Scripting Civil Partnerships: interviewing couples together and apart

The study

Our study is researching couples where both partners were aged up to 36 years when they entered into Civil Partnerships in the United Kingdom. ² Unlike most couple studies, ours involves same-sex couples, and unlike most studies of same-sex relationships, it involves younger cohorts’ formalized relationships. The study is therefore situated in distinctive ways with respect to existing research and is exploring relationships that are themselves historically and socially distinctive. The research is concerned with the ‘new’ relational possibilities opened up by the formalization of same-sex relationships and the historically ‘new’ experiences of sexual minorities who will have access to more or less full relational citizenship for most of their adult lives. From the outset, we were keen to study these new relationships and experiences in ways that assumed as little as possible about their structuring, organization and quality. Thus, we set out to explore how the transition from being single to Civil Partners is made and experienced; how formalized same-sex partnerships are defined, experienced and practised and how same-sex ‘marriages’ are influenced by interlinked sociocultural and biographical factors. In essence, we sought to explore young Civil Partnerships as complexly situated relationships by exploring how they were scripted.

Our rationale for interviewing partners together and apart was threefold. First, previous studies have suggested heterosexual marriages to be structured in accordance with gender differences and inequalities (for overviews, see Duncombe and Marsden, 1993, 1996; Dunne, 1997; Jamieson, 1998). In contrast, studies of same-sex relationships suggest them to be highly negotiated and ‘more egalitarian’ because of the absence of gender differences (Dunne, 1997; Peplau et al., 1996; Weeks et al., 2001; for criticisms see Carrington, 1999; Ryan-Flood, 2009; Taylor, 2009). These studies have tended to rely on couple or individual interviews with one or both partners (for discussion, see Carrington, 1999; Gabb, 2008). We were keen to explore how a combined approach might allow for a more nuanced view of relational power. Second, we sought to study how couples intersubjectively constructed their relationships, and couple interviews allowed us to explore couple interactions in scripting and ‘doing’ the relationship in a situated context. Third, we sought to embed this in partners’ (non-)negotiation of biographically rooted personal scripts for relating, and the individual interviews allowed us to explore these scripts. All three interviews were conducted by the same researcher during a single visit. The interview format was quite simple, starting with the joint interview, which was split in two parts. The first part of the joint interview focused on the couple’s relationship story, and the second part followed up questions that arise from this. We then moved on to the individual interviews that focused especially on finances, sexual and emotional commitments and family making/planning. We interviewed 50 couples, 25 female and 25 male. At the point of the interviews, the length of Civil Partnerships varied from 1 month to 4.5 years, averaging around 23 months.

Activating the story: influence and agency

Couples were recruited with the help of registrar officials across the United Kingdom. Our interactions with the couples began when, prior to agreeing to participate in the study, they received an information leaflet about the study. This information was repeated immediately before starting the interview. At this point, the format of the interviews was also carefully explained to ensure that both partners knew what to expect for the duration of the visit. We explained that the individual interviews would take place in alphabetical order according to partners’ first names and clarified that the separate interviews were not designed to ‘catch them out’ but to explore the approaches to relating that couples brought to the relationship. We then explained that their two accounts would be kept strictly confidential and that we would not share information given in individual interviews with partners. The joint interview then began with the following statement by the researcher:

This study concerns people who have entered Civil Partnership. We are interested in finding out the story of your relationship from the beginning to now, how you met, what attracted you to one another and how the relationship developed.

We would like to know the ins and out of your relationship and for the first part of this interview I would like you to tell us your own story in your own words from the beginning to now.

I will simply listen, but I may take a few notes so I can ask you some questions when you have completed your story.

This task was fairly open-ended and allowed partners to ‘intuitively’ detail their story while the researcher was positioned as an active listener (Anderson and Jack, 1991). While the task was partly designed to minimize our influence on the couples’ stories, it did not, of course, neutralize this. To illuminate this, it is useful to consider two broad ways in which relationship stories were told that were linked to whether couples had children or not. Children featured highly in the relationship stories of couples who were parents, and the entry into Civil Partnership was often just one milestone in their broader family story. In contrast, the majority of couples who were not parents sketched how their relationship had developed up to the point of Civil Partnership and often presented this as the final point of their relationship story. This raises the question about why the latter did not usually include discussion of couple life after the moment of formalization. Initially, we were concerned that the stalling of couple stories at this moment might reflect the length of our introduction and the difficulty participants may have in remembering the details of the verbal prompts: ‘we would like to know the ins and out of your relationship’ and ‘tell us your own story in your own words from the beginning to now’. However, the fact that couples with children told more detailed stories of life after Civil Partnership led us to reflect on other dynamics that might be at play. This, in turn, led us to consider what participants might think the study was about, how the story was staged for multiple audiences and the tension between the stories we sought and the ones they wanted to tell.

In terms of participants’ perceptions of the study, we reasoned that in exploring how we activated and shaped their stories, we should consider the information leaflet given to them prior to interview as well as the introduction to the interview itself. The information leaflet featured an image of two rings, which could have possibly signalled that we were interested in the wedding itself. While the text explicitly explained our interest in how couples met, what attracted them to each other, how their relationship developed and ‘what it’s like to be in a Civil Partnership’, we cannot undermine the immediate power of the visual image. Thus, we cannot say that our introduction did not influence how most couples’ stories stopped at the day when rings were exchanged. But there also seemed to be other dynamics at work relating to cultural scripts about marriage as the benchmark for ‘authentically’ formalized relationships; the ‘public’ nature of interviews about ‘private’ issues and the couples agency in the interview context. Consider the following quotations:

Despite the fact that Civil Partnership is legally not marriage, most couples viewed and described themselves as married and were keen to be recognized as such. As the quotations above indicate, interviewees consistently deployed the language of marriage when describing their decision to formalize their relationships, the nature of their commitment and the practices through which their relationships were embedded and given meaning. At the heart of their stories were culturally familiar narratives about romance, love and commitment as the basis of marriage, and of marriage as a key life event and as bolstering couple commitments. In other words, their stories could be interpreted as performative claims about being in ‘real’ and ‘ordinary’ marriages, perhaps signalling the power of marriage as a dominating cultural script for framing understandings of relationships. Alternatively, they could equally be viewed as indicative of couples’ scripting capacities and as a testament to their agency in the interview context.

From the latter perspective, ‘private’ stories about relationships are not simply recounted in interviews but are constructed and performed for different audiences. In the case of couple interviews, these audiences can include the partners themselves, the researcher and broader (imagined) research audiences (see Beitin, 2008). While partners constructed their relationship as a marriage with and for each other, they were also performing it as such for ‘external’ audiences. The stories of same-sex couples who were parents could be read as performative claims to be real and ordinary families by virtue of the presence of children. This may partly explain why their children featured so strongly in their couple story. In contrast, couples who were not parents seemed to emphasize the degree to which Civil Partnership itself was performative of their legitimate status as a married couple and family. This may partly explain why the couple story stalled at the point of entry into ‘marriage’. By that point, the meaning-making work of the storytelling was done: the authentic marriage was established.

As interviewers we shaped, but did not wholly control, our research participants’ narratives. Narratives generated in couple interviews, like all interviews, emerge through the negotiation of constraints and agency. While the research agenda sets the context for the interview, in light of the discussion above, it would be naive to undermine interviewees’ narrative agency. Interviewee’s agency in the research context is often evident where, like the couples in our study, they narrate the stories they want to tell as opposed to the ones researchers ask them to address. Developing Gubrium’s and Holstein’s (2009) point about linkages, we can link couples’ narrative agency in interviews to relational agency more generally. While cultural scripts are drawn upon in making relationships meaningful, people do not simply follow scripts for relating. Rather, scripts are actively constructed and emerge though interaction in situated contexts (Plummer, cited in Whittier and Melendez, 2004). In the next section, we illuminate the nuances of scripting agency and its constraints by focusing on the ‘internal’ relational dynamics involved in narrating the couple in interviews.

Whose story? Collaboration, composition and resources

Many researchers have explored the interactional aspects of storytelling in specifically situated research contexts (e.g. Conway, 2008; De Fina, 2009; De Fina and Georgakopoulou, 2008; Schlosser, 2008; Van Enk, 2009). Here, we focus on partners’ collaborations in composing their couple story to illustrate their interactions in the interview context and the linkages between narrative authority in this context and scripting resources (or capital) more broadly. Most relationship stories began with giggles and laughter as partners decided who would start. The following abstract is a typical example of this:

Like Graham and Andrew, most couples negotiated the telling of their stories from the outset. While couples were normally quick to reach a comfortable rhythm in their storytelling, their collaboration strategies varied. One approach was to offer to ‘go first’, as Graham did, but in other cases, neither partner was keen to start. Instead, couples spent the first few moments deciding who would start or to ‘do it together’. Louise and Kathryn are a good example:

Negotiations like this in the interview context often matched with how couples claimed to negotiate decisions within the relationship (but see discussion of individual interviews below). However, among some couples, no negotiation took place and one partner took the lead. In Amina’s and Josha’s interview, for example, Amina first suggested joint storytelling, but this collaboration never materialized. This is how their story began:

But instead of waiting for an answer from her partner, Amina continued:

Amina then only paused to check at which point they met, before she carried on with the storytelling. It soon became clear that Amina was in control of the couple narrative. Even when they argued, Amina’s version of the story carried more weight. Josha’s collaboration was often reduced to agreeing with Amina to confirm her version and interpretation of events. There were other cases, like Callum’s and Mark’s, where one partner took control of the couple narrative. Callum began,

Like Amina, Callum dominated the telling of the relationship story from the outset. Mark confirmed it or added asides. Methodologically, examples like these raise questions about the value of interviewing couples together, as they can obviously produce a one-sided story of the relationship. In terms of method, the dominance of one partner is typically avoided by interviewing couples separately (Allan, 1980; Beitin, 2008). However, taking up Gubrium and Holstein’s (2009) point about linkages, we argue that joint interviews can be valuable for exploring such domination in its own right and how it is linked to sociocultural factors that influence scripting authority in relationships (see also Allan, 1980; Valentine, 1999). This, in turn, requires making links between how couples tell their stories and the content of these stories themselves (Gubrium and Holstein, 2009: 37).

In Amina’s and Josha’s case, it was clear that Amina was not only in control of the storytelling but that, according to the content of the narrative that she and Josha told, the relationship itself was structured according to Amina’s self-defined needs. Being the older partner, the home owner, the breadwinner and the one who could draw on previous relationship experience, her position was a powerful one. In Callum’s and Mark’s case, the content of the story emphasized how Callum undertook most of the relationship planning, organized the couple’s social life and took responsibility for organizing their finances. As the primary earner at the time of the interview, he was better economically resourced than Mark. Moreover, Mark was fairly new to the area in which the couple lived. His family and friends lived elsewhere, meaning he had limited social resources. Further, Mark had been badly scarred by a previous abusive relationship which, Callum explained, left him unable to make decisions for himself. In both cases, an obvious factor that influenced scripting dominance was relationship ‘expertise’ where one partner was more experienced in relationships than another or could claim to be more knowledgeable about how relationships should work. Combined with other kinds of resources (economic, social and cultural), claims to expertise could allow a partner to accrue greater scripting capital that, in turn, could enable her or him to be dominant in structuring the relationship itself (for discussion of different forms of capital see Bourdieu, 1986; Skeggs, 2003).

As opposed to seeing one partner’s dominance in joint interviews as a problem that can be resolved by the ‘right’ method, we argue that how couples collaborate (or not) in narrative production in interviews can be explored in conjunction with the content of the narrative itself to generate substantive insights. Couple interviews do not ‘merely’ generate narratives, but situated examples of couples’ scripting practices (c.f. De Fina and Georgakopoulou, 2008). These narratives and practices can illuminate how relationships are given meaning and done in situated interactional contexts and how relationship construction is socioculturally influenced and shaped. However, it is also important to acknowledge the limits of the joint interview method. Chief among these, from our perspective, was the limited scope for exploring how socioculturally shaped ‘subjectivities’ feature in the intersubjective construction of relationships and the negotiations this involves. This was our primary rationale for conducting individual interviews.

Situating relating selves

As we saw earlier, Josha was often silenced by her partner in the couple interview. In the individual interview, she explained the personal implications of being constructed as a ‘dependent’ self in her relationship. She said,

I feel guilty …when Amina insists on paying for the shopping … she really doesn’t let me do that … which I find annoying sometimes … it’s, again, like she’s the dominant one in the relationship.

Raising this issue in the couple interview would have been problematic for Josha. Because it involved an area where Amina was unwilling to negotiate, it would almost certainly have caused an argument between them. In this case, Amina’s domineering approach to the relationship combined with what seemed to be her frightening temper limited any serious challenge to her control of the couple story. The individual interview therefore provided Josha with the opportunity to tell her story of the relationship. While this confirmed Amina’s dominance in the relationship, it also allowed Josha to assert her ‘self’ as an actively collaborating (but not wholly compliant) one in the relationship, in a way that the couple interview did not. In her individual interview, Josha gave meaning to her relational self (and her personal script for relating) by linking it to her family upbringing and community life, where rigid gendered roles were enforced on the basis of social norms connected with religious beliefs. She assumed, and partly subscribed to, the belief couples and marriages ‘naturally’ involved a dominant and submissive partner, and that the economically resourced one (in heterosexual relationships, the man) had the right to call the shots. This was not simply ‘her’ story but a strong moral tale about how relationships ‘should’ be done that was shared within – and inherited from – her family and community.

Narratives generated in individual interviews do not simply confirm or contradict couple ones (c.f. Pahl, 1989). Rather, they contextualize and complicate them. This is not only because they provide additional ‘information’ but also because different interview contexts allow ‘different’ relating selves to emerge, who can narrate the relationship from a differently situated position. In our case, individual interviews enabled a different view of the relationship: from the perspective of a biographically embedded relational self who was not wholly detached from the family, community and moral contexts in which their relational orientations and scripts had been formed and developed. Embedded relational selves and moral tales did not only feature in narratives of ‘non-negotiated’ relationships, like Josha’s, but also in narratives of negotiated relationships.

Situated negotiations

Making links between couple’s individual interviews illuminated how the negotiation of relationships was often more complex than couple narratives and the previous research often suggest (see also Carrington, 1999). In narrating and giving meaning to their personal approaches to money and finances in the individual interviews, Caroline and Edith situated them biographically. When Caroline was asked about her approach, she explained,

I’m quite sensible … I didn’t have any money when I was younger when I was a kid and I was brought up with no money and when you’re like that that you do have a bit of a one eye on [spending] … I am careful [even if] I can afford stuff now that I could never afford before.

In contrast, Caroline’s partner, Edith, recounted a financially secure background and described her own approach to finances as being ‘careless’. Edith had gradually taken up her partner’s ‘sensible’ approach. Getting married had forced her and Caroline to confront their different orientations to spending money and this centred on Edith’s relaxed approach to her debt. On that note Edith said,

I do forget that that’s affectively her debt as well. So I forget sometimes that’s kind of an ‘us’ thing that we’re paying for … But I forget that and I know that … makes her nervous.

Edith compromised her approach to the debt. On the surface, her narrative could be taken to support claims about same-sex couples’ negotiated relational practices (and possibly indicated ‘narrative collaboration’ across the individual interviews, c.f. Gubrium and Holstein, 2009: 93). However, taken together, Caroline’s and Edith’s individual interviews suggest that this would be an overly simplistic view of the dynamics involved. In fact, it was only Edith’s approach to finances that was changed through the confrontation and not both the partners’ approaches: Caroline’s more ‘fixed’ one remained unchanged.

By linking the narratives generated by Caroline’s and Edith’s individual interviews, we might explain the dominance of Caroline’s approach to finances in the relationship in a number of ways. First, Caroline’s script for money management is supported by a range of sociocultural scripts about ‘good’ relationships and marriages: that finances should be a joint matter and not an individual one, and that couples should manage finances sensibly to avoid debt. Second, this combined with Caroline’s articulation of her approach to finances via a disadvantaged classed self-narrative amounted to a powerful moral demand on Edith to reassess her approach. In Edith’s individual interview, it was clear that Caroline’s classed self-narrative was well-rehearsed within the relationship itself, and that it was a strong one in encouraging Edith to change her ways.

Only relying on the couple narrative or one individual interview would have limited the insights gained into how the self-scripts feature in couple negotiations. The point is not that individual interviews contradict the couple narratives of negotiated relationships. Rather, by generating embedded self-narratives, they enable researchers to explore the subtleties of intersubjective negotiation and the factors that influence this. The latter include partners’ biographically embedded biographies and practices, as well as the stories partners tell to each other about these. In addition, personal scripts that are supported by culturally powerful moral scripts about ‘good’ relationships can be especially strong ones in couple negotiations. As we shall see, couple and individual interviews combined enabled the exploration of how moral scripts for relating could be a source of tension and conflict for couples and selves.

Strong and weak stories in relationships

Practically, individual interviews enabled us to explore in-depth issues that couples might be more reluctant to discuss in joint interviews (Beitin, 2008). These included sexual arrangements and practices. By the time couples met, some partners had developed habituated ‘alternative’ sexual practices. In his individual interview, Graham recounted how he had a broad ‘sexual menu’ before he met his partner Andrew. This menu included phone sex with strangers and he continued to engage in this practice after entering into his current relationship. Andrew discovered this, and as Graham recounts, ‘he just asked me straight out, “have you been having phone sex?”’. The discovery was a ‘hard pill’ for Andrew to swallow, and he confronted Graham about it. In his interview, Andrew said, ‘I just thought that wasn’t acceptable … it was just sort of what he was used to when he was on his own’.

Graham and Andrew had, in fact, already raised this issue as a negotiated critical moment in their joint interview. In itself, this underscored that researchers cannot assume what issues are ‘sensitive’ ones for interviewees (c.f. Enosh and Buchbinder, 2005). Nevertheless, the individual interviews allowed us to explore the negotiations involved from the position of multiply differently positioned ‘relational selves’. In Andrew’s interview, for example, it was clear that he had assumed that a committed relationship would be a sexually exclusive one. In his interview, Graham explained that because he and Andrew had not had a conversation about sexual commitment there was, in fact, no explicit injunction against sex with others. In doing so, he drew on alternative ‘queer’ discourses that suggest sexual exclusivity cannot be assumed in same-sex relationships but must be explicitly negotiated (Duncombe et al., 2004; Klesse, 2007; Weeks et al., 2001).

However, Graham’s narrative was a conflicted one, and his individual narrative indicated that he was aware of Andrew’s unspoken expectations and had actively tried to ‘cover my tracks’. The individual interview therefore illuminated how Graham was juggling a number of scripts that potentially gave meaning to his practices – alternative ‘queer’ ones that promoted negotiated non-monogamy in relationships, as well as mainstream ones that linked monogamy to ‘authentic’ couple and married commitments, which associate sex outside relationships with ‘cheating’ (c.f. Duncombe et al., 2004). While the joint interview suggested that Andrew’s script for doing the relationship won out as the strong one, because of its links to morally weighty mainstream scripts, Graham’s individual interview indicated that his narrative was a weak and less-than-robust one, as it was ‘internally’ conflicted.

Practically speaking, individual interviews provide a context in which tensions and negotiations in relationships can be explored from the perspective of biographically, socioculturally and morally situated selves. By enabling the narration of a reflective self, individual interviews also generate deep insights into couple and self-conflicts that stem from negotiating different moral value systems, relational orientations and possibilities. Individual interviews revealed that in scripting relationships, partners not only negotiate relationship scripting with their partner, but they also negotiate with their ‘selves’.