Abstract
There is a persistent media narrative that millennials are a distinct generational group that is particularly skilled at navigating multiple forms of social difference. Yet, as Cristen Dalessandro makes clear in Intimate Inequalities: Millennials’ Romantic Relationships in Contemporary Times, there is little empirical data exploring the extent to which this claim is true, and if so, what the impact is on their personal lives. Intimate Inequalities fills this gap, investigating how millennials navigate social differences in the context of their intimate relationships. As Dalessandro argues, while public behaviors and narratives can be revealing in their own right, they are also often shaped by “social niceties” in ways that are hard to maintain with those closest to us. Thus, the book uses the stories millennials tell about their intimate relationships as a lens into understanding how they think about and engage with social inequalities more broadly. As she asks, are millennials reshaping relationships and reducing social inequality in the process, or do we see less divergence from past generations than we might expect given the progressive narratives?
Dalessandro interviews 60 millennials (those with birth years between the early 1980s and the mid-1990s), and the sample varies by gender, race, social class, and sexuality. The book is organized around the social inequalities that Dalessandro explores, with chapters on gender, age, race, social class, and how these shape millennials’ orientation to marriage. But comparisons are made within each chapter too, as Dalessandro looks at how other identities intersect with the one under exploration. Thus, we also see how sexuality shapes experience, as each chapter compares heterosexual and LGBTQ+ millennials’ accounts. Throughout, Dalessandro emphasizes the value of storytelling for understanding how people use these identities to make sense of themselves and others. By listening closely to millennials’ accounts of their lives, Dalessandro untangles how they “construct their understandings of who they are as raced, aged, classed, gendered, sexual people” (p. 10). The voices of the participants draw the reader in throughout, while Dalessandro grounds their narratives in careful, compelling, and accessible analysis that provides context to the tensions with which millennials grapple.
As Dalessandro points out, generations are unique in that they are shaped by broader context. Millennials entered adulthood during a period of rapid social change and economic precarity. Their access to technology fundamentally reshaped intimate relationships in ways unparalleled in past generations. As a result, many claim to have a different orientation to relationships, placing individual choice and freedom, rather than societal expectations, at the center of their intimate desires. Yet, they often also draw uncritically on well-worn narratives about what these identities mean in their relationships. For example, heterosexual women portray themselves as relational and more responsive to men’s desires than to their own. Heterosexual men narrate agentic, independent identities and place their self-development ahead of relationships. But instead of interrogating the gendered expectations that lead to these orientations, both groups view them as opportunities for personal growth and seek individualized solutions to the inequalities that inevitably arise. Intimate Inequalities’ key contribution is to demonstrate how millennials navigate a transition to adulthood marked both by a desire for progressive social change and by goals and desires remarkably aligned with those of previous generations. Rather than fundamentally challenge social inequalities, millennials use identities in ways that often reproduce the very inequalities they hope to avoid by failing to connect to larger hierarchies and social patterns.
Intimate Inequalities would be a strong addition to courses on social inequalities, gender, families, and intimate relationships, as well as any course that explores young adulthood in the life course. While many studies focus on one or two dimensions of inequality, it is rare for a work to cover so many so extensively, thus allowing students to investigate how multiple intersecting identities shape experiences in romantic relationships. While most current undergraduates are too young to be considered millennials, the book should at least give them pause to reconsider the pace of social change and their linear sense of social progress as a by-product of cohort replacement. As Dalessandro makes clear, many young adults can recognize social inequalities more broadly without challenging them in their personal lives, making them less different from previous cohorts than they often presume. This book will also encourage students to reflect on how relationship practices are tied not just to preferences, but also to the economic, social, and cultural contexts in which they occur. Yet Dalessandro is firm about the limitations of addressing social inequalities through interpersonal dynamics alone. Individuals simply can’t to the extent necessary, and thus policy solutions are offered to demonstrate the need for structural change.