The psychological architecture of the stable couple relationship

The couple as microcosmos

To reduce a more complex picture to a central theme, the classical worldview of the cosmos essentially rested on a notion of the earth as a self-contained, spherical, and imperishable whole. The earth and heavenly bodies were believed to move in a harmony maintained by the natural laws of a steady universe. Thus the ideal of universal order (kosmos) was linked to regular natural patterns and to a privileged form or object that existed apart from time, space, and process, and was believed to be perfect in its central and autonomous totality. This was a cosmos that befitted the centrality of God and divinely inspired harmony. For Plato it also reflected the public domain and its civilizing political values. In Plato’s philosophy, too, the principle of wholeness underpinned the mythical idea of humans as originally complete entities (with two heads, etc.) who after being split by an act of Zeus are in constant search for an “other half” in order to return to their natural state. While ideas about universal wholeness and permanence have certainly been challenged since antiquity (and I return to this later), classical metaphors of cosmic order and wholeness continue to be intricately bound up with furnishings of the human psyche and the structure of everyday experience (Ferguson, 1990). Sociopolitical determinations of metaphor have, for example, shaped conceptualizations of the sexed and gendered body since antiquity (Laqueur, 1992).

Contemporary representations of romantic love and relational stability remain particularly reliant on classical and Judeo-Christian metaphors of symbiotic oneness, as if the couple, and only this relational form, can attain this state of harmony and unity. Psychology’s “top marriage guru,” John Gottman (1994/2007), in fact begins one of his best-selling accounts of stable marriage with the biblical image of voices rising to the heavens in a blending of two-part harmony the moment a partner is found. And similarly in the enormously popular Mars and Venus books (e.g., Gray, 1992), a dyadic (cosmic) harmony that ideally triumphs over disparateness is held up as the essence of couple stability in terms of gender symmetry, wherein the queer subject and relationship are excluded, or conversely normalized.

For Lacan (1975/1998), however, this notion of cosmic/dyadic oneness is nothing less than a fantasy of copulation in which the primacy of form (as the phallic organization of language and thought) penetrates and impregnates matter (as the corporeal and feminine addendum to form). In the fantasy of a totalizing cosmic oneness, there is, then, a differential yet supposedly harmonious relationship between form and matter, and, by extension, between male and female principles. From this premise, Lacan understood knowledge—cosmological and otherwise—as generating the all-consuming fantasy that there is such a thing as a sexual relationship; or as Fink (2002) interprets it, that a harmoniously stable relationship between the sexes is even possible. What this can be taken to mean, in simplified terms, is that sex and desire between a man and woman are never symmetrical because language—or the noise of the signifying phallus—is the ever-present third party that mediates the other two parties in sexual relationships. For Lacan, the illusion of love is compensation for the impossibility of gendered sexual symmetry. Keen to formulate a psychoanalysis that is devoid of fantasies of wholeness and unity, Lacan encouraged a more slippery system of thought that cannot so easily generate unmediated categories like man–woman and inside–outside (Fink, 2002).

While the symbol of the sphere (the ring) can be seen to take centre stage in romantic discourse and ritual because of a fantasy of dyadic oneness, its pre-eminence is also tied to the belief that couple stability is representative of social and affective orders that are equally metaphorical and institutionalized. Around the same time as Western bourgeois coupledom (and the nuclear family more broadly) was afforded an “inside” space of secure and homely privacy in architectural and metaphorical terms (De Swann, 1990), there emerged Hobbes’s (1651/2008) notion of the social contract (then variously reworked by Rousseau, Locke, and Kant). With a concern for the legitimacy of the sovereign or state, social contract theory has been one of the most influential theories in moral and political thought and can be seen as a constitutive legacy for the modern (heterosexual) couple in relation to an ordered, moralized, and politically useful sense of stability.

Marriage historians have variously accounted for ways in which the marriage contract of 17th- and 18th-century Europe served as a metaphor of political authority (e.g., Peters, 2004; Stone, 1992). In its older sense, the legitimacy of sovereignty and state was about status and inevitable hierarchy, and so lesser subjects accepted the naturalness of a coercive order and their involuntary submission to it. As an extension of this overtly penetrative style of governance, marriage, along with its reproductive function, acted as a microcosm of sovereign rule and men “naturally” dominated women as pregnable subjects who were in need of control and guidance. With the emergence of the notion of the social contract in liberal political rationality, however, there was a shift to a rather more romanticized and covert form of rule that sought to invoke the voluntary nature of a subject’s political obligation. Positioned as a freely consenting subject, one’s submission to rule was now motivated not by force or a sense of duty but by notions of freedom, equality, and affection, while not of course making liberal governance from the late 17th century any less coercive (see Barry, Osborne, & Rose, 1996). My point here is that the internal stability of the couple as a microcosm of the state–subject relationship was absolutely paramount for a style of liberal governance that came to depend on the micro management of hearts, desire, and lifestyle for its legitimacy and power (see Pateman, 1988, for a feminist critique of the social contract in relation to marriage and gender). Hence the romanticized “affectionate marriage” that men and women were in principle free to consent to, and negotiate, came to serve as a trope for a particular political arrangement, and the organized principle (and fantasy) of a stable couple unity can be seen as being politically warranted and conducive.

Fast-forwarding to the early 21st century, in America we find George W. Bush pledging over $1 billion to fund research and social programmes to support stable marriages while refusing to sanction gay marriage on the grounds that it does not promote social (and implicitly political) stability. Indeed stable heterosexual marriage has become a major focus of neoliberal political agendas, with psychology certainly stepping up to the plate as the guardian of good stable coupledom. Gottman, for instance, continues to market his claim that he can predict whether a couple will “stay happily together or lose their way” (Gottman & Silver, 2000, p. 2), and avers that “some hidden, evil force is loose in America that is making marriages fall apart” (Gottman, 1994/2007, p. 16). It is as if such an agenda, and the policies it supports, is nothing less than a battle for civil and personal salvation; one that should be willingly embraced like the divided and wanting human of Greek mythology, and the lacking and complicit subject of liberalist rationality.

Consistent with this is the way in which academic and popular psychology can view being un-coupled as symptomatic of discontentment, isolation, and destruction (Gottman, 1994/2007), or, in earlier and more extreme terms, “chronic distress without redeeming features” (Moustakas, 1972, p. 15). As discussed in the following section, John Bowlby’s influential theory of attachment and stabilizing “bonds of love” grew out of a priori ideas about the chaos of separation and isolation for which the mother–child dyad, and then also the couple, was positioned as the antidote.

The safe haven of attachment

The concept of an emotionally saturated and politically useful union of love that was firmly established in Europe by the end of the 18th century came to be scientifically explained as the zeitgeist of positivism moved to the fore of psychological theory. Following Bowlby’s research into attachment from the 1930s, our emotional stabilities and bonds came to be theorized as largely determined by the interactions we have with our mother as children (Bowlby, 1969, 1978). In the context of increasing child delinquency and the changing roles of women at the time, Bowlby observed the distressful effects of separation from the mother on infants and young children. For Bowlby, attachment behaviour (or “proximity seeking”) in children was evidence of a biological and psychic mechanism that essentially afforded the child a sense of security and consequent emotional stability—if the mother was continually present and suitably responsive. For Bowlby, then, healthy mother–child attachment ensured the well-being and positive adjustment of both child and parent in a responsively affectionate and exclusive dyadic relationship.

Bowlby then went on to make claims about the benefit of the “affectional bond” in all close relationships, highlighting the safe haven and the secure base as two of its defining features (see Bowlby, 1979). “Secure base” referred to the utilization of an attachment figure as a platform from which to explore one’s environment, and “safe haven” was seen as the reliance on this same figure for comfort against threat and isolation. These, however, can be regarded as more the consequences of already installed constructions of stability and danger than natural components of “bondedness,” whether between the mother and child or coupled individuals. The affectional bond can be alternatively explained as an effective strategy in the governance of mothers and then, in the extension of the theory to adult relationships, the governance of everyone (Rose, 1989). It is a form of governance that would have us strive for relationships of steadiness and unity with clear responsibilities around mutual responsiveness and how emotionally stable behaviour is best demonstrated and experienced.

Bowlby’s theory was largely read as the empirical confirmation of what Freud had previously suggested: that adult pathology had its origins in childhood emotional disturbances. What Bowlby had counteracted, however, was the radical Freudian perspective that attachment behaviour in both children and adults is impelled by sexual drives. In the face of increasing social and familial unrest in the lead-up to the Second World War, erotic desires were replaced with a rather more domesticating desire for stability and a sense of home. Freud’s somewhat chaotic currents of affectionate and sensual libidos that carried connotations of unpredictable flux were re-coded as no less than life-threatening and pathological, and the mother–child dyad was privileged over Freud’s Oedipal triad as the relationship that enabled a well-adjusted life. Subjectivity in attachment theory was no longer about amoral instinctual gratification (Richards, 1996), but had become moralized in bonded dyadic relationships wherein responsibilized individuals were to assure their own development, worth, and contentment according to the correct organization of emotional welfare and happiness.

The application of attachment theory to the couple relationship continued with Hazan and Shaver’s (1987) conceptualization of romantic love as an attachment process. Following Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, and Wall’s (1978) categorization of patterns of attachment as “secure” (dependent attachment) and “insecure” (avoidant and ambivalent attachment), the application of attachment theory to adult romantic relationships was heralded as the moment in which psychology could allegedly grasp the “entire range of love experiences” (Hazan & Shaver, 1987, p. 512). This influential application of attachment theory is clearly driven by the assumption that we naturally want to have and maintain, and not reject or avoid, the typical experience of romantic coupledom and the stabilities it is thought to afford. The inevitability of healthy attachment in “secure” manifestations of the bond, however, was later questioned, with self-classifying individuals being capable of spreading themselves across the indices of “secure” and “insecure” typologies (Brennan, Clark, & Shaver, 1998; Feeney, 1999). From this it would seem that stable romantic attachment ambiguously exists at the edge of order and not in the cosy safe haven wherein ambivalence and irregularity are ostensibly absent. Such erraticism in an individual’s attachment “style” can be seen as a function of the private and public subjectivities of modernity that involve both autonomy and dependence, and thus competing standards for the attainment of stability (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 1995; Cancian, 1987; Giddens, 1992).

I proceed by turning to commitment and trust as key principles for remaining contained in safe havens and for avoiding outside dangers by virtue of a stable couple relationship that is to be further infused with the values of dyadic knowing, balance, and predictability.

Knowings of commitment and trust

While Bowlby was concerned with productions of the healthy mother–child relationship, in the USA Lewis Terman and colleagues embarked on the first psychological study into marriage stability (Terman, Buttenweiser, Ferguson, Johnson, & Wilson, 1938). Particular interest lay in what was different about happy and unhappy marriages. In line with the emergent tradition of personality psychology in America at the time, Terman asked what kind of optimal personality was at the heart of a happy marriage. Using self-report data, no such personality profile was found, but the investigation inspired a great deal of psychological research over subsequent decades that attempted to predict marital/couple stability. While many researchers are currently using the Big Five model of trait theory to scientifically determine those behavioural characteristics that best suit marital longevity—for example, agreeableness and openness (Donnellan, Conger, & Bryant, 2004)—personality was not notably explored as a predictor of relational success for another 50 years after Terman’s early research.

In the late 1950s, there was also a break from looking to happiness as a clue to relational stability when an interactional perspective was developed in American social psychology as a way of predicting couple stability. A new paradigm of interpersonal exchange ignited the search for the systematic laws of dyadic coupledom in terms of equanimity. Beginning with the idea that the exchange of social and material resources is a central aspect of human interaction (Thibaut & Kelley, 1959), the cognitive social exchange perspective was to develop as a theory of economic behaviour that could ostensibly explain, and ensure, relationship stability. The model of social exchange involves the four fundamental motivations of rewards, costs, outcomes, and comparison levels (i.e., comparing a current relationship with alternatives). The fundamental premise is that relationships will last as long as the benefits outweigh the costs (Kelley & Thibaut, 1978; Walster, Berscheid, & Walster, 1973). No doubt inspired by the newly emergent neoliberal emphasis on economic and personal freedoms that are to be attained by individual autonomy, enterprise, and choice, social exchange theory was to become the most cited theoretical perspective in psychological research on marriage and close relationships, and, along with attachment theory, became a cornerstone of couple therapy (Johnson & Lebow, 2000).

Early applications of social exchange theory to couple relationships began with Levinger’s (1965) research into the cognitive components of couple commitment. This new focus on couple commitment made it possible for researchers to isolate a construct that could serve to stabilize marriages and that was importantly under the direct control of individuals (Adams & Jones, 1997). People in couple relationships no longer had to worry about simply being happy, (un)lucky in love, adjusted in attachment behaviour, or having the right kind of personality; now it was possible to work at their commitment and make economic assessments of it. With the help of psychological expertise and intervention, couples could now actively manage the stability of their partnerships by enacting proper maintenance behaviours. Correct maintenance behaviours are deemed to include sexual and emotional bonding, the equitable sharing of tasks, the fostering of shared social networks, open communication, harbouring positive illusions about a partner, and the avoidance of attractive alternatives (Harvey & Wenzel, 2001; Kurdek, 2004). Essentially, what psychology insists on is that avoidance of ambiguity and uncertainty as forms of interruptive “noise” must be properly managed in enactments of couple commitment, whether such noise is in the form of external attractions, negative attitudes, or inequity.

In psychological theory of romantic commitment, significant tension can be discerned at the level of the subject. Besides those already referred to, the demonstration of dutiful sacrifice is also made a necessary maintenance behaviour in the name of commitment (Rusbult, Olson, Davis, & Hannon, 2001). In this the self-interested individual of social exchange theory is further positioned as ideally compliant and ethically sound. Given the additional imperative of symbiotic oneness, the coupled subject is also required to balance dependency on another with the modernist insistence on a self-containing autonomy as an aspect of personal worth. The subject is thus placed in an ever-widening set of conflicting discourses and obligations. Moreover, the “committed” individual who is assumed to be free to assess and choose can also be seen to lack freedom in the obligatory pursuit of culturally sanctioned and moralized stable relational conduct (Finn, 2010; Lawes, 1999). In particular, such conduct becomes particularly moralized in ideas of what it is to trust a partner, and be trusted in a relationship.

The psychology of couple trust is also rooted in theories of social exchange, and before that in the political rationality of liberalism that established social and relational trust as ensuring unity, order, and salvation, as discussed. Couple trust is understood as a desirable and measurable attitude or disposition of an individual (e.g., Boon, 1994; Rempel, Holmes, & Zanna, 1985; Rotter, 1980) and, as a contractual concept, a vital ingredient in uncertainty reduction (Holmes & Rempel, 1989). Trust, like commitment and attachment, is investigated in dyadic terms and theory assumes a natural desire for exclusive and permanent relationships. What psychology tends to advance as essential components of couple trust are the predictability of a partner, his or her dependability, and one’s faith in a partner to fulfil his or her commitment. Similar to commitment, a developing sense of trust is said to rely on the avoidance of attractive alternatives, with trust helping to produce relational security through a series of exclusions and, importantly, the policing of these. In these terms, the trust imperative can be seen to produce relationships as maximum security institutions as it functions to guarantee a (precarious) knowing of what will happen and ensure the absence of doubt, wonder, and risk (Willig, 1997; Worth, Reid, & MacMillan, 2002).

Notions of trust, then, assume the possibility of truth about another and oneself: a truth that requires no less than the demonstration of acceptable and predictable conduct. Breaches of trust are therefore conceived as betrayals of promised certainty—as steering a relationship, and its occupants, towards disconnection, insecurity, and falsity. In theory and popular marriage manuals (e.g., Block, 2000), a particularly traumatic betrayal of trust is infidelity, with an individual’s vexed response to this seen to be a natural and rightful reaction given what attachment theory, for example, tells us about our inherent need to be secure and the role of dyadic exclusivity in this. But in the constitutive allegiances of couple commitment and trust we are not led towards a place of certain security so much as directed towards regulatory states of dyadic balance, non-disturbance, and disciplinary truth. Of all the qualities of coupledom that psychology advances as crucial for stability, however, no other penetrates and produces innermost truth more than the technology of self-disclosing intimacy.

Penetrations of intimacy

The intimacy said to be involved in couple relationships (both cross- and same-sex) has been given special significance in psychology and is uniformly understood as the key to rounded wholeness and well-being. In intimacy literature, the emotionally and sexually connected dyad is prioritized as the context for a full expression of intimate closeness and as that which contributes most to relationship satisfaction, unity, and thus stability (e.g., Hassebrauck & Fehr, 2002; Mackey, Diemer, & O’Brien, 2000; Prager, 1995). It was from the early 1980s that psychology began to measure intimacy in terms of partner perceptions of it (Schaefer & Olson, 1981) and devise therapeutic programmes and self-help techniques to support couples with expressions of “genuine” intimacy (Masters, Johnson, & Kolodny, 1988). This timing of intimacy research in psychology is significant in that it emerged in the aftermath of the 1960s cultural shift away from sexual monogamy as a mark of true dyadic authenticity. In this context it is no accident that ideas began to circulate within psychology of intimacy as a form of “inner” exposure that revealed more than just what one did with sex, and that could stabilize couple relationships in more acute ways.

In his well-known guide to better relationships Games People Play, Eric Berne (1964) offered one of the first humanistic definitions of couple intimacy as “the spontaneous game-free candidness of an aware person” (p. 180, emphasis added). Jourard (1964), and others after him, similarly gave particular emphasis to an intimacy that was apparently best achieved and demonstrated through self-disclosure. Hinde (1978), for example, defined a proper form of intimacy as being about “the number of different facets of personality which are revealed to the partner and to what depth” (p. 378). And Mackey et al. (2000) framed romantic intimacy as the sense that one can openly and honestly communicate personal thoughts and feelings that are not generally expressed in other relationships. A self-disclosing couple intimacy is thus said to be produced by the unique exposure and visibility of a “real” self; in other words, as the experience of being fully known in all one’s alleged truth and of knowing a partner in his or hers. As such, the psychological profile of the visible intimate subject was clearly based on the Enlightenment model of the private, self-contained individual who harbours a knowable inner depth (see Foucault, 1976/1998).

Leaving spurious gender differences aside, the profile of the mature intimate subject includes characteristics such as positive affect, emotional warmth, accountability, expressiveness, self-awareness, and responsiveness (Prager, 1995). Yet the particular power effects of couple intimacy can be seen as being tied up with what is required of the innermost self in terms of a knowable interiority and its willing exposure. Through the much invested-in technology of intimacy, what becomes integral to the establishment of the stable couple and coupled individual is not only what one does (e.g., responsively attach and dutifully commit) but who and what one is, and how this is both produced and monitored. Despite its allure for traditional psychology, the idea of a self-contained, static, and coherent selfhood is no longer sustainable, having been thoroughly deconstructed by postmodern theories of selfhood (Shotter & Gergen, 1994). Ideas about a unified self have, for example, been replaced with notions of the provisional subject whose self-identity is constituted and reconstituted relationally (e.g., Shotter, 1993). Thus the kind of static subject that is assumed in the traditional literature of intimacy does not hold up in light of a re-theorized subjectivity that cannot truly be known through exposure of a private and independent interiority.

In psychological theories of couple intimacy, power can be understood in Foucauldian terms as being organized around the disciplinary technology of confession. In the ritual of a tell-all intimacy, every detail that determines or is lacking in the subject is brought to the surface and made known in the presence of an overseeing other who, at the same time, entices the production of a particular kind of intimate partner through listening, clarifying, and judging (Foucault, 1976/1998). In intimate confessions, then, partners can be seen as being produced as knowable, compliant, and self-monitoring subjects, and thus as calculable and governable in neoliberal terms. For Foucault, demonstrations of expressiveness, responsiveness, and self-awareness as the instruments and judgements of intimacy are a part of what he terms “technologies of self.” Compelled to responsibly enact intimacy in normalized ways, the coupled subject deploys such technologies of self as a way of transforming him- or herself into a particular kind of desiring individual; one who compliantly desires and receives the subjectifying gaze of the other. In other words, the self-technology, or received formula, for intimate desire and conduct marks out the very kind of subject it is possible to be in intimate spaces, as well as the kind of intimate relationship that can be had in them. And it is by virtue of psychological theory and self-help manuals that the disciplinary formula of couple intimacy is most thoroughly etched into the consciousness and bodies of subjects who are obliged to desire and recognize intimacy in prescribed forms (Rose, 1989).

In being obliged to be transparent, in working on oneself to fully express the terms of “genuine” intimacy, and in being (self) monitored by the (internalized) gaze of the other, the coupled subject is ideally prevented from even the possibility of wrongdoing, the ultimate form of which, in the psychology of romantic intimacy, again being extra-dyadic desire. In the wake of extra-dyadic desire and (un)revealed truths looms the threatening chaos of personal ambiguity and civil-political disorder that monogamy, like policings of trust and intimacy, works to counteract.

Monogamy and its alternatives

In a history of romantic love in Western Europe from the 12th century, the freedoms of a spontaneous romantic passion (La cortezia) that originated in France as a challenge to the moral, matrimonial, and feudal laws of the time had, by the 18th century, given way to the responsible pursuit of stability in relationships of “love.” In 20th-century psychological accounts of the stabilizing quality of couple love, the construct is measured alongside (or as) commitment, trust, and intimacy, and sexual monogamy is typically referred to as one of its foundations (e.g., Cramer, 1998; Fletcher, 2002; Hatfield & Walster, 1978). What mainstream psychologists continue to agree on is that “quality” love and sex are sexually and emotionally monogamous because monogamy is a universal norm, facilitates bonding and survival, and is a good predictor of relationship success, among other proposed benefits. Consequently, where theory attempts to address the widespread phenomena of extra-dyadic sex, the aberrant practice of non-monogamy is routinely understood as adultery, infidelity, or indicative of an unsatisfactory relationship. Practices of extra-dyadic sex, multiple partnerships, and a dislocation of love and sex that had characterized the 1960s and 1970s are typically viewed as threats to personal and relational stability and, not surprisingly, social cohesion itself (e.g., Buunk & Dijkstra, 2000; Immerman & Mackey, 1999).

From the 1990s, however, feminist and sociological critiques of monogamous coupledom began to re-emerge (Giddens, 1992; Jackson & Scott, 2004; Plummer, 1995; Robinson, 1997; Weeks et al., 2001). In similarly turning their interest to diverse practices of consensual non-monogamies as alternative ways of relating (e.g., polyamory, swinging, open relationships), many researchers have gone on to highlight the psychosocial aspects that sustain, and limit, such relationships (e.g., Barker, 2005; Finn, 2010; Heckert, 2010; Jamieson, 2004; Klesse, 2007; Wilkinson, 2010). While deployments of normative love and intimacy discourses have been shown up as variously constraining practices of non-dyadic and openly non-monogamous relationships (Finn & Malson, 2008), such affective arrangements continue to be credited with at least the potential for re-grounding relationships on nomadic and ethical styles of connectedness (see Barker & Langdridge, 2010b). Thus, open non-monogamy—however practised—can be seen as not necessarily dependent on a form of hetero/mononormative relational stability that involves a series of exclusions and containments and that synonymizes “excess” with disorder (Finn, 2011).

As abstract as current ideas of relationship potentiality may be, what is important is that re-grounded forms of intimate connectedness do not inevitably result in the chaotic undermining of relationships, people, families, or social cohesion but can potentially propagate creative extensions to these (see Barker & Langdridge, 2010a, for various discussions). In the burgeoning research concerning open non-monogamies, it is new foundations for relating and for a knowing of self and another/others that are being sought. What this currently involves is the exploration of differently configured relational foundations that at least have the potential to de-prioritize orders of romantic hegemony and hierarchy and establish stabilities of inclusion rather than exclusion. According to anarchist perspectives of open non-monogamies, it is the “noisy” disturbances of polyamory, for example, that are productive of a new order (Heckert, 2010; Wilkinson, 2010). Indeed, according to the philosophy of Michel Serres, “noise is not simply a threat to order; it is the basis from which order might emerge. It is simultaneously destructive and productive; it interrupts at first glance and consolidates when you look again” (as cited in Brown & Stenner, 2009, p. 49). It is the idea of a transformative stability and order that comes from chaos, as opposed to a flat and lifeless version of stability that excludes it, that I want to further explicate in the next and final section. To do this I return to matters of the cosmos and highlight ways in which science and philosophy have acknowledged the precariousness of known stability.

A view of chaosmos

With the advent of the telescope in the early 17th century, Galileo gave credence to Copernicus’ theory and its overturning of ideas of cosmic inertia and spherical wholeness. The German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler then carried forward a heliocentric model of the universe and later theorized that planets do not move in perfect circles around the sun but in ellipses (or oval-shaped planes), thus breaking belief in uniform circular motion and spherical wholeness as aspects of cosmic order and harmony. Hence tied up with developments in cosmological theory is a challenge to the primacy of unity over partiality. Since Hubble in the 1920s detected that the universe is expanding, cosmology, along with other natural sciences such as ecology, continues to premise a view of “chaosmos” and the impossibility of a static and permanent universe. According to Prigogine (1997), we are observing a science that is no longer identified with certitude, but a “science that views us and our creativity as part of a fundamental trend present at all levels of nature” (p. 7). As Prigogine understands it, instability and possibility are core aspects of the natural world; a world from which we are not separate and in which there is no division between being and creative becoming.

Fuelled by new ways of seeing the natural world, and ourselves in it, in 20th-century philosophy there are strong rebuttals of modernist foundations of stability, wholeness, and order. For instance, Derrida (1967/2001) challenged a fundamental ground of certitude as always beyond reach and as ultimately misdirected. Heidegger (1927/1962) understood a sense of security grounded on the absence of fear, doubt, and uncertainty as a mark of inauthenticity, and Deleuze and Guattari (1972/2004) advocated creative “lines of flight” that move away from the over-coded values of stability and certainty. For Deleuze and Guattari, these lines of flight are not an escape from assumed fear and uncertainty, but rather circulations of a more chaotic subjectivity and palpitations of affect that are driven by uncertainty and thus not stocked within established social, relational, and affective orders. In these terms, psychologized needs, satisfactions, and securities that are thought to be fulfilled and made complete in a proper doing of stable coupledom are rendered problematic because of the ways in which previously abstract energies, forces, and affects have been brought to life in specific ways, or indeed left lifeless. For Foucault (1983) also, the fostering of de-territorialized flows of desire is to yield intense relations that do not resemble those that are institutionalized. It is to prefer flows over unities and mobile arrangements over lateral systems, and to believe that creative productivity arises not from uninterrupted order, but rather from nomadic, irregular, and uncertain processes.

Drawing from this tradition of anti-modernist critique is the current call for an ontological re-grounding of psychology itself on a life-affirming (non)foundationalism. Here, change, irregularity, and noise are understood not as accidental and unwelcome disruptions of more essential regularities and substances but rather as part of the very fabric of biological, psychic, and sociocultural processes. In drawing on the philosophies of Whitehead, Deleuze, and Serres, for example, Brown and Stenner (2009) foreground the universal and fundamental dynamics of multiplicity and emphasize an order that comes from a mediating chaos. They position themselves, and the thinkers on whom they draw, not as being anti-foundationalist (as in relativist forms of constructionism), but as rejecting notions of static realities and ways of being while maintaining the need for differently configured foundations. As Stenner (2007) suggests, “[W]e need foundations precisely because we lack them: existence, being fundamentally groundless, must invent its own foundations” (p. 46). In these terms, couple/relational foundations are necessary but are ours to devise; they are not inevitably tied to metaphorically construed systems of order that privilege a lifeless stability of consistent dyadic balance, exclusionary wholeness, and reductive certainties.

What is expounded in the work of Serres (1982/1995), in particular, is the existence and virtue of the “excluded middle” between order and chaos as the atom of life. Existence is thought to begin with disequilibrium and instability rather than with negations of these. According to Serres, foundational notions of stability work to erroneously conceal the chaos that propels all forms of existence. Order and stability are thus believed to be inseparable from the appearance of chaos and its inherent fluctuations and processes. It is from within chaos—and importantly the inclusion of the apparent interruptions of chaos—that new forms of thought and existence can emerge. Serres and other process philosophers therefore oppose the civilizing settlement of chaos through imposed orders of essence and connection. In this way, existing practices of open non-monogamies can be viewed as attempting to challenge traditional relational foundations by refusing the stabilizing illusions of certainty and exclusory borders.

Akin to the anti-reductionism of process philosophy is chaos theory: a perspective that is also useful for developing a critique of unalterable couple foundations and their universal laws. Chaos theory (or nonlinear dynamics) can be seen as posing a challenge to the idea of disorder as being always and already destructive and alien to the process of life (Hayles, 1990; Prigogine, 1997). Having its beginnings in the physical sciences, chaos theory has in recent years been applied to the study of social systems in offering an alternative ontological perspective, with cognitive, developmental, and clinical branches of psychology tinkering with the theory with varying degrees of success (see Ayers, 1997, for a discussion of early applications of chaos theory in psychology).

Academic fascination with chaos theory can, on the one hand, hinge on its possibilities for escaping hegemonic systems of order. On the other hand, chaos is also engaged with as a further extension of order and stability (Hayles, 1990). Here the stability of chaotic systems—and I am characterizing intimate partnership as one such system—is about the transformed new orders that chaos and its infinite possibilities can initiate. In this view of complexity, order is understood as being tied not to prediction or certainty but to a system’s (or relationship’s) sensitive dependence on random initial conditions whereby similar systems (or relationships) will rapidly display very different forms of behaviour and unpredictable outcomes. In other words, new forms of order and stability emerge from patterns of chaotic fluctuation and variability. Unlike linear systems (such as monogamously contained dyadic relationships), nonlinear systems (perhaps a polyamorous relational system) can absorb “noise” without disturbing the overall stability of the system (Weigel & Murray, 2000). Thus the idea of couple relationships being stable in linear terms is antithetical to a creative order of things. According to chaos and process theories, creative order relies on turbulence, irreversibility, and erraticism—the very energies of life that are excluded from the traditional couple domain.

One of the many implications of chaos theory for the psychology of relationships is that the effect of an attachment style with one’s mother, for example, cannot be predicted. This is because attachment—like processes of commitment, trust, and intimacy—would be seen to involve multiple possibilities and outcomes for every decision, action, and response as we interact with a partner (or partners) and they with us. Like process philosophy, chaos theory highlights the occurrences of chance, inconsistency, and unrest as being pivotal in the behaviour of the many systems that make up the physical universe and human experience. As such, manifestations of apparent chaos in intimate relationships should not be excluded as irrational, destructive, imperfect, or deviant. While psychologists and relational dialectics theorists can favourably acknowledge the fluctuating patterns and nonlinearity of romantic relationships (e.g., Baxter & Montgomery, 1996; Duck, 1994), this has implicitly been about the management of uncertainty and the reduction of intrusive chaos in favour of couple homeostasis (see Knobloch, 2008). And where chaos theory and nonlinear modelling have been applied to the study of romantic relationships, the usefulness of a complexity approach has been understood in terms of its ability to resolve problems, predict behaviours, and increase the likelihood of steady, stable states between partners in a dyadic relationship (Gottman, Swanson, & Murray, 1999; Gottman, Swanson, & Swanson, 1993; see Weigel & Murray, 2000). What thus tends to be resisted is a more fundamental concern for plurality and vitality in how we can love and relate to others (and ourselves) outside of a “stable” relational system and its management of perceived chaos.

Conclusion

This sketch of the psychological framework of the stable couple relationship has outlined key components that are commonly deployed in theory and in everyday practice to steer the (heteronormative) couple towards a form of stability that embraces ideological fantasies of wholeness and certainty. As a dominant indicator of relationship success, the value of relational stability has, in this paper, been tied to the modernist agenda of bringing about foundational order over a feared chaos where the (compliant and copulating) couple serves as a metaphor for the former in political and affective terms. The power effects of the psychological conjuring of the stable couple via the technologies of attachment, commitment, trust, intimacy, and monogamy are that how we relate to another and ourselves is made static, certain, and predictable and ideally ordered in these terms.

What I have attempted to highlight is an insistence on relational stability as somehow being devoid of the negatively construed turbulences of what is unknown, uncertain, and impermanent, and an incessant closing down of uncertainties that can instigate altogether different portraits of relationships and relational subjectivities. What becomes important, I would argue, is not fearing preconceived notions of the unfamiliar, the unstable, and the chaotic but reconceptualizing an order–chaos dynamic in non-dualistic ways such that life-affirming forms of intimate relationality can be more fully realized. To this end, I make the suggestion that theories of nonlinear, chaotic process might be usefully applied to the study of non-dyadic relationships and embodied non-monogamous practices in particular. Such application could fruitfully explore chaos as a site of production in situations where people are engaging with versions and degrees of plurality. What could be highlighted in this are the vital small changes—or strange attractors—as conditions for as yet unrecognized relational processes; chaotic conditions that can produce unfamiliar lines of affect and different channels for (dis)connection with others and, in turn, with ourselves.