A Genealogy of Serial Monogamy

Introduction

Monogamous marriage is a pervasive ideal. It provides a framework for organizing intimate relationships and is highly related to other strong societal institutions such as the reproductive family and the nation. Research has shown monogamous marriage to be a mean to institutionalize a naturalized national identity ¹ as well as an instrument for increasing national fertility. ² This has certainly been the case in Sweden. Despite major social shifts as well as reforms of the marriage law the last 100 years, marriage is still an institution at the heart of the Swedish society. ³ It remains the ideal socially as well as providing an ideal form of relationship for other forms of state sanctioned relationships.

However, the Western ideal of monogamous marriage has not been unaffected by social change. ⁴ European and US divorce rates have been on the rise, in some countries for several decades, ⁵ and a wider moral acceptance for unmarried relationships follows it. Swedish family research has paid significant attention to this trend, concluding that divorce numbers have risen significantly during the twentieth century ⁶ and that unmarried cohabitation has become a valid form of intimacy, ⁷ thus shifting the emphasis society puts on marriage. As in other Western nation-states, the Swedish family law recognizes different forms of families; children of unmarried parents have the same rights as those born within wedlock; same-sex couples are included in the Marriage Act since 2009; and marriage is increasingly seldom a lifelong agreement. ⁸

But views on marriage are affected not only by divorce rates but also by people choosing not to enter into marriage in the first place. A number of scholarly traditions have noted a transformation of intimate relationships in some late modern western societies, as theorized in terms of pure relationships or late modern intimacy. ⁹ The emphasis in these late modern relationships are not on institutionalization but on emotion and personal development—making marriage a possible but not necessary part of the relationship, whether long term or short term. Sweden has traditionally had relatively high rates of couples postponing marriage until late in life as well as living betrothed or in an incomplete marriage for a number of years before marrying. ¹⁰ The rates of unmarried cohabitation began to rise in the 1960–1970 and became regulated by the state in the form of a law on cohabitation from 1973 for different-sex couples and 1987 for same-sex couples. I have chosen the concept of serial monogamy to capture this development. The concept has been used since at least the 1960s, by among others Margaret Mead, to denote a development with rising divorce numbers and unmarried relationships. ¹¹ I will use it to conceptualize the development referred to earlier, with liberalized divorce regulation, rising unmarried cohabitation, and equal rights of children born within and outside wedlock. The development, however, is occasionally paradoxical and intertwined with other social changes.

The present political view of the family is something that should be protected but in its multiple forms—which includes unmarried families, stepfamilies, “extra” and “plastic” parents. The same goes for the couple—state regulations of intimate relationships have in Sweden for a relatively long time institutionalized the unmarried as well as the traditionally married couple. On one hand, then, marriage is a social ideal and provides a model for other regulations of family. On the other hand, state regulations are continually expanded beyond marriage and moral boundaries nowadays include nonmarital relations between adults—especially different-sex couples but to some extent also same-sex couples. ¹² How have these parallel ideals of regulation come to develop historically and discursively in way that they do not mutually exclude one another? How can the development toward serial monogamy be analyzed in a way that simultaneously explores the continued importance put on marriage as the model of state regulation of intimacy?

The social shift toward serial monogamy has been more pronounced in some countries, and Sweden is one example of this. With a relatively long history of individualized family policy promoting individuality as well as the forming of couples and families, Sweden provides an excellent case for exploring a genealogy of serial monogamy. ¹³ The ideal of state regulation of intimate relationships has, as we shall see, changed from that of lifelong marriage in the beginning of the twentieth century toward what we see today—an acceptance for divorce and expectations that people will have several monogamous relationships during their lives, whether marital or nonmarital. Present analyses show how this idea of serial monogamy became axiomatic for Swedish state regulations of intimate relations during the twentieth century, while at the same time only partly challenging the ideal of marriage.

Aim

The aim of this article is to trace a genealogy of serial monogamy. The development will be explored by questions of how norms of lifelong marital monogamy have been successively transformed in Sweden during the twentieth century. As I hint at in the Introduction section, I see some important historical shifts as particularly relevant for this development. I argue that it is possible to analytically distinguish these three steps in the development: (1) the renegotiations of marital morality during the early twentieth century, where the dichotomy of marriage as morally good and nonmarriage morally bad was reformulated toward a moral hierarchy and lifelong marriage was problematized in discourses of the importance of fertility levels, (2) the introduction of more liberal divorce laws, and specifically the discursive negotiations around the initial liberalization of the divorce laws as well as the political aims involved in the more thorough liberalization of divorce in the 1960s and 1970s, and (3) the increased acceptance of unmarried cohabitation, visible in the institutionalization of unmarried cohabitation via cohabitation laws introduced in several steps from 1973 to the gender-neutral cohabitation law in 2003.

These three shifts are possible to order chronologically, albeit this temporal categorization is not without overlaps or ambiguities as we shall see. The following analyses thus aim at exploring three important discursive and historical shifts leading up to serial monogamy providing a basic assumption and logic for state regulation of intimate relationships. In short, it aims at tracing a genealogy of serial monogamy.

Concept of Serial Monogamy and Context

In this article, I argue that the concept of serial monogamy is useful for the purpose of capturing social shifts of relationship ideals, namely how the norm of lifelong monogamous marriage has been renegotiated in relation to other emerging norms privileging authenticity and emotions in a relationship rather than its institutionalized status or its durability. The concept is usually attributed to Margaret Mead and her analyses of the cultural development of marriage in the mid-twentieth-century United States. ¹⁴ The concept of serial monogamy has other than that been used in only a limited number of historical and sociological studies for describing shifts in relationship practices, primarily connected to feminist practices of denouncing patriarchal ideals of lifelong marriage and instead having several monogamous relationships during one’s life. ¹⁵ It has also been fruitful in historical studies problematizing legally restricted divorce laws and relating them to more liberal social practices. ¹⁶ The concept is otherwise primarily used in research on venereal disease, psychology, and evolution biology in order to capture patterns of sexual behaviors where there is only one sexual partner at the time but that there can be several during a life course. This conceptualization is close to the one utilized in this article in that it describes the same relationship pattern over time, but it instead emphasizes how these relationship patterns can be put in a social and historical framework and used to develop analyses of how norms and ideals related to regulation of intimate relationships shift. Important to note is that when I use intimate relationships as a concept for describing the content of the relationships analyzed here, it is not an empirical concept found in the material but instead an analytical concept intended to capture distinctions made in the material between relationships that include some or all aspects of love, intimacy, partnership, and sexuality, and those which are not perceived as including these. ¹⁷

This analysis is done by exploring how shifting notions of marital morality and divorce are constructed in policy documents published during the twentieth century in Sweden. The policy documents are government commission reports (Statliga offentliga utredningar, SOU), a type of policy document that is unusual internationally, in that it is a form of preparatory work made for the cabinet but carried out outside the cabinet’s own organization. The government commission reports are written by committees that during the twentieth century have been organized in different ways but have consistently been characterized by a close relationship between science and politics. ¹⁸ What is created, especially in the early SOUs where compromise over large political gaps is a guiding principle, is a groundwork for further political decisions. The bureaucratic language in combination with the political ambitions of the committee work makes for a text laden with constructions of truth. Michel Foucault sketches his method of genealogy by quoting Nietzsche advising his reader to search for insignificant truths. A genealogical analysis means searching not for origin and not for the Truth. Instead a genealogy includes a history of emerging morals and values, of unexpected effects and deviations creating emergences and discursive changes not quite new, nor quite the same. The term moral is thus, for the purposes of this study, an empirical concept used in the close readings of the material, while the concept of norms is used analytically to capture an array of discursive shifts, always in motion. While traditional history, in Foucault’s view risks implying a development completed in the moment it is put on paper, he calls for a history fully incorporating the fact that history does not end with one particular historian. ¹⁹

The genealogy of serial monogamy will be thematically structured around shifts in public and later state discourse on marital and nonmarital relations. First, I explore the renegotiations of marital morality, which are done both by way of deconstructing moral dichotomies and by introducing medically based ideas of matching people in ways optimizing fertility. Second, arguments made for liberalization of divorce laws are analyzed in combination with changing policy ideals made with scientific basis from earlier decades. Third, regulations of cohabitation are explored and the article asks whether a cohabitation law could be said to realize the logic of serial monogamy in a definite way or whether there is still something beyond marriage.

Renegotiating Marital Morality—Deconstructing a Dichotomy

The late nineteenth and early twentieth century saw a major debate on the position of marriage in society. Women’s rights as well as radical ideas on sexuality were gaining ground, bringing issues of contraception, citizenship, and economic possibilities for women higher on the agenda. Conditions for unmarried women were raised by, among others, the Norwegian Association of Women’s Rights as one of the most pressing issues for the women’s rights movement to deal with. ²⁰

The division between married and unmarried is one of historical importance, especially for women. It has decided citizenship rights, social status, as well as recognition as a legitimate mother. In Sweden, major shifts of welfare practices during the 1940s and 1950s changed the status of unmarried lone mothers in relation to their divorced counterparts, and there is an increasing tendency to dissolve the division of married/unmarried mothers in social policy. ²¹ But in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century where we start our investigation, the division is yet intact.

The religious, lifelong marriage traditionally upheld in Swedish and Nordic societies was under debate in the late nineteenth century. The status of lifelong marriage as the one and only morally acceptable form of intimate relationship was defended by some, but others argued that there were other forms of relationship that should be morally recognized.

The marriage law at this time recognized not only marital relations but also betrothal and incomplete marriages, which would bestow certain economic benefits for the woman, should a man break up a relationship or die. Granted that the woman had become pregnant or given birth after a promise of marriage had been made. ²² This meant an opportunity for women to remain unmarried, thus retaining independence, but at the same time having some of the rights a married woman with children would have. This form of incomplete marriage was removed in Sweden with the new marriage law of 1915 and replaced with regulations of the economic obligations of an unmarried father—a law reform the women’s movement criticized, arguing that it was not merely an economic issue but one of societal status. The institution of incomplete marriages had given women moral restitution and an opportunity to avoid having to categorize their children as born out of wedlock, but this was now removed. ²³

Unregulated by the state, but nevertheless an important part of public debate at the time was the much debated “Stockholm marriages” and “marriages of conscience.” The name signals the connotations of urban debauchery that critics tried to attach to the phenomenon. Stockholm marriages were, in practice, relatively durable unmarried cohabitation, with varying degree of radical criticism against current marriage regulations. ²⁴ A number of “marriages of conscience” were publicly debated as radical criticisms of the obligatory church wedding as well as the unequal rights of married women. ²⁵

These expressions of criticism, encouraged by among other famous Swedish writer and philosopher Ellen Key and public debater Hinke Bergegren who both insisted that the state should not interfere with love, eventually resulted in the introduction of civil marriage in Sweden 1908. ²⁶ The radical actions and protest against contemporary marriage law in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century rested heavily on a philosophical and political vibrant vision of a modern marriage and modern relationships to go with the modern society that was in the making.

Writer and feminist philosopher Frida Stéenhoff scandalized the Swedish critics with her writings and made a bishop in the Swedish church accuse her of arguing for “successive polygamy [successivt månggifte]” in an outrage against her criticism of marriage and religion. ²⁷ Ellen Key also criticized the ideal of one lifelong marriage and instead called for a love that does not ask whether it is first or last, but whether it is made of both sense and soul. ²⁸ Key even opened up to the possibility of attaining a divorce—should the marriage not lead to true love. ²⁹

The idea of such a concept of love, thus opened up for an ideal of committed relationships, each one judged by its own merits and not on the ground of being the only one. The marriage that philosophers and debaters of the late nineteenth century envisioned was not the one in contemporary marriage law but one instead unconnected to the church and with equal rights for men and women. Their vision of a new love and a new form of marriage was interpreted as a critique of marriage as the foundation of society and as such their ideas were, to a large extent, ridiculed and they were accused of encouraging immorality. They contributed to a spreading fear that marriage as an institution was withering apart in the new modern times. Only a few decades later, however, similar ideas were starting to seep into the policy makers’ texts.

One of the major issues for the Swedish politicians of the 1930s was declining fertility and marriage frequencies. The Swedish policy projects were thus lunched as an overarching policy aim organizing different policy attempts to increase fertility. These attempts regarded increased marriage rates as a surefire way to increase fertility—an assumption that however has been shown as rather oversimplified. ³⁰ The underlying logic of the 1930s policy makers’ constructions of marriage in relation to other forms of relationships was that nonmarital relations could be acceptable if they were morally high standing. ³¹ To distinguish between moral and immoral relationship when marriage no longer was the sole criterion, the policy makers had to make a moral hierarchy of more or less moral relationships using “marriage likeness” as their tool of measurement. ³²

Deciding on whether a relationship was moral or immoral aspects of durability and emotional basis for the relationship were central. Stockholm marriages and marriages of conscience were hereby actually regarded as having a relatively high moral content, as they were compared to temporary relationships, prostitution, and traditional marriage arrangements based on economic considerations. ³³

The division between married and unmarried was socially crucial during the discussed period, particularly for women. The basis for this division was the moral dichotomy of marital/nonmarital relationships, unequivocally constructing nonmarital relationships morally unacceptable. The dichotomy, however, was renegotiated into a moral hierarchy—still placing marriage at the top of the moral pyramid, but opening up the discursive categories for some social flexibility.

Renegotiating Marital Morality—The Idea of “Matching”

The first step of renegotiating marriage was thus reformulations of the dichotomy of marital/nonmarital relationships. By comparing different relationships to each other, a moral hierarchy was instead developed. Here, the old concept of betrothal came into use in a way that led policy makers further in their renegotiations of marriage. Betrothal was a traditional form of intimate relationship that figured most prominently in some rural parts of Sweden, but dated far back in the Swedish legal system where it rendered rights and obligations for those considered betrothed.

Already in the beginning of the twentieth century considered outdated in public and state debate, the institution of betrothal had a discursive revival in the 1930s as it turned out to be of interest for representatives of medicine. Betrothal offered a unique opportunity of a morally sanctioned sexual relationship without the lifelong bounds marriage entailed. For those interested in the medical aspects of sexual relations—infertility, impotence, and hereditary diseases—the goal of marriage was healthy and effective reproduction. In addition to the mentioned potential problems with fertility, new medical sciences had developed theories arguing that two people, albeit healthy in themselves, could be unsuited to reproduce together. In their minds then, the idea of betrothal became a way to exclude unsuited combinations before they entered into marriage. ³⁴

The idea of unsuitable combinations was discursively constructed in a way which made trying out partners outside of marriage a rational social practice. This was something already going on, in the form of Stockholm marriages and other forms of nonmarital relationships sometimes referred to as “test marriages.” Betrothal and “test marriages” alike thus gained moral ground. Instead of constructing marriage as the only morally acceptable relation, a moral hierarchy was introduced with the idea of trying on a partner to see if they fit—an idea not far off from that of serial monogamy.

As Foucault specifies regarding genealogy, the insignificant truths of the time are central for sketching a history of morality. The new medical knowledge that formed a basis for the population policy project’s reformulation of intimate morality can, I argue, be seen as one such insignificant truth. The modern medical gaze, naturalized in contemporary times, made it possible to reformulate benefits of betrothal, which in context meant also opening up for the debated “test marriages”—a moral shift-laying ground for later reforms of regulations of intimate relations. ³⁵

These reforms were motivated largely in terms of modernization and equality but could genealogically be traced also to state attempts to increase fertility, using philosophical as well as medical arguments. Both in the cases of Key’s critique of marriage and the medical reasoning of testing a future partner, there are elements introduced that deviate from the ideal of a lifelong morally superior marriage, albeit in two different ways. They are both examples of a broader societal debate on love, and of how views of intimate relations were changing at the time. Key and her contemporary radical debaters explicitly called for a changed view, whereas the policy makers balanced between preserving central social values and at the same time adapting to a changing moral landscape.

I argue that these ideas recur in the population policy project, albeit in a different way, creating what genealogically could be called an unexpected effect—when statements made in different contexts with different motivations jointly can be said to contribute to the same emergence of a moral shift.

The SOU where the negotiations with a hierarchy of more or less moral relationships are to be found is not a policy document aiming at legal reforms but a part of a larger population policy project discussing issues of sexuality focusing on contraception and abstinence among other things. ³⁶ It is thus an indication of normalization of shifting moral standards rather than formalization of a new morality, but it did not take many decades before the reformulation of the place of marriage in society was introduced also in legal preparatory works.

Liberalization of Divorce Regulation—Dedramatizing Divorce

In 1909, a Scandinavian committee had formed to reform and coordinate the marriage laws of the Scandinavian countries. In 1920, this reform resulted in legal changes that made the married woman a full legal subject, in addition to an increased modernization and individualization of the law—although balanced against an emphasis on the private life of the family. ³⁷ The Sweden of early twentieth century, on the brink of modernity but with its poor past still vivid in memory, is very different to what we see today. Technologically as well as socially, they are far apart. But the change was made step by step, and the ideals of individualization and liberalization were in some instances not realized until several decades later, as we shall see in the case of divorce regulation. A liberalization of Swedish divorce regulations was initiated already in 1915, when “no-fault divorce” was introduced. ³⁸ This resulted in a doubling of divorce figures, but some limitations of divorce rights remained for another sixty years. There was an obligatory period of separation before divorce could be obtained and for the divorce to go through the spouses must specify reasons or verify a deep unresolvable conflict. ³⁹ Research has shown that the Swedish reforms of divorce laws done during the early twentieth century preserved the position of marriage rather than promoting freedom. ⁴⁰

This was however changed in the new law on marriage introduced in 1974. The basis for this law reform was a new view on marriage specified as follows:

In accordance to the basic view that the start as well as the continuation of marriage should be based on the spouses free will to live together under the marital system of rules, the expert proposal for new rules of dissolution means that a spouse’s will to dissolve the marriage should always be respected. A spouse it thus granted an unconditional right to divorce. The motives therefore shall in the new system be of no significance. ⁴¹

The unconditional right a spouse from then on had to dissolve his or her marriage made a significant ideological difference to the previous rules. A couple had to agree on when to get married, but they no longer had to agree on when to end it. This meant a shift in the view of what the state should regulate. Previous reforms of the marriage law had included regulations and limitations of the right to divorce in a way that gave the state the interpretive prerogative. Hitherto the state, rather than the spouses themselves, had decided whether divorce was the best option. ⁴² This meant another big step in the development of institutionalizing serial monogamy. Gone were the limitations for obtaining divorce—creating a legal space designed for multiple relationships and marriages replacing one another rather than one preventing it.

The right to decide—together or separately—how long the marriage was to last was not however the only discursive shift relevant for this discussion. The committee preparing the reforms of the marriage law in 1972 also got a more general issue on their hands. The instructions for the committee from the government included creating a marriage law that balanced on one hand the central role of marriage for family law, and on the other a neutral view on regarding different forms of relationships and thus avoided unnecessary difficulties for those forming a family outside of marriage. It was hoped, from the government’s perspective, this would dedramatize divorce. ⁴³ The committee responded quite skeptically to the request to balance such diverse policy aims as to regard marriage as central but at the same time remain neutral in relation to different intimate relationships. The result was somewhat of a compromise, wherein marriage clearly had a special status in family law but was no longer the sole form of legitimate family formation. Divorce rules were liberalized and thus took the shape we recognize today, with few limitations. The future of marriage and particularly monogamy was still of interest for the state, but divorce was no longer the battlefield on which to defend it.

Regulation of Cohabitation—A Solution for Societal Stability?

As a result of divorce, liberalization serial monogamy was no longer legally prohibited or even significantly limited. Even those who had once married had the opportunity to be serially monogamous and the state regulations which encouraged lifelong marriage were thus abolished. Unmarried relations, however, were hitherto unregulated, with exception for rules of betrothal and similar premodern regulations. A first version of a law on cohabitation was however introduced in Sweden in 1973 and in 1987 the law on cohabitation was reformulated and somewhat expanded concerning the areas it regulated. The law regulating cohabitation was new insofar as it regulated unmarried cohabitation, granting rights and obligations to couples living together whether they had chosen to define themselves as cohabitants or not—provided that the relationship was marriage like, that is, it consisted of persons that would be eligible for marriage with regard to age, gender, and familial relations. However, the law rested to a large extent on the same logic as marriage. Monogamy was presupposed—you would not fall under the cohabitation law if you lived with a married person. And even the assumed seriality was highlighted in the cohabitation law of 1987, where it says, on the subject of dissolution of the relationship, “Has one cohabitant been entitled to the home, the other one is obligated to leave immediately.” ⁴⁴ If the intimate relationship between the cohabitants was dissolved, it was assumed that the cohabitation would end as well.

Also henceforth, with reforms of the cohabitation law, the construction of the law excluded the possibility of a continued cohabitation without an intimate relationship, except in cases where threats of violence prevented one of the cohabitants from moving out immediately. ⁴⁵ As continuing to cohabit after an intimate relationship had ended was constructed as a nonissue in the policy documents, seriality as a basic assumption was strengthened. The course of events constructed as expected in the state regulations was one of serial monogamy, where one intimate cohabiting relationship is followed by another intimate cohabiting relationship unless the parties got married.

The implicit goal with the marriage law had hitherto been durability and stability of relationships, things considered a good foundation for a stable society. ⁴⁶ This had meant trying to maintain existing marital relationships intact, since this was considered the source of stability. Instead of protecting individual marriages from dissolution, the liberalized divorce laws meant reconstructing marriage as something obtainable for everyone, even the ones already married. If the current relationship did not fulfill the expectations of intimacy, it was possible to divorce and try again. The aim of stability was thus shifted in another direction. Since limiting divorce was constructed inconsistent with a modern view of intimate relationships, the stability of relationships had to be maintained in another way.

Regulation of cohabitation plays a central role here. By introducing a new form of regulated relationship, the realms of relationships considered stable and morally acceptable were expanded. Instead of unmarried cohabitation being constructed as an exception from marriage—in addition to being morally inferior, as previously during the twentieth century—cohabitation could serve as a stabilizer expanding the reaches of serial monogamy beyond marriage. ⁴⁷

My suggestion here is that the concept of family is also central in this expansion of serial monogamy. Marriage regulations increasingly became more closely intertwined with family and regulations of reproduction during the studied period. On a societal level, this development is part of a larger shift from a state emphasis on marriage to one on family. ⁴⁸ This is specifically evident in a discursive shift from marriage to family in the policy documents preparing family law during the twentieth century ⁴⁹ as well as in the last decade’s regulations of parenthood which in different ways have benefited married parents. ⁵⁰

Trying to balance the central role of marriage with the increasing legitimization of other forms of intimate relationships, the policy makers in the 1970s construct a compromise to maintain marriage while at the same time dedramatizing divorce. As I have concluded, this meant a shift from the view that society should be the protector of marriage by way of regulating divorce, toward a regulation of marriage that was not built on divorce but rather on embedding marriage in regulations of the family. This was done in a way that did not exclude starting a family outside of marriage, but nonetheless prioritized marriage and made it very advantageous in relation to reproduction, for example, making inheritance and parental rights more clearly regulated.

The analyses above, of the law on cohabitation of 1987 as well as subsequent reformulations of the law such as the one in 1999, show that these reforms follow the development toward a social structure of serial monogamy. The assumptions of how intimate life is organized follows the idea of serial monogamy, but this is not exceptional for the cohabitation law. Family law in general exhibits this trait during the last couple of decades, and serial monogamy thus seems to be the assumed way of organizing intimate relationships in general.

In short, marriage has historically been—and remains to some extent—at the top of the moral hierarchy. Serial monogamy may have expelled the idea of the lifelong marriage, but it still builds on the idea of marriage as an ideal. The monogamy part of serial monogamy is modeled on marriage, albeit not the lifelong marital ideal. So, does the ideal of serial monogamy mean that societal stability becomes a futile goal for the policy makers? It does not seem that way. Interestingly, durability and stability are concepts invoked during the process of weakening the ideal of the lifelong marriage. Durability thus becomes articulated in the same discursive process in which it is decoupled from marriage. Durability and stability are still central ideas for the state regulation of intimate relations, making the marital model a central one for serial monogamy.

A Genealogy of Serial Monogamy—Histories of Institutionalization

Whereas the focus of this analysis has been on shifting normative foundations for family policy, there are at the same time continuities within this development. Throughout these policy shifts, the prioritized goal for the state has been to promote stability—though as I noted earlier the role of marriage as stabilizer as increasingly been taken over by the idea of family. We are not, however, talking about any family. The imagined community of families capable of providing sufficient stability for a whole society is the specifically Swedish family.

The idea of Swedishness is central for the construction of family in the material. By describing the monogamous family as something rooted in “our culture”—that is, Swedish and Western culture—the stable, monogamous, and modern Swedish society is contrasted against a polygamous other. ⁵¹ Interestingly, the idea of modern Swedish society is thus characterized by stability and monogamy, and these traits are at the same time connected to progressiveness (in relation to a polygamous Other) and traditional values (whereas monogamy is and has always been a central part of Swedish culture).

Monogamy is thus constructed as a stable trait of Swedish society in the policy documents. As such it can be articulated and have a positively connoted significance for further improving Swedish modernity. In this way, the ideal of marriage is continued—transformed into a general ideal of monogamy. As nonmarital relationships are increasingly regulated by family policy in the form of cohabitation laws and thus institutionalized, they are included in a historical continuity emphasizing monogamy and stability. Marriage is thus preserved as the model of intimacy regulation. The expansions of family regulation represented by cohabitation laws do nothing to disrupt the basis for these regulations.

These continuities are however paired with historical and discursive shifts. By using the concept of serial monogamy and separating the two components of this concept, it becomes possible to distinguish between seriality and monogamy as two aspects of the historical development of regulation of intimacy.

The ideal of monogamy is to a large extent a continuity during the studied period, and as I have accounted for above provides a continuation of marriage as the model for state regulations of intimate relationships. Seriality, however—the assumption that people will not organize their intimate lives according to the ideal of one lifelong marriage, but instead will live in a series of monogamous relationships during their lives instead represents a significant shift in the organization of regulated relationships. As described earlier, the political hope of lifelong marriages has successively been replaced by liberalized divorce laws and cohabitation laws increasingly designed with relationship seriality as a basic assumption.

Important to point out, however, is that while monogamy is an empirical as well as analytical concept for present analyses, seriality is an exclusively analytical concept. It does not become explicitly formulated as a concept or idea in the material. Considering the major shifts that this development nevertheless has entailed, I find this worth noting. Does this silence in the material mean that it is a nonissue for the policy makers, or could it potentially be problematic to make the seriality of late modern relationships explicit? Would such a conceptualization potentially question the very position of marriage and the coupled relationship as something idealized? The state is here discursively caught in a double bind as the policy makers cannot make the seriality explicit, but at the same time seriality is exactly what they are continually dealing with in terms of law reforms regulating cohabitation, divorce, custody, and inheritance in a society increasingly populated by stepfamilies, plastic parents and couples unhindered by social or moral pressure from splitting up. The ideal of monogamy still makes every individual marriage a hope of continuity and stability, but societal norms as well as legal reforms have normalized serial monogamy as state regulation and social practice.