Abstract
Growing gender equality, normalization of same-sex relationships, rising rates of cohabitation, of people living apart together, and other arrangements are signs of what Anthony Giddens famously (and controversially) described as the “democratization of personal life.” Many of us enjoy far greater freedom to live outside of heterosexual procreative structures than our parents and grandparents ever did. But still the couple norm persists. Why is this the case, and what are its consequences?
Interviewing subjects in four contrasting national contexts, in different “intimate citizenship regimes,” Roseneil et al. find that “the couple-form is assumed, promoted, and sometimes even enforced” across United Kingdom, Bulgaria, Norway and Portugal (4). Their case studies are embedded in historical and cultural contextualization that is lucid and engaging. Their in-depth life story interviews show that despite myriad national differences, the couple is viewed as the primary repository of passion, intimacy, sex, companionship, and caregiving. That’s a lot to require of coupledom, as we can clearly see during the global pandemic.
It’s not simply a UK or European problem, of course. In the US, for example, as the traditional markers of middle class adulthood (buying a home, getting married, having a steady job with health benefits) are increasingly difficult to attain, achieving coupledom has become an even more important marker of adulthood for many young people. Whether married or unmarried, straight or gay, being in a long-term committed relationship is often seen as the sign of maturity. Indeed, queer theorists note with some irony the rise of “homonormativity” –the essence of which is the belief that “good homosexuals” are members of long term committed partnerships.
One sign of a successful work of social science is that it changes the way you think about the world, sensitizing one to things that tend to be taken for granted, and hardly noticed. That was certainly my experience while reading this provocative book, which made me think of the millennial transgender men I interviewed several years ago. The couple norm played a central role in the stories people told about their lives and aspirations. They expressed the desire “to feel more comfortable in their own skin” which they often linked to the ability to pursue satisfying intimate relationships with others. While discourses of transgender tend to focus on bodies, I was reminded as I read this important book how deeply our social expectations about happiness, self-fulfillment and belonging are embedded in the quest for coupledom.
Decades of writings by psychoanalytically influenced feminists showed that women tend to define themselves more relationally than do most men. But they’re also more likely to find the couple norm oppressive, as Roseneil and her co-authors show. “A culture of domination,” the late great Black feminist author bell hooks wrote, prioritizes the romantic relationship when “the single most important bond is that of community.” So why do most people, including most women, buy into this model? One answer is that in a neoliberal age, face-to-face community is harder and harder to come by. We’re working more, moving around more, and are less connected to others. An additional answer is that norms are powerful. Societies reward those who follow the rules: a sense of belonging, self-worth, affirmation. They dole out punishments to those who do not: feelings of failure, shame, marginality. Expectations to be coupled are enacted by peer groups and families but also by individuals’ internalized notions of normality, and their sense of the desirability of coupled intimacy. If we were not relational beings, those judgements would not be so powerfully constraining, but we define ourselves in relation to others. The tenaciousness of the couple norm, this book so clearly shows, is very difficult to challenge as long as normative injunctions are linked to legal and economic privileges, which make standing outside the couple structure extremely difficult to do.
Still, it to the authors’ credit that they never assume that individuals are simply reflections of the culture in which they live. We abide by the norms we inherit, to a great extent, but we are often conflicted by them, and we do resist, to the extent that we can. So while the couple norm can be satisfying to some, and a source of deep pain and suffering to others, it also generates tensions within and among individuals that may lead to forms of refusal, and innovative experiments in intimacy, many of which challenge couple-dominance. Such experiments, they suggest, need to be grounded in structural change in order to be successful. Only by interrogating the couple norm, and imagining how to better support those who live outside of it, can we continue to struggle to legitimate diverse forms of intimacy and belonging. I thank the authors of this book for offering us this very important and thought-provoking work.