New Intimate Relationships in Later Life

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate the consequences for linked lives of entering into new intimate relationships in later life. The empirical data is based on qualitative interviews with 28 Swedes aged 63 to 91 years, who have established a new intimate relationship after the age of 60 years or are currently dating. Theories on linked lives and individualization are used. The results show that children were generally supportive of their older parents’ unions and older individuals were often integrated into the new partner’s network. However, a new union also restructured the relationship chain so that time and energy were redirected to the new partner. Older parents preferred to be dependent on partners rather than children/others. A new partner was described as a source for autonomy and a way of “unburdening” children. Results are discussed in light of Western individualism generally and Swedish state supported individualism in particular.

Keywords

autonomy later life linked lives new intimate relationships relationship chain

Introduction

Initializing a new intimate relationship in later life has different meanings and consequences from doing so in young adulthood or midlife, when parents are still actively working and sharing households with children. The past two decades have seen an increased research interest in the subject of new intimate relationships in later life. Little of this research has concerned questions of how linked lives are affected by these relationships. What happens with the relationship between the enamored couple and their children, friends, siblings, and so forth? The purpose of this article is to investigate the impact of entering into new intimate relationships in later life on interdependent lives. How do people in the social network react to the new union? How are relationships to children, other relatives, and friends renegotiated?

To fulfil the purpose, we proceed from the principle of interdependent or linked lives, which is a central part of Elder’s life-course theory (see, e.g., Elder, 1994). Like the old proverb “No man is an island,” this principle stresses that people live and experience their lives in relation to other people, they are bound to and dependent on in different ways (parents, children, friends, etc.), and that important events in those people’s lives have an effect on lives linked to them as well and may change their lives significantly. Consequently, we cannot understand the individual’s decisions without taking into account the choices of important people around her or him: where one moves might depend on where one’s partner lives, how one feels in later life might be tied to the emotional state of one’s children (see, e.g., Greenfield & Marks, 2006), and a parental divorce earlier in life might have long lasting effects on adult children’s and older parents’ relationships (see, e.g., Daatland, 2007; Kalmijn, 2013). Conversely, important events in peoples’ lives, such as losing a partner or meeting a new intimate partner might have a significant impact on the lives of people around them.

Interdependent lives can be affected by the unique individual’s major life transitions such as when he or she marries, divorces, retires, and more. Hagestad (1988) has shown how transitions in one individual’s life create “follow-transitions” in other linked lives: marriage creates daughter/son-in-law relationships, divorce creates ex-relationships, and parenthood creates grandparental relationships. The effects that major transitions in life have for interdependent lives have been studied in previous research (Fennell, 2004; Hyde & Higgs, 2004; Kaufman & Uhlenberg, 1998; Lee, 2004; Marshall, 2004; Moen, Kim, & Hofmeister, 2001; Owen & Flynn, 2004; van Solinge & Henkens, 2005; Williams, 2004). However, this research has mostly focused on major turning points during the institutionalized life course such as entry into first marriage in young adulthood, birth of children, retirement, and widowhood. Studies on transitions in later life and their effects on interdependent lives has mostly focused on widowhood. Less is known about the effects of divorce and even less about the effects of meeting a new partner late in life.

Still rising divorce rates in later life are a demographic trend in the Western world generally, what Brown and Lin (2012) has called “the gray divorce revolution,” and repartnering is more common among divorced than widowed older people (Brown, Lee, & Bulanda, 2006; Davidson, 2002). Statistics from contemporary Sweden show that it is becoming more and more common both to divorce and to meet a new partner late in life and even more common to have experienced divorce at some point in life. Over the past four decades, the proportion of divorcees (prevalence) aged 60+ years has quadrupled, from 4% to 17%. Since 2011, the proportion of divorcees, 60 to 90 years, has even surpassed the proportion of widowed people in Sweden (Bildtgård & Öberg, 2013).¹ Generally, transitions in and out of marriages and other forms of intimate relationships over the life course have increased and as a consequence individuals aged 50 years and older have the most complex marital biographies (Brown & Lin, 2012).

Previous Research

Most studies about relationship transitions in later life have focused on the loss of a partner and more specifically on being widowed, although an increasing number of relationships dissolving in later life are in fact due to divorce (see, e.g., Brown & Lin, 2012). However, a growing body of research has also focused on gaining a partner, reflecting that this is becoming an increasingly important transition in later life. In the following we look at research about transitions out of and into intimate relationships in later life from three perspectives concerning linked lives, where the last one is the most relevant for this article: (a) How does widowhood or divorce affect linked lives? (b) How do linked lives affect older peoples’ attitudes toward forming new intimate relationships? and (c) How do new intimate relationships affect linked lives?

How Does Widowhood and Divorce in Later Life Affect Linked Lives?

Loneliness has been suggested to be the biggest problem for widows, who miss the intimate relationship (Carr, Ha, Utz, Williams, & Umberson, 2002; Davidson, 2002) and the couple-oriented social life (Davidson, 2001; Stevens, 2004). Loneliness might be even more common for widowers, who tend to rely exclusively on their partner for emotional support and social contacts, and consequently suffer more socially from losing their partner (Carr, 2004; Dykstra & de Jong Gierveld, 2004; Stevens, 2004). Considering adult children, some studies have found that contacts with them increases after widowhood, when children are serving as the primary sources of instrumental support to their widowed parent. Adult children tend to compensate parents for the lost support of a former spouse, but it has also been shown that this support tends to decrease by time (Ha, 2008).

Social consequences of late life divorce have also been investigated. Some studies suggest that parent–child relationships suffer from a parental divorce (Aquilino, 1994; Shapiro, 2003). Brown and Lin (2012) argue that when divorced older people no longer have a spouse on whom they can rely, they are likely to place greater demands on their children for support and that this may create strains that weaken intergenerational ties. Family support to older parents, especially fathers, has been found to be negatively affected by divorce as compared with married parents and the effects can be long lasting (Cooney & Dunne, 2001; Daatland, 2007). However, K. Glaser, Stuchbury, Tomassini, and Askham (2008) did not find any decrease of support from adult children as a consequence of a union dissolution among parents and Dykstra (1993) even found that adult children were more supportive to formerly married parents than to parents who were still in a union.

How Do Linked Lives Affect Older People’s Attitudes Toward Forming New Intimate Relationships?

If loneliness is the biggest problem for widows and widowers, transition into a new intimate relationship could potentially be a way to relieve loneliness (Cooney & Dunne, 2001; Moore & Stratton, 2004). Even if research suggests that only a minority of single older people (often widows) are interested in remarriage (Carr, 2004; Davidson, 2001; Mehta, 2002; Montenegro, 2003; Moorman, Booth, & Fingerman, 2006; Stevens, 2004) or repartnering in any form (Stevens, 2004; van den Hoonaard, 2004), interest in new intimate relationships seems to be dependent on how socially integrated the individual is. Older men tend to have fewer confidants than women and rely exclusively on their wives for emotional intimacy (Arber, 2004; Carr, 2004; Dykstra & de Jong Gierveld, 2004; Stevens, 2004). Consequently, after marital dissolution, they tend to be more interested in dating, new partnerships, and remarriage than women (see, e.g., Carr, 2004; Davidson, 2002).

The social context of linked lives also plays a role for older people’s interest in new intimate relationships by constituting a normative reference. Adult children, in particular, seem to be crucial for older parents’ decisions about new partnerships. As Bulcroft and Bulcroft (1991) have noted, in later life, the normative base for relationships is no longer parents, but children, and they can often be negative. Negative attitudes from family and friends may have a negative impact on older people’s decision about initiating new partnerships. In a study by van den Hoonaard (2004) in a religious conservative rural part of Canada, a common experience among older widows was that children were hostile toward them having new relationships. The widowed informants expressed worries about gossip if they would have male friends, and it was common to keep the wedding ring on as a signal to ward off potential male interest. Similarly, in a study from Singapore, Mehta (2002) found that remarriage among widowed people was seen as inappropriate. This was partly explained by a culture, where marriage is not only a union of two individuals but of two families; the widow is still part of the deceased partner’s family. The familial system of dependencies explained their own as well as their children’s disapproval of remarriage. This explanation clearly points to the impact of linked lives and cultural influence on older people’s intimate partnership choices. However, in contexts that promote more individualistic values, the impact might be different.

The Impact of Established New Intimate Relationships on Linked Lives

As de Jong Gierveld (2004) points out, living as a couple provides older men and women with the greatest possibilities of social integration. Still very few studies have investigated the consequences for linked lives of older persons’ entry into new intimate relationships, and the limited research has mainly focused on consequences for relationships with children. One suggestion is that a new partner, especially for men, increases contact with children. Hagestad (1988, cf. Moore & Stratton, 2004) found that “second wives” kept the men connected with their families in ways they could not do well on their own.

More commonly, it has been suggested that a new partner might lead to conflicts and deteriorated contacts between generations. Stevens (2004) notes that one of the issues that have to be negotiated and decided after meeting a new partner in later life is how to deal with conflicting loyalties between the partner and children, friends, and family. A new relationship might challenge family boundaries and not be welcomed by family members and friends.

The question of the effects of new intimate relationships in later life on linked lives seems to primarily have been addressed in Dutch research. In a study from the 1990s, de Jong Gierveld and Peeters found that although networks remain relatively intact after a person enters into a new late in life relationship, contact frequency tend to be negatively affected (de Jong Gierveld & Peeters, 2003). In a later study, de Jong Gierveld and Merz (2013) found that older parents (50+ years) often experienced negative attitudes from children toward the new relationship. These experiences influenced them to form living apart together (LAT)–relationships instead of moving in together, in order to avoid conflicts with their children. It should be noted that these negative reactions were mostly from children who shared the household with their parents and who would have had to share their home with their parent’s new partner. Effects might be different when the repartnered parent and their children are no longer living together.

To summarize, prior research about relationship transitions in later life and their effect on linked lives has mostly focused on the consequences of loss in the form of the death of a partner or, lately, late in life divorce. Some research has focused the importance of linked lives as an explanation for older people’s interest/disinterest in new intimate relationships. However, apart from a few Dutch studies, little research has addressed the consequences of new intimate relationships in later life for linked lives. Still this is a subject commonly addressed by older people living in new intimate relationships, and it deserves further investigation, and from additional cultural contexts besides the Dutch one.

Theoretical Perspectives

The theoretical point of the departure for this study is Elder’s (1994) life course theory and the principle of interdependent lives, which stresses that important events in peoples’ lives can have a significant impact on the lives of people around them. In a wider perspective, people are linked to others in huge webs of dependencies (Elder, 1994), which constitute an important structural component in the individual’s life, shaping them in relation to the wider historical trajectories of the webs he or she belongs to such that, for example, a general societal increase in separations might influence the individual’s life by pointing to alternative life trajectories and changing values. The principle of linked lives helps in understanding change in people’s lives, but to understand the nature of the changes we use family theory.

An important historical trajectory in much of the Western world described by current family theory is a movement from intimate relationships determined by external conventions to flexible arrangements based on individual negotiations. For example, Hackstaff (1999) talks about a movement from a culture of marriage to a culture of divorce, Cherlin (2004) about the deinstitutionalization of marriage, and Giddens (1992) describes a movement toward “pure relationships,” based on negotiations between equal partners rather than conventions.

According to Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002), the recent history of the family has been one of increasing individualization; a transformation from a community based on mutual needs in agricultural and later industrial societies to a community between relatively autonomous individuals in late modernity. Two main reasons for this transformation are the increasing participation of women in the labor market and the creation of a modern welfare state providing rights to services and insurances on individual basis, thus making people (especially women) less dependent on traditional ties such as the family, religion, and local communities. At the same time, the increasing involvement of family members in spheres outside the home, such as work, school, leisure activities, and so forth, demands more flexible arrangements for family members. The consequence is that family relationships, also between generations, are continuously negotiated rather than institutionally determined, but also that it becomes easier to separate if the relationship ceases to be rewarding for the individual. In short, both the form and the future of relationships are increasingly determined by individual needs and less by filial bonds or tradition. How do these changes in family life affect intergenerational bonds in the case of repartnered older parents?

Method and Analysis

The arguments in this article are based on a qualitative interview study carried out in 2010 and 2011, with 28 older Swedes aged 63 to 91 years. The study was based on in-depth interviews (ranging from 1hr 05min to 3hr 16min in length, average 2hr) with 10 men and 18 women (average age 74 years—78.5 for men and 71 for women). The sample consisted of six singles (60+ years) looking for a new relationship and 22 individuals living in new relationships established after the age of 60 years. The analysis in this article is mainly based on the 22 informants living in a new union (4 marrieds, 7 cohabitants, 11 LATs). Their relationships had lasted from half a year to 14 years with an average of 5 years. The sample was recruited within a radius of about 300 km from the city of Stockholm in Sweden. Interviewees were approached through ads, articles in the media, and educational conferences arranged by the retirees’ organizations. Volunteers were recruited using a predefined structured sampling framework that assured representation from men and women, young-old and old-old people, and different union forms.

The sampling strategy based on voluntary participation resulted in a sample dominated by urban middle class and upper middle class informants. Rural and working class informants volunteered to a lesser extent, even though we used recruiting ads in four local newspapers covering smaller towns and rural areas in order to extend the diversity of experiences of new intimate relationships in later life.

The interviews were carried out by the authors (either Author 1 or Author 2), audio recorded, transcribed in extenso and analysed successively. The interviews covered four major themes: (a) everyday life in a new relationship, (b) the history of the present relationship, (c) the history of relationships over the full life course, and (d) future perspectives on life in the relationship. Each of the major themes in the interview started with an open question and continued with more specific semistructured probing questions—always followed by additional questions if needed for clarification.

This article is primarily based on the answers to the first two interview themes, which covered the current relationship. The first interview theme started with the open question: “Tell me about your life as married/cohabitant/LAT?” This question was followed up with more specific questions such as: “What does it mean (economically/socially/emotionally/in terms of care) to be married/cohabitant/ LAT in your current life phase?” One specific issue dealt with reactions from the informant’s social network toward the new partnership: “What kind of reactions has your relationship given rise to in your surrounding network?” followed by questions about specific people: own and partner’s children/grandchildren/friends/relatives.

The second interview theme started with an open question about the relationship biography: “Can you please tell me about your relationship from the moment you met until today?” We followed up with semistructured questions: what they thought about their current union form, whether something had made them hesitant about initiating and solidifying the relationship, which the most important events or turning points in their current relationship history were, and how the relation to their children had been affected by their new partnership.

The analysis was carried out inspired by grounded theory methodology (B. G. Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss & Corbin, 1994) and principles from analytical induction (Denzin, 1989; Öberg, 1997; Plummer, 2001; Robinson, 1951; Znaniecki, 1969). The analysis started with open coding (using the online mixed method coding software Dedoose) of relevant parts of the texts, primarily the sections specified above. All codes were discussed and agreed on by the two authors as a form of consensual validation. As coding progressed, open codes were gradually abstracted into wider conceptual themes. In line with the principles of analytic induction, texts were reread and themes were reformulated until they were deemed to be valid for the whole analyzed data set. Five conceptual themes were the result of this process: (a) the integration of social and filial networks, (b) obstacles to such an integration, (c) the restructuring of the chain of interdependencies, (d) the new partner as a resource for achieving autonomy, and (e) the hierarchy of interdependencies. These themes are presented below in the results section.

The project in full has been vetted and approved by the Swedish Central Ethical Review Board (www.epn.se). All participation in the interviews was fully voluntary (guaranteed by the sampling strategy, where people who wanted to tell us about their intimate lives contacted us) and all participants signed a letter of consent which included assurance of confidentiality.

Results

Below, we present the five conceptual themes identified in the aforementioned analysis. The first theme, integration of social and filial networks, shows that in most cases a new partner either did not affect or positively enriched the older individual’s social network. The second theme describes two obstacles to integration: conflicts concerning how the individual’s former relationship had ended and juridical aspects on marriage and inheritance. The third theme concerns how social and filial networks are restructured when the older individual initializes a new relationship, and shows that the partner tends to enter the network as “the first” in a chain of relational links. The fourth theme is the partner as a key to autonomy, and shows how the partner is viewed as a resource for both the older individual and for the children. The last theme shows how the partner is often the first in a hierarchy of dependencies and explains this prioritization in terms of two conceptual oppositions: natural versus voluntary responsibility and availability versus nonavailability.

Integration of Social and Filial Networks

Although meeting a new partner is most transformative for the individuals in the new union, it also involves people around them to different degrees; for example, the circles of friends who are introduced to the new partner and families who might or might not accept the partner as a new family member. They are affected by the loss of time and focus, which is redirected to the couple by both of the involved individuals. In the interviews, the level to which the partner is introduced and integrated with friends and family varies. Some couples have for different reasons chosen to keep their respective circles of friends and families separate; some because they do not feel entirely sure about the “nature” of the relationship, others because they do not have the energy to spend on new friends and relationships. In exceptional cases, informants did not like their partner’s friends or family and preferred to keep their distance for that reason.

However, it is more common that informants are integrated into their new partner’s social network. It is common for the interviewees to describe how they and/or their partner have become involved in each other’s families. Some have become accepted as more or less full members. A common example is how they help their partner’s children with babysitting or in resolving problems in that stepfamily:

When we told her [the partner’s daughter] that we would get married, she said “Can I call you my stepfather then?” “If you want to you can,” I said, and she was so happy. . . . And the two boys [stepsons] have had marital problems and one of them have had problems with his kids as well. So we’ve had conversations and I’ve helped them and it has all worked out quite well in the end. (Married man, 84 years)

Children were generally positive in learning that their parents had found a new partner. This positive attitude was recalled by informants in all union forms. Also it did not differ in any noticeable fashion between sons and daughters or toward mothers or fathers. In fact, in quite a few cases, children had been encouraging their mothers and fathers to find a partner who could look after them. In some cases, they had even acted as dating coaches, teaching their parents how to put up profiles on dating websites.

A new partner can also be a key to a broader social network. Many informants had gained new friends and “relatives” through their new partner and many claimed that the social circles were an important part of what the relationship brought to them. It was not uncommon that partners were recruited within the circle of acquaintances, thus further contributing to the integration of those circles:

Sture [the new partner] has grown up in S-town, and me as well . . . and he knows my cousins. Everyone has met him before because he studied at high school in S-town . . . and used to know them all when he was a child. So I never have to introduce him. Everybody knows him. He’s very happy about that. (Cohabiting woman, 73 years)

For many, inclusion in the partners’ social network constitutes a reawakening of their social life, which was stunted when their former partner passed away or when they got separated. In a common scenario, also described in prior research (Davidson, 2001; Stevens, 2004), informants (mainly women) told us that they were no longer invited to couple events after they had lost their former partner, and others had willingly isolated themselves, not to become the “fifth wheel” in social gatherings. In other cases, the former partner (often a woman) simply “inherited” the pool of common friends after a separation. In these cases the new partner could act as a key into new social circles or back into old ones.

To conclude, in all but a few exceptional cases (see below), where some definable circumstances were the case, the new relationship had either not affected or positively enriched the interviewees’ social networks. This was the case for both men and women and independent of union form.

Obstacles to Integration

Even if the dominant experience in the interviews was that of being welcomed into the new partners’ social and filial network, integration had to be negotiated and could be conflict ridden. Our interviews included no traces of children’s boundary work (de Jong Gierveld & Merz, 2013), where children try to keep their families intact. Instead, integration was mainly affected by how the relationship with the former partner ended, especially if a betrayal of the former partner was involved. This was the case when the new partner was the reason for breaking up the former relationship, or if the new partnership was initiated when the former partner was still alive but sick (suffering from dementia). In these cases social integration with the new partner’s family and friends could be difficult. One of our interviewees, who initialized a new relationship when his wife was in a nursing home, recalled: “Both my daughter and my daughter-in-law distanced themselves . . . ” and “they didn’t like” the current partner. Even 14 years later, after the death of the former wife and after getting married, these relationships were still nonexistent.

A difficult divorce could sometimes cause the partners’ social network to split (to “choose sides”) or even disappear completely. Again, this was mainly if issues of loyalty were involved. This was the case with the remarried woman who announced her divorce by a phone call to her husband after meeting her new partner: “You see I called my former husband from the airport and said that I wasn’t coming back home.” For some years her children did not accept her new relationship and some of her former friends kept their distance.

More commonly, formal integration into the family of the new partner is made complicated by legal bonds that connect parents to their children. This is particularly the case with inheritances. In this case remarriage can be a complicating factor because it ties not only the two partners legally to each other but also their families. Marriage creates a legal thicket around inheritances that are left for the children of the two partners to sort out after their parent’s death.

One of my daughters said “mom, you can’t get married.” Because it gets so complicated when you have children on both sides. . . . If one partner dies, you know, then there is a problem with two different families if you haven’t properly arranged everything legally. (LAT woman, 79 years)

Even with prenuptials the legal situation was regularly perceived to be complex. As a consequence, even if the children in general are positive to their parents finding and living with a new partner, they are often critical toward their parents getting remarried or involved in more profound economic transactions. Some of our informants explicitly refer to the legal/inheritance issue as a reason why they have chosen not to marry, taking into account the perspective of their children—in this respect, adult children’s attitudes to their parents’ marriages is an example of Elder’s point that people are interdependent and that important life choices are seldom made in a social vacuum, and also of Bulcroft and Bulcroft’s (1991) point that adult children are central normative references for older parents. However, few of our informants expressed any wishes of getting married. Instead, they often referred to marriage as something that was important in an earlier life phase, when they had young children, and in another historical context, when marriage was expected (marriages in later life are extremely rare in Sweden; of all nonmarrieds, 60+ years, less than a half percent married in 2009; Statistics Sweden, own calculations).

In contrast to what studies from other countries suggest (de Jong Gierveld, 2003; de Jong Gierveld & Merz, 2013; Mehta, 2002; van den Hoonaard, 2004), our interviews demonstrated that children were generally very positive toward their parents finding and/or cohabiting with new partners but also generally negative to them getting married. Not for family boundary reasons, it seems, but for purely practical (legal) reasons.

Filling the Gap—Restructuring the Chain of Interdependent Lives

Above, we have showed some ways in which a new intimate relationship in later life affects and is affected by the social and filial networks of the two partners. In this section, we argue that these relationships have a particular structure, which becomes visible when a partner is lost or when a new intimate relationship is formed. Interdependent lives tend to form a “chain,” where somebody is always the first link, or primary relationship. When that person is lost, somebody else normally steps in to “fill the gap” as the older person’s primary relationship—normally the next “link” in the chain. A new partner tends to enter as the first link of the chain. This was clearly expressed by a cohabiting woman who talked about her need for partnership and fear of being left alone, although she (as all informants) had children. If her partner passed away, she said, she would have to immediately find a new man, and added: “I wouldn’t be able to live a single day without knowing who the first in my life is.” (The quote is chosen to represent the importance of knowing who one’s primary relationship is—however, it should be noted that the expressed wish to quickly replace one’s intimate partner is not typical for neither the women nor the men in the data.)

When our informants recount the story of their postmarital life, they regularly bring up the importance of friends and family for filling the gap left by their partner. In the absence of the former partner, who held a primary position as “the first” in the hierarchy of relationships, others, such as friends or children or other relatives, are stepping (or drawn) in to fill emotional and practical needs. For example,

They [neighbours] were wonderful to me when I was alone [after being widowed]. They have looked after me—you wouldn’t believe it. . . . And I’m very grateful that they did, because at this age you never know what might happen. You read all kinds of stuff. One day you might be lying there. (LAT woman, 76 years)

In the chain of relationships, family, especially children and grandchildren, tend to be given priority as the most important relationship(s), when the former partner is gone. For most of the widowed informants, at least in the beginning, it seemed natural to invest their time and energy in their relationships with their children and grandchildren:

If I hadn’t met Lisa . . . I would probably have found a place between my children and become a sort of service person for them—babysitting, painting windows, and stuff. (Married man, 76 years)

In the case of transitions into new intimate relationships, a reverse process seems to take place. When people meet a new partner, focus tends to shift from the network of friends and family to that person, who now becomes the new natural focus of their time and energy. This reprioritization is very concrete; cohabitants recount how they are spending “all their time” with their new partner, and LATs how they keep in touch by phone or mail whenever they are not together physically. In some respects this seems to take the shape of a zero sum game, where there is only a fixed amount of time and energy to go around, so that when a new partner takes up an important position in a persons’ life, there is less time and energy for others (of course, some needs, such as sexuality, are not interchangeable).

When I [Svea] became a widow, [me and my sister] started thinking about moving in together . . . to be able to support each other. Today I’m happy it didn’t happen . . . Ulf [the new partner] asked her “Have I stolen Svea from you?” and she said “yes, but I’m happy for you.” I sometimes feel that I give Ulf much more time than Doris [sister]. (LAT woman, 69 years)

The inclusion of a new partner in their lives demanded a measure of prioritization. How that prioritization should be made was a question that had to be taken into account when negotiating the form of the new relationship. One informant, for example, had opted for an LAT relationship because she had two grandkids and it was important “that I have room for them as well in my life.” In the interviews, explicit reference was often made to this zero sum aspect of closer relationships. In order to make place for the new partner the older individual had to ration his or her time with friends and family, or time with the new partner had to be limited to allow space for other close relationships.

The image of this restructuring of close relationships is reminiscent to that of a slide puzzle. If one tile, or in our case a close relationship, is lost, another one tends to take its place and becomes the new primary relationship. And if a new intimate relationship is initialized, the other tiles, or relationships, have to make room. In this article, we have conceptualized this as a restructuring of the chain of interdependent lives. This seems to be in line with de Jong Gierveld and Peeters’ (2003) finding that a new partner in later life tends to decrease the contact frequency between generations. However, in one of the clearest patterns in our study, this restructuring is mostly positively interpreted by our informants as a ground for more autonomous and rewarding intergenerational relationships.

The Partner as a Key to Autonomy

Humans are social beings and people tend to value close relationships with their children and friends. On the other hand, being autonomous is a strong societal value in most of the Western world (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2002). A consequence of these combined values could be a wish for close relationships that are based on independent personal choices. A central theme in our interviews is the value of being autonomous in relation to children and friends to retain the free and voluntary character of these relationships. Not being dependent on friends to go to movies or restaurants, for example, or on children for social contacts and practical help, is highly important and a new intimate relationship is a tool for achieving that goal. The preferred autonomy in relation to friends is expressed by the LAT woman below, comparing her life as a single with life with her current partner:

It is very nice to have someone to go to a restaurant with . . . I mean, instead of always having to call a friend and ask. Or to go alone. (LAT woman, 79 years)

To some extent, the preference for autonomy is clearly because relying on others is seen as a restriction on personal freedom—when dependent on others one cannot be too choosy about friends and family contacts, but when one is independent, one can select only contacts that are perceived as important. A former widow recalls having been dependent on friends that she did not appreciate to get out and socialize. The security of the new relationship had allowed her to sever those bonds.

You find a certain strength and security in each other, which allows you to discontinue friendships that aren’t positive. (LAT woman, 63 years)

More important, dependency is frowned on because it might destroy the positive nature of the relationship, turning it into a duty rather than a voluntary relationship. The question of autonomy is particularly poignant in relation to adult children, and the informants recurrently stressed the importance of having a life of their own and of being able to determine themselves the nature of the relationship with their children:

I thought, even before I met my partner, that I want to have a social function with my kids. I didn’t want to be the old person they have to take out on a picnic. I wanted them to invite granny because it is nice and fun. (LAT woman, 64 years)

A central concern articulated by the informants was to avoid being a burden to their adult children, who were in midlife with children of their own and careers that kept them busy. It is remarkable how often the informants themselves use the phrase “being a burden.” In this context, a new partner is often described as a resource for their children as much as for themselves and a person that their children are, or should be, happy for. Having a partner means that they free their children from the primary responsibility for looking out for them (everyday supervision). Since this is a central point, we illustrate it with three different quotes:

I think that at heart your children think it’s great that their parents can take care of themselves: That they’re not a burden. So that they don’t have to think all the time that “I have to go home to dad, I have to do this and that and I have no time for it because I have my own kids to think about,” etc. That is a burden that I’ve lifted from my kids [by finding a new partner]. (Cohabiting man, 82 years)

I think they [the children] are really happy I met Lisa. Then they don’t have to worry about me because I can take care of myself. So I think I freed them from a responsibility . . . I remember when my father became a widower. I had to take on a big responsibility: I went to him and took care of his economy; I took care of practical matters such as installing a fridge and trimming his hedge every year. My kids don’t have to worry about that. (Married man, 76 years)

If an older person meets a new partner and they have a good life together it unburdens the children. . . I mean, they know that he or she is fine and doesn’t, as you can read about in the papers, “lay there for 3 weeks before he was found.” They know that if I’m sick, Eva is here for me. And if she’s sick I’m here for her. If I was alone, somebody else in the chain would have to take more responsibility. So I unburden her children and she unburdens mine. (LAT man, 79 years, author’s emphasis in italics)

The issue of unburdening the children is emphasized in different ways in all three quotes above. Although we have only chosen quotes from men above, both men and women talk about unburdening the children. However, there is a gender difference—while the men tend to describe themselves both as a “burden” and as active agents unburdening their children, the women never directly refer to themselves as a burden, and talk about how the “relationship,” rather than they themselves, unburdens their children. As a 75-year-old LAT-woman expressed it: “I think it’s a great relief for the children, to know that mom has someone.”

Two informants even stated that “not being a burden” to your children, or society in general, ought to be a moral imperative:

Peter’s children, for example, think of all the work I’ve unburdened them from. Every time that he [is ill]—we went to the hospital the other day—they would have had to go with him instead. We ought to have a new collective moral code: Encourage your mother or father to find a new partner as soon as the former partner dies. (Cohabiting woman, 78 years)

A new partner becomes a resource for achieving the desired autonomy in relation to friends and family. It might seem like a contradiction that people are seeking independence in relation to people who they are interdependent with, but it seems to be very much in line with the ideals of Western individualism and especially with its Nordic welfare-state form (see Discussion).

Prior research has shown that older women, in particular, are keen to keep their personal autonomy by having a separate home from their partner (Borell & Karlsson, 2002; Karlsson & Borell, 2005). In our study, this was an ideal mentioned in particular by single women. However, those in a relationship did not much discuss the importance of being autonomous in relation to their partner, instead, the value of independence was emphasized in relation to others, especially children. It would seem that as an overarching value independence was preferred, but our informants found it more agreeable to be dependent on their partner than on children, friends, or even the state.

A Hierarchy of Dependencies

In the informants’ narratives about social and filial relationships and autonomy a clear hierarchy of dependencies is hinted at: partners come first, followed by children and the state (professional caregivers), and finally friends and others. How can we understand this hierarchy? There are two binary oppositions that recurrently appear in the data when the interviewees talk about how their partners affect their social and filial relationships. The first one has to do with natural versus voluntary responsibility. Children are seen as having a natural or self-evident responsibility for their welfare, in the sense that it is almost always the children who are thought to be relieved of responsibility by their partner. Sometimes the state is also mentioned. Alternative dependencies such as friends, siblings, and neighbors are never qualified, but simply mentioned as the next link in the chain of interdependencies, pointing to the fact that children’s responsibility is seen as natural and self-evident. The partner is seen as natural and self-evident with the limitation: as long as he or she remains at the individual’s side. A partner cannot be taken for granted in the same sense as children or the state, and the informants were acutely aware of the finality of the relationship (see Bildtgård & Öberg, 2014), having experienced divorce, separation, and/or the death of a partner before.

The second opposition is that between everyday availability versus everyday nonavailability. This dimension is not necessarily a question of geographical proximity but a degree of availability in everyday life. The state is to some extent omnipresent but not immediately available. Availability is primarily represented by the partner and sometimes neighbors and friends, whereas children are mostly portrayed as being less available (occupied by other things) in everyday life, even if they are living in the same house or in the immediate area. The paradox of closeness and nonavailability is well expressed by the single woman below:

I’m getting more and more afraid that things should happen, and I want somebody [a partner] to be close at hand if they do. Even if they [daughter and her family] live in the same house, we don’t see each other every day, so I could easily lie here for days without somebody knowing about it. (Single woman, 71 years)

In our data informants LAT tended to have their partner at a close geographical distance and they were in that sense easily available to each other. However, even the few ones who had their LAT-partner at a distance reasoned in a similar fashion about availability. For example, a female LAT-informant, who had her partner in another country, said he was always available on Skype, where they talked to each other every day, whereas her children living nearby in the same town were not as available.

The issue of availability is a fundamental aspect of the desired autonomy mentioned above. Children are seen as somewhat unavailable and busy (compare Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2002) with lives of their own, including work and children, and older parents cannot count on them being available all the time. This is also quite different from early adulthood or midlife, when parents shared households with their children and they were available to each other to a much higher extent. In later life, the older parents instead aspire (and are encouraged) to remain autonomous, partly because they do not feel confident that the children will be available and partly because they do not want to put any strain on that relationship. A new intimate partner is one way to achieve such autonomy.

An intimate partner, provided he or she remains at the individual’s side (and is reasonably healthy), is thus both perceived as having a natural responsibility for the individual and is physically and mentally available in everyday life. Even if children are experienced as emotionally close, they are often not available for support in everyday life. Also, even if the state has the ultimate—and in that sense a natural—responsibility for the well-being of older persons, it is primarily available as a final backup. Neighbors, although they might be more readily available in everyday life, have no natural responsibility. Last, friends and siblings have no natural responsibility and are (often) not immediately available. For informants in new marriages or cohabitant relationships, the primacy of the partner relationship is obvious and also for informants living apart together, the everyday availability of the partner is stressed. Even if they are not physically together, they can always be in contact by phone or e-mail. Moreover, many of the LAT-informants share much of the time together.

Discussion

In this article, we have taken as our point of departure the principle of linked or interdependent lives in Elder’s life course theory (Elder, 1994). We have asked: how new intimate relationships in later life affect linked lives; how a new partner is integrated into existing social and filial networks; and how relationships with children, friends, and others are renegotiated.

The results from our study showed that new partners either kept separate social lives or, more commonly, were integrated into the new partner’s social and filial network. Social networks rarely diminished as a direct consequence of repartnering, except when something involving a perceived betrayal of a former partner was involved. However, the contact frequency between generations might have suffered from the new relationship. A new intimate relationship tended to restructure the relationship chain so that other close relationships become secondary to that with the new partner and time and energy was reprioritized and directed from other close relationships to the new partner. A relationship with a partner was often preferred to relationships with children and friends because partners were seen as more available on an everyday basis. Also, a partner made the older person more autonomous and allowed him or her to determine themselves the nature of the interaction with children and friends—allowing for an interaction based on choice rather than necessity.

Our Swedish results pointed in a slightly different direction than previous studies. The interview responses did not include any instances of principled family boundary work on the part of adult children; rather, children appeared to be generally supportive of their parents’ new intimate relationships, at least as long as they did not plan to marry. One reason for this difference could be our sample, which was based on self-selection and tended toward a slight dominance of urban middle-class informants with positive relationship experiences. Still negative experiences were present in this sample as well (as detailed above), only not the kind of family boundary work suggested in previous research. This absence leads us to think that the sample is at least not the major reason for this difference.

A more fruitful line of explanation might be the insistence on autonomy that was so evident in our interviews and which was apparently encouraged also by children. This desire for autonomy is very much in line with the ideals of Western individualism, and perhaps especially the specific form of state-supported individualism which characterizes the Nordic welfare-states. According to Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002), one of the major reasons for modern individualism is the development of a welfare state that distributes rights on an individual basis, thus freeing the individual from prior collective dependencies, such as on the family or the local community. Perhaps, this is more relevant for Sweden than for most other countries. According to the World Value Survey (Pettersson & Esmer, 2008), Sweden is one of the world’s most individualized countries, where people strongly emphasize independence and where collective affinities such as family, religion, and nation are ascribed less importance. There is, for example, a difference between American individualism, anchored in filial support structures, and Swedish welfare state-supported individualism, anchored in a universal insurance system. Swedish state-supported individualism (Berggren & Trägårdh, 2006) allows for high levels of personal autonomy by providing a relatively generous system of welfare services and insurances that guarantee that individuals can live their lives independent from others, economically and to some extent practically. This applies to women as well as men.

The principles of state supported individualism find a clear expression in Swedish elderly care law. Since 1979, children in Sweden have no formal juridical responsibility to take care of their parents (although informally, they often take a large responsibility). Instead, this responsibility falls on the state. Moreover, one goal for Swedish public elderly politics is to enable people to age “with preserved independence” (Swedish-Government, 2014). Earlier research has shown strong support for this model, showing that older Swedes prefer being dependent on the state for welfare services rather than their kin (Daatland, 2007).

The social context of Swedish individualism could explain why the informants in our study so strongly emphasize the value of not being a burden to their children, and stress that a new partner is a resource for autonomy and independence in relation to children and others. It could explain why children are generally positive to their parents finding new partners in later life, since it actually frees them from responsibility for their older parents. Also, in a culture of individualism people are free to decide about their own lives. And it would seem that children do not view it as their “right” to decide about their parents’ love life and how their parents should live their lives.

Individualism seems like a relevant explanation for the difference in our results and those of, for example, Mehta (2002) in Singapore or van den Hoonaard (2004) in a conservative part of Canada. It is perhaps more surprising to find a difference with de Jong Gierveld and Merz’s (2013) Dutch study. There are definitely cultural differences between Sweden and Holland, but these differences seem marginal compared with those between Sweden and Singapore, or between secular Sweden and a religious rural part of Canada. Still according to the World value study, Holland is slightly less individualistic than Sweden (Pettersson & Esmer, 2008).

There are also other explanations for the difference between our results. In de Jong Gierveld and Merz’s (2013) study, the informants were younger (50+ years) and much of the family boundary work was performed by children still living in the same household as their parents, and who would have to share their home with a new adult and possibly relate to that adult as a stepparent in their everyday lives. This is a situation which is very different from that of an adult child, living away from their parents, often with children of their own and under no authority from their new stepparent. In that life phase, it seems reasonable to think (as our informants claim) that children would be happy that their parents have somebody who can look out for them, so that they are relieved of that everyday responsibility. This is not equal to saying that children do not care about their parents. In fact, it often appears as rather the opposite—caring for their well-being by supporting their parents’ new unions.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We thank Lars Andersson and the Social Gerontology Group at Uppsala University (Gunhild Hammarström, Sandra Torres, and Marianne Winquist) for commenting on the article.

Authors’ Note

The authors, Torbjörn Bildtgård and Peter Öberg, have in all parts contributed equally to this research project (conception, research design, collection of data and analysis) and to the drafting of this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This project has been funded by FORTE, the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working life and Welfare (Dnr 2009–0720).

Notes

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