics of the relational organization and the intimate nature of those relationships that people find the most significant. I treat ‘family’ as an empirical setting of relationships rather than a category.
In the analysis I was interested in interdependent processes involving both temporal and structural elements. In order to analyse the dynamics of change in the relational organization of contemporary lives, the sample includes participants who have been confronted by change, including disruptive events such as divorce and the loss of a spouse. As Widmer and Sapin (2008: 279) claim, ‘families on the move’ reveal something about the changing nature of family more generally. This is important, as changing configurations of people (Elias, 1978) are an elementary aspect of contemporary lives. In British sociology, qualitative research on personal relationships is rarely accompanied by a systematic analysis of their organization – however fluid that organization may be.
My analysis focuses on the interconnected dynamics and demarcations of different close relationships 1 and their intimate quality. It shows that living with or without a partner operates as an ‘order principle’ (Fuhse, 2009), organizing close relationships into exclusive or inclusive configurations of intimates. For the purposes of the analysis I define ‘intimacy’ in empirical terms as emotional closeness, but return to the question of intimacy in conclusion.
Data and Analysis
The study draws from two levels of data collected from the same 35 Finnish adults (23 women and 12 men, aged 30–76). The data document the study participants’ configurations of all ‘close or otherwise important’ relationships, their settings and participants, as well as their interconnectedness, interactions and degrees of emotional closeness. ‘Configurational analysis’ means a systematic analysis of the evolvement and structure of relationships as an interconnected whole (Castrén, 2008; Castrén and Ketokivi, 2012; Widmer et al., 2008). Second, the data contain two to three transcribed interviews with each participant, 77 in total, analysed as ‘personal narratives’ (Lawler, 2002; Mason, 2004), focusing on the self, significant life events and relationships.
The interviewees differ in terms of age, gender, education, occupation and life situation. They are all white and heterosexual, and reside in urban or suburban settings in southern Finland. Of the interviewees, 23 are either married or cohabiting, 21 have children (13 have minor and eight have adult children), 12 live without a partner, but 10 of these have children (five minor and five adult children). Seven live alone.
The study was designed to understand the selves and their personal narratives as embedded in chains of interdependency (Elias, 1978). In stable phases of life, the interconnected dynamics between people remain unrecognized and downplayed. Whether expected or not, change unpacks social embeddings of selves, making them visible for analysis. Moreover, analysing phases of disruption helps to understand the personal consequences of biographical events, such as divorce, from a structural viewpoint. About half of the study participants were recruited during or after phases of change. These included ‘ordinary’ transitions such as becoming a mother, as well as unexpected and disruptive life events, including the loss of a spouse through death or divorce, illness and the inability to work. Some were found from support groups or through a therapist offering crisis counselling at a local mental health clinic. Others were found with different strategies including direct contact, snowballing, voluntary organizations and an internet advert. The study followed the guidelines of a formal ethical committee. In the analysis I searched for differences in the empirical patterns of citing intimates without categorizing participants based on their experiences, living arrangements or other qualities.
The relationship data were collected with ‘name generator’ questions that identified particular persons and their position in the configuration of all personal relationships. Participants stated the emotional closeness of each relationship on a scale of one to seven (one indicating the closest possible connection and seven the least close connection). The analysis addressed relationships to those ‘intimates’ who were cited among the closest (value 1), investigating the patterns of exclusion and inclusion of a wider group of friends and families vis-a-vis the most intimate circle of people. The number of intimates assigned the value of one varied between zero and nine.
In explaining the relational dynamics of intimate configurations from a limited set of cases I first sought all alternative explanations that might challenge the centrality of the intimate couple and the family setting (Yin, 2003: 164). The sample was analysed from the viewpoints of gender, generation, level of education and family situation, systematically examining which circumstance would explain differences in the relational organization of close relationships. Regarding family, co-resident partnership and parenthood were analysed separately. The greatest distinction in the relational patterns was produced by the co-resident partnership, the couple, which as an ‘order principle’ (Fuhse, 2009) organizes close relationships into exclusive or inclusive patterns of intimacy. The cited relationships were further analysed as subjectively lived in light of the personal narratives.
Who Are the Intimates?
In terms of the entire sample, those most often cited as intimates by the study participants are co-resident partners, children and grandchildren (excluded from further analysis due to their small number). The first impression is that the closest circle equates with family of procreation. This reflects the sample in which the majority live with a partner and have children. However, some included friends, parents or siblings as intimates. While co-resident partners and children are almost always included as intimates, citations of LAT (living apart together) partners, siblings, parents and friends vary significantly. With few exceptions, ‘other relatives’, ex-spouses, work colleagues, neighbours, and hobby-related mates are not cited as intimates, even when included among significant relationships. Table 1 presents the relationships most often cited as intimate.
Inclusion of relationships among the most intimate
Out of the 23 with co-resident partner and children, 17 limit their intimate circle exclusively to ‘the family’. Similarly, of the 12 people not living with a partner, almost all include their children (with a few exceptions for grown children). The greatest difference between those with co-resident partners and those without is the inclusion of friends as intimates. Half of those outside the couple structure cite a friend as intimate (compared to one in 10 of those living with a partner). The order principle producing a family-exclusive relational pattern is ‘the couple’. Regarding intimacy, the ‘nucleus’ of the bounded family is hence not parenthood, but co-resident partnership. It is the key relationship organizing other close relationships.
Even in this small sample, it is apparent that when there is no partner, the configurations of intimates are likely to evolve in alternative ways that are less embedded in the family setting. Hence, people living outside the (nuclear) family do not just ‘lack’ family positions, but the relational organization of their close relationships follows a different logic.
Other differences in relational patterns were smaller, but interesting. Men tend to limit their intimacy to their partners and children, while some women maintain more inclusive patterns. The younger generation (30–45 years) cites friends more often among intimates (one in four), while the older generation (50–76 years) rarely does so (fewer than one in 10). Inclusion of friends as intimates rises with education: fewer than one in 10 with a basic education cite a friend, whereas a third with an academic education do so. Moreover, the relational patterns of the academic group vary more in general, suggesting the use of agency in organizing close relationships. The further analysis concentrates on the demarcations and nuances of the intimacies of those living within and outside the couple structure.
The Intimate Couple, Exclusive Family Intimacy and Alternative Patterns
Of the 23 living with a partner, 17 included only their partners and children (and grandchildren in the case of some older interviewees) as intimate, excluding friends and other family members. Although the group with a co-resident partner is diverse in terms of age, gender, biographical history, stage of life, education and number of children, partnered people tend to realize a similar relational pattern that I name exclusive family intimacy.
Living with a Partner: Exclusive Family Intimacy
Who realizes the common pattern of exclusive family intimacy? All the men and those with basic education cite exclusively their (nuclear) families as intimate. This is in line with survey findings from Finland suggesting that men are more exclusively involved with the immediate family than women, who are more involved with both kin and friends (Jallinoja, 2008). Also, people with lower levels of education are typically more family oriented than highly educated people who maintain active friendships (Melkas, 2003). In this sample, the six persons with an alternative configuration of intimates in the family setting are all educated women.
Typical of exclusive family intimacy is that other intimates such as parents, siblings and friends are assigned to further circles of closeness. There are two kinds of logic connecting the next circles of intimates and family. In the first, close relations with parents, siblings or family friends involved in family life are embedded in the family setting shared by the partners. The second logic is more individualized. In such cases other intimates are friends and sometimes also siblings (characterized as friend-like) not embedded in family life. These personal relationships not intimately shared by partners have individual embeddings and require negotiation in the family setting and active management by the individual. These close relationships originate from the self’s own biography, identity and own ‘foci of activity’ (Feld and Carter, 1998).
This pattern of exclusive family intimacy is now illustrated in two different cases. ‘Pasi’ is a 45-year-old man with a higher vocational education. He is married for the second time with no children from his previous marriage. He cites only his wife and three school-aged children as intimates. When asking about the marital relationship he responds:
My wife and I have had the kids for 15 years. It does drain you … There’s a song about marriage where they sing … That when the kids are gone, they sing ‘Is that you? After so many years, will you remember me?’ The idea is that we shall have to start all over again [laughing]. Now it’s all so foggy.
Figure 1 presents Pasi’s configuration of personal relationships (the intimates are highlighted).
Personal relationships of ‘Pasi’ (intimates, value 1, highlighted)
When mapping out his relationships, Pasi discusses his intimates: ‘My wife and kids are clearly close, obviously they are, and these others [parents, three siblings and a friend who is also his wife’s sister’s husband] are not as close, because they are like bystanders of a sort.’
Pasi’s life is focused on family and work. Spouses form a tight whole in child-rearing, characterized as ‘draining’ the intimate knowledge and felt connection between the partners. Pasi’s relationships with his wife and children are so ‘clearly close’ that is seems difficult to verbalize it. Exclusive family intimacy in Pasi’s case is about caring, providing and loving, but he longs for a future with more intimate sharing of thoughts and emotions with his wife. Jamieson talks about ‘disclosing intimacy’ when referring to intimate sharing of emotions, but notes that intimacy can also be based on a silent belief that the partners ‘mean the world to each other’ (1998: 7–8). Disclosing intimacy requires ‘distinct selves’ sharing their inner experiences (see also Castrén and Lonkila, 2004; Oliker, 1998: 20). Forming a whole in responsibilities of care leaves no space for such a distinction. Pasi’s next intimates are all family related and narrated as ‘bystanders’ of their family life. He underlines one of his brothers – a kindred soul – who has been there for him in times of disruption.
‘Maiju’ is an academic woman in her late thirties. She is married and has a small child. She has been married before, but has no prior children. She cites her husband and child as her intimates and singles out love as the key of family intimacy:
It is quite clear that my husband is the closest, and the child of course … [In intimacy, is love or emotional closeness more important?] ‘Well, I think love is, because there are so many close people in a way, but the love – there is no other love like I feel about my husband and child.
Like Pasi, Maiju narrates it as clear that her husband and child are her intimates. For those with family, ‘the family’ as the centre of intimacy is typically so taken for granted that it is not further narrated. It seems both the lived experience and the cultural expectation. Regarding the next circle of intimates, Maiju is more inclusive than Pasi. She includes five friends, one brother and her stepmother, who mediated her relationship with her father at the time of her divorce (her mother was already deceased). These relations are not embedded in the family setting but involve different embeddings and foci of activity (Feld and Carter, 1998), including her studies and hobbies, previous marriage, work abroad, years as a single woman and finally her current focus on mothering. Maiju manages various close relationships important to her, while Pasi is more exclusively family oriented. Despite the pattern of exclusive family intimacy, Pasi and Maiju have very different styles of relatedness (cf. Mason, 2004: 167). Exclusive family intimacy is a social and cultural pattern that is common for otherwise different people.
In exclusive family intimacy a clear demarcation between the family and others is maintained. The family is the centre of intimacy, while others are enveloped into further circles of intimacy, despite their sometimes vital role in people’s lives (cf. Spencer and Pahl, 2006: 136). The nature of intimacy between partners in the family setting was typically narrated less in terms of intimate sharing and disclosure, and more in terms of taken-for-granted love and a common focus on child-rearing. Conversely, close relationships with friends or siblings are often characterized as involving personal disclosure. In exclusive family intimacy the intimate couple forms the core of the relational organization. Instead of suggesting a shift away from partnership (Roseneil and Budgeon, 2004), this pattern testifies to the contrary in the setting of ‘mainstream families’. In this setting, friendship, even if less strictly embedded, is constrained by family commitments and their exclusive dynamics (Oliker, 1989). ‘The family’, rather than a flexible social category (cf. McKie et al., 2005), is a setting that structures personal life. However, some educated women maintain alternative intimate configurations even when living with a partner.
Alternative Intimacies within the Family Setting
Six of the partnered women maintain configurations of intimates within the family setting that are alternative to exclusive family intimacy. Their intimates do not equate with their (nuclear) families, and the relational organization of their close relationships is not embedded in the family, but is more individualized. Four of these women are in their thirties and academically educated. Their lives are temporarily centred around child-rearing. Three of these women cite friends as intimates along with their families.
‘Janna’ (38 years old) is an academic professional who is currently staying home in suburbia with their two year old and soon to give birth to their second child. Janna’s configuration of personal relationships is presented in Figure 2. She cites her husband, daughter, sister and four friends as equally intimate. Janna’s relationships to her sister and her intimate friends reflect different sides of her identity and biography. With her sister she shares the challenging experience of motherhood after professional work and her resentment toward their unsupportive mother. They talk daily, and Janna notes that she currently has more in common with her sister than her husband, who is focused on work. Her close friendships are embedded in several important foci of her life (Feld and Carter, 1998). Two of these originate from college and work. The other two are about sharing the same experience: infertility that Janna suffered for years before having children with assisted reproduction technology and her current focus on mothering. These five women are intimates with whom Janna can discuss her own feelings and individual aspirations (cf. Oliker, 1989).
Personal relationships of ‘Janna’ (intimates, value 1, highlighted)
Janna maintains some of her close relationships when her husband is at work, while other relationships require more negotiation. She recognizes her circle of close friends as somewhat fluid and reflects this in the interview. 2 Having intimates outside the family affirms Janna’s identity as a whole person, not just as a wife and a mother. Although her husband knows all her intimates, she likes to meet them outside the family setting. She acknowledges the potential tension accompanying the intimate disclosure of family matters and does not share the intensity of all conversations with her husband.
When mapping out her personal relationships, Janna reflects her intimates in relation to her self:
I really feel like drawing my husband and child as half inside me, because they are so close. I’m yet someone there inside myself, where no one else belongs, but it would feel strange to draw them outside myself. [There is no boundary?] No, there isn’t. … It’s like they are always there, no matter where you go. Friends and other people are separate, but they are part of the same. I can’t get rid of them. They are a part of me, but it doesn’t mean they are me.
Janna narrates her husband and child as clearly ‘so close’ as those maintaining exclusive family intimacy: family members are felt to be part of the same, rather than distinct selves. Family is not primarily about mutual disclosure, the ‘intimacy of self’ (Jamieson, 1998: 1), but about being part of a whole. In Janna’s account, however, a deeply personal I-perspective of the self is more vocal than in previous accounts. Janna asserts her loved ones as part of herself (Cooley, 1962: 824). The family is part of the self, not vice versa. The self is highly relational. When the self is so central, bonds with other intimates help maintain the parts of the self that are not about family. Extending the intimate circle beyond family and differentiating among the pool of intimates can be seen as ways to sustain more individuality (Simmel, 1950: 417). Janna exercises agency in an intensive phase of family life and maintains intimates of her own, balancing her (relational) self between individuality and family. Individuality here is best understood not as an innate trait of the self, but as a relational dynamic of agency sustained in-relation (see Ketokivi, 2010: 136). Janna learned the significance of intimate sharing with friends when confronted by the disruptive experience of infertility. Her relational style of having many intimates of different embeddings has remained the same.
‘Anna-Maria’ (32 years old, married with two children), is even more individualized than Janna. She leaves the closest circle of intimacy empty:
If being close to someone means total honesty, I could barely give that value to myself. It’s a bit scary, but value two is the closest I am going to give anyone. I keep up a certain boundary even with my spouse and kids. I don’t show them my darkest sides. I have my own space and that’s pretty important to me.
Anna-Maria is a bounded person. She assigns her partner, children and mother, who lives next door, as her next intimates, but does not disclose marital issues to her mother. She talks about family matters with her two friends, whom she assigns to a further circle of intimacy together with her father and brother. Anna-Maria challenges the pattern of exclusive family intimacy in two different ways. First, she does not allow unrestrained sharing and intimacy – in her case honest disclosure of the self – even with the family, and, second, she includes her mother as equally intimate as her spouse and children. The relative intimacy she has with them is about love and sharing of everyday life.
The sample also includes two women in their sixties with long-term marriages and grown children. These women divide their families when citing intimates. One excludes her abusive husband, but cites her three adult children as intimates. Her husband is assigned to the second stratum. The other cites only her husband as an intimate and differentiates her three grown children in three different levels of closeness. These women seem individualized in their definitions, but their narratives imply a lack of agency in their lived relationships. Their lives are dominated by abuse or mental problems in the family, as the account of ‘Silja’ implies: ‘I have wanted to leave and live alone, but I’m told [by the husband] that now that my daughter is ill, I can’t leave.’ These cases importantly point out that some ‘alternative’ patterns of intimacy evolve through agonizing family life.
All alternative intimacies in the family setting are individualized in the sense that family members do not share the same intimates. Alternative intimate configurations either included individuals’ own family members and friends or had bounded intimacies with family. Even when in part dis-embedded from the family setting, alternative intimacies have to be reconciled with the ‘meaning structure’ (Fuhse, 2009) of the couple and family relationships which are expected to be the most intimate. Alternative intimacies are examples of the decentring of partnership (Roseneil and Budgeon, 2004), but their family settings are not individualized; the analysed women are. They challenge cultural expectations and negotiate their ways through conflicting pressures to intimacies that serve their personal needs and aspirations.
For four Finns out of five, family literally means ‘intimacy’, connoting dimensions such as responsibility for others, togetherness and support. This idea is especially popular for women, parents and those with a partner (Paajanen, 2007: 23–7.) Exclusive family intimacy reflects these expectations. People’s definitions of closeness present their relational lives as more organized than their lived realities, but cultural expectations organizing people’s lives are real in their own right. The exclusive family intimacy which the six women above challenge is a powerful idea of family. It is part of the popular imagination of ‘the family’ that people live by (Gillis, 1996: xvi). For some, the interdependency it implies is too tight, and they seek alternative configurations that better suit their selves. It would, however, be hasty to claim that ‘the family’ has lost its grip. Rather, within the family setting, ‘the family’ is a powerful category in action, one structuring all other relationships (also Ketokivi, 2010). Instead, outside the family setting there is clearly space for friends and wider families as intimates.
The Intimate Configurations of those Living without a Partner
The study participants living without a partner (N = 12) include single, divorced and widowed persons with and without resident children as well as people in LAT relationships. Most of them have lived through uncoupling disruptions such as divorce or the loss of a spouse. When compared to the coupled, this group stands out as having more inclusive definitions of closeness. Half cite at least one friend as intimate (as opposed to fewer than one in 10 of the partnered). A third cites at least one sibling, and another third cites a parent (see Table 1). Living outside the couple structure does not produce a specific pattern, as ‘the family’ tends to do. On the contrary, it leaves space for diversity, personal definitions and agency. Parenthood or the parent–child relationship does not form an exclusive core of intimacy as the couple does.
Inclusive Intimacies and the De-centring of Partnership
Alternative, inclusive intimacies are maintained by very different people living outside the intimate couple. Their inclusive intimacies vary from citing one special friend, to the case of ‘Mika’, a single cosmopolitan man in his thirties who cites nine intimates, including six friends worldwide, his parents and his only sister. Mika verbalizes the tension between a tight family and the self:
I wouldn’t like to live in a family community. I couldn’t make it living where your private space is so tiny … There is tremendous pressure and if you try to be yourself there … the others don’t understand, it’s just so difficult, so bad …
Mika’s intimates originate from different settings. Some of his intimates live abroad, and the relationships are maintained virtually. The principle of inclusion is personal, and the structural pressure is low. A wide circle of close friends is important to him, although ‘not everyone can be close’.
‘Paula’ is a 39-year-old artist with a ‘family of choice’ (Weeks, 2000: 216) of three kindred spirited friends who are all assigned as intimates. In addition, her intimates include her recent LAT partner who is not part of the family. Paula has actively rejected the institution of marriage and lives alone, but shares both her everyday life and holidays with her family. Her intimates are divided into two separate circles of intimacy – the family of choice and the intimate couple. Paula’s family of choice includes a male friend in his sixties (her ex-partner from youth) and two female friends in their thirties and forties. They all have LAT relationships outside the family. For her intimacy is about ‘unconditional love and acceptance’: ‘These people know exactly the way I am when I’m at my worst. Yet they still accept me, they have chosen to be with me.’
Paula’s family is different from exclusive family intimacy, as it lacks the expectation of exclusivity. It has evolved through times of disruption and mutual support. Paula narrates the intimacy with her family in terms of intimate disclosure: ‘With these friends I can freely share what there is to share of each person.’ It is about personal bonds of love, sharing and emotional attachment between distinct selves (Oliker, 1998: 20). Social categories are not paramount, as the family includes different genders, generations and sexual orientations. Paula’s LAT partnership is about exclusive intimacy, love and sexuality.
Managing two separate, yet intensive intimacies takes agency and the ability to negotiate relations, as well as tolerance and trust from everyone. Intensive close relationships with individual embeddings tend to cause escalated conflicts between them (Feld and Carter, 1998). This is a tension Paula realizes, but it is openly dealt with. At the time of the last interview Paula was planning to move in with her partner. It would be interesting to know how forming ‘the couple’ now constrains her other intimate relationships.
Alternative intimacies often evolve through painfully lived circumstances. ‘Sari’ (two school-aged children) was widowed overnight at the age of 44. Her current circle of intimates includes a female friend (divorced, with two children). This friendship has been strengthened by mutual support in disruptive times. The two women live close by and share their personal and family lives with one another. Neither parenthood nor their friendship operates on an exclusive principle, but can be easily reconciled.
Another case of intimate sharing between female friends comes from ‘Seija’ who is a divorced manager in her late fifties. For her, divorce signified a loss of intimacy: ‘[in divorce] … you lose being close to someone’. Over time she has moved from exclusive family intimacy to an inclusive definition and practice. She cites a sister (labelled as ‘best friend’) and a female friend as her intimates. She indicates her adult son as the most significant other, although the relationship is not very intimate: ‘adult sons don’t tell things to their mothers’. For her, intimacy is about intimate disclosure and companionship. She shares ‘almost everything’ with her single friend and counts on her married sister for support. She now has a solid belief that ‘you can become friends with anyone’.
The intimate configurations of those living outside the couple were less structured than of those living with a partner. The relational organization of close relationships reflected personal preferences, agency and negotiated relationships. Close friends and family members offered intimate sharing of everyday lives, adult companionship and support. Family and friendship were overlapping qualities of relationships: intimate family members were described as friend-like and the solidarity between friends as family-like (cf. Spencer and Pahl, 2006). This means not only the inclusion of different categories of people as intimate, but a blurring of the categories themselves. Within ‘the family setting’, family remains as ‘family’, and friends remain as ‘friends’, but outside it relationship categories become more flexible. Categories are embedded in social settings: what holds in one setting may not hold in another.
Outside the family setting, personal relations and agency were highlighted, while given expectations and structural aspects were downplayed. My analysis suggests that family is a setting that both structures and enables intimacy. Living outside it not only allows but also requires agency in the active construction of close relationships. The social seems somewhat ‘queered’ as Roseneil and Budgeon (2004: 141) suggest, although inclusive intimacies are much more common for women than men.
Haunting of the Couple Structure: Disrupted and Lacking Intimacies
Five interviewees without a co-resident partner cite only their children as intimate or no one at all. These people have experienced disruptive events, such as contentious divorces or mental problems. Most have troubled families of origin and no safety net. Instead, professionals or fellow sufferers have stepped in as significant (also Ketokivi, 2009; cf. Spencer and Pahl, 2006: 148; Widmer and Sapin, 2008). Those separated from a partner have not been able to construct alternative intimacies. Their lives are lonely. Their intimate configurations lack ‘substance’, as ‘the couple’ haunts as an empty position. Their relational lives, not adjusted to being without a partner, lack both intimacy and support.
‘Salla’ (42-year-old woman, two children) illustrates this group well. Salla is currently unable to work for health reasons. She cites only her two children as intimates. She has recently separated from a seriously depressed man, but suffers from depression herself. Salla needs support herself and fears a relapse into a bad relationship. She has no family or close friends, but includes professionals and a support group for the depressed as significant.
Some people in this group had friends, but no supportive family. Their friends offered lighter adult companionship, but could not be mobilized in situations of need. The centre of the relational organization of close relationships was nearly empty, but their lives were too disrupted to actively search for new friends. Of the interviewees with disruptive life experiences, some had received both emotional and material support from their intimates while others had received neither. Some were able to change their styles of relatedness in adjusting to life without a partner, while others were not. The relational organization of close relationships is not fluid enough simply to adjust to changing circumstances. It requires resilient selves, agency and supportive relationships. In mainstream Finnish culture, the couple is central not only in its own right, but also in connecting people to wider families and social life in general. This is clearly visible in, for example, Pasi’s map of personal relationships. In a couple-oriented culture, losing a partner often leads to wider isolation. This dynamic is in part structural.
Conclusion
Empirical analysis of the structural consequences of ‘the intimate couple’ and family, both central in Finnish culture (Castrén and Lonkila, 2004), point out some ways in which micro-level relational organization, people’s styles of relatedness and agency are interdependent on wider social structures. The relational patterns of intimacy vis-a-vis the life situation are elaborated in Table 2. In this small-scale ‘mainstream’ sample, the intimate couple was found to be the order principle (Fuhse, 2009), the ‘nucleus’ of family that generates exclusive family intimacy. It connotes ‘the family’ that as a social category is not as flexible, as McKie et al. claimed (2005). For those who live within, it is a structuring mechanism demarcating the intimate family from all other relationships including friends and kin. However, what I mean here by ‘the family’ is to be understood in the context of intimacy, the relational organization of close relationships and their demarcation in Finland. ‘The family’, I argue should be understood in context. As an abstract category it has no consequences. At all levels it happens between particular people and their relations. Also its effects evolve as embedded in the setting.
The dynamics of structure and agency in the relational organization of closest relationships by their order principle, the intimate couple
Demarcating family as the centre of intimacy has some peculiar qualities. Partners and children are narrated as ‘clearly close’ without further explanation. On the contrary, non-intimate family relationships come with an explanation. The taken-for-granted intimacy is typically about loving, caring and sharing (cf. Jamieson, 1998: 9), which has no openings for other intimates. In intimacy, the centrality of ‘the family’ constrains all other relationships. In fact, contemporary family may be especially bounded, because intimacy gains its quality from exclusivity (Simmel, 1950: 126). This, instead of connecting people to their kin and friends, demarcates ‘the intimate family’ from all other relationships and concentrates the tight interdependency into the family setting. In this sense family is clearly not embedded in the kin, but in the couple.
The relationship between family and intimacy is a complicated one. The felt intimacy requires its participants to see only one another and not to feel that a super-individual structure is operating on its own (Simmel, 1950: 127–8). My analysis, however, suggests that exclusive family intimacy has a structuring effect of its own. The contemporary focus on intimacy, as opposed to given family roles, highlights the expectations people have of their families’ ‘performance’ of intimacy. As more weight is put on intimacy, more weight is put on family life as well. Intimacy then instead of loosening the grip of ‘the family’ adds to its structuring effect. Moreover, the expectations and realities of family life and intimacy are not easily reconciled. Perhaps this drives some partnered women to seek complementary intimacies.
Some academic women resist the structural pressure of family and maintain alternative intimacies in the family setting, either including their own friends as equally intimate to family or refraining from family intimacy. They exercise agency in organizing alternative intimacies, which are differentiated in a way that Simmel (1950: 417) identified as allowing space for individuality, or they keep their distance. While also affirming different sides of the self, intimate friendships enable partnered women to balance their relational selves between different relations and to loosen the tightly knit family interdependency. Intimate friendship is valued for the mutual disclosure of self, which in the family setting is drained by responsibilities. Female solidarities, which loosen the intense family relations, but do not act against them, may serve both the family and the self. This relational style can be characterized as a ‘postfeminist strategy’ (Stacey, 1996) to cope with the demands of family life without becoming only a wife and a mother. Intimate relations with different embeddings create tension that these women are willing to manage. Their families are not alternative; they are.
People living without a partner have a less structured organization of close relationships. Unlike the coupled, they often cite friends, parents and siblings as intimates along with their possible children. Many of them have a strong sense of self and agency in constructing inclusive intimacies. Although some had actively chosen an alternative configuration, for many, friendships had grown close in phases of disruption and mutual support.
Outside the family setting, queering of categories seems to have taken place: friends resemble family and family friends. However, not all study participants had been fortunate enough to have close relationships. Some without a partner still had a couple-driven relational organization that no longer had substance. After separation, they had not re-partnered nor been able to construct alternative inclusive intimacies. Their lives were isolated and lacking in intimacy.
In Finnish culture, ‘the intimate couple’ is a central principle organizing family life and sociability more generally (Castrén and Lonkila, 2004). In terms of the demarcation of intimate family from others, ‘the family’ constrains friendships and other relationships by pushing them to further circles of intimacy. Via vast chains of interdependency this inevitably also affects those living outside the family setting, as its exclusive intimacies have no openings for close friends or kin. The family-centred life of the majority creates a structural imperative either to get partnered or to actively build alternative intimate lives. If neither happens, people are left in isolation from close (adult) connections altogether. The willingness to create alternative intimacies may be connected to disruptive experiences, although those without a partner and with accumulated disruption tend to lack both the social support and agency in constructing intimacies that are not readily available to them. The fact that people move in and out of exclusive family settings makes people vulnerable. To belong to a closely knit community relies on the intimate family, and eventually the couple, which is fragile. To the extent that the couple is the bedrock of intimate belonging, life as a couple becomes intense. If the couple fails, the only one left to knit together the social is ‘the individual’. This inevitably leaves some in isolation.
This is my impression of the different dynamics of the relational organization of close relationships of (heterosexually oriented) Finns living in urban and suburban settings. The extent to which it is valid in other contexts is an open question. ‘The family’ as an image of exclusive intimacy seems rather appealing throughout western nations, although alternative imaginaries exist. I would argue that ‘the intimate couple’ or even family as an intimate unit does not have to be based on a gendered and heterosexual notion, but on a clear demarcation of intimates. It can take place in non-heterosexual contexts in which exclusive intimacy is valued. This seems likely also in light of Roseneil’s (2010) analysis of the couple as a norm of intimacy that in different European nations has been slowly detached from sexual orientation. The answer to the question of the queering of the social is not ‘yes’ or ‘no’, but ‘yes’ and ‘no’. An analysis of close relationships placed in their settings shows how contemporary personal lives are varied, but not free-formed.
I began with an empirical definition of intimacy as felt closeness, but after all, what is common to all different intimacies analysed in this article? What makes some so close? It is the sharing of the most significant aspects of your life whether that is children, home, an inner experience of the self, work or something else. It is letting others really close to the most precious.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and Anna-Maija Castrén and Riitta Jallinoja for helpful feedback on earlier versions of the manuscript.