Couple Relationships in the 21st Century

J. Gabb, J. Fink

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137434425
• eBook ISBN: 9781137434432
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Who and how we love may be changing but our desire to be in a relationship endures. This book presents an incisive account of how couples experience, understand and sustain long-term relationships, exploring the emotional, practical and biographical resources that couples draw on, across the life course.

1

Introduction

Abstract: In Chapter 1 we set out the aims of the book and situate the study of long-term couple relationships in both the rich vein of academic research on families and intimate relationships and the demographic, policy and socio-cultural contexts of contemporary Britain. We introduce our overarching conceptual framework of relating practices and map how it draws attention to everyday and lived experience, and extends understandings of how couple relationships work. Throughout, we outline how the mixed methods design of the Enduring Love? study, on which this book is based, generated rich quantitative and qualitative data about couple relationships and the way a practices approach shaped our analysis. Finally we present overviews of the subsequent chapters, illustrating how they are organised through the idea of everyday relationship practices.

Gabb, Jacqui and Janet Fink. Couple Relationships in the 21st Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137434432.0005.

Researching couple relationships

In her book Ordinary Affects, Kathleen Stewart (2007) endeavours to slow down the pace of analytical thinking as a means of speaking to, and taking account of, complex and uncertain objects in order ‘to fashion some form of address that is adequate to their form; to find something to say about ordinary affects by performing some of the intensity and texture that makes them habitable and animate’ (2007, p. 4). In this book, we maintain there are no more ‘complex or uncertain objects’ than long-term couple relationships, and that a similar epistemological strategy is needed to examine how couple relationships endure and in what ways they are endured. By concentrating attention on the ‘ordinary affects’ which combine to create the texture of couple relationships, and through which the tensile strength of couple relationships is constituted, the book explores how relationships are sustained in the moment and over time. Moreover, in attending to the minutiae and mundanities of everyday feelings, acts and gestures that often go unseen in enduring relationships, we also bring into view the ‘intensity and texture’ of those elements that connect two people and shape their intimate lives together.

Our aims in this endeavour and in the book more broadly are twofold. The first is to extend understandings of couple relationships by turning the analytic lens onto the many heterosexual and non-heterosexual (lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer – LGBQ) couples who remain together for significant periods of time, thereby shifting attention away from serial or transitory relationships (Montemurro, 2014) and relationship breakdown (Coleman & Glenn, 2010), which have largely dominated much of the research in this field. Our analysis draws from the Enduring Love? study¹ which examined long-term couple relationships. Such couples have received little sustained academic attention in recent years and their inclusion in socio-cultural, policy and political debates about relationships and family life has tended to be as romanticised or aspirational relationship formations. By addressing these lacunae in research and resisting idealised and often deeply ‘traditional’ views on the meanings of stability and quality in relationships, we thus seek to portray a more complex and nuanced account of how couples live and love in contemporary Britain. In so doing we illustrate the intersections of structure and agency, past and present, realities and dreams, and culture and context.

Our second aim is to extend a practices approach to the study of couple relationships in order to focus attention on couples’ experiences and feelings, especially where these are situated and materialised in the home. Despite the extensive use of ‘family practices’ and ‘practices of intimacy’ in studies of families and personal lives, a practices approach is curiously absent in research concerned with couple relationships – as we go on to discuss. This has left a particular gap in knowledge about what couples do, together and together apart, in the privacy of their homes. For those in abusive relationships, home can be a place of insecurity, distress and fear but for the couples in our study, who viewed their lives together in largely positive terms, home signified permanence and commitment. We thus suggest that attending to the spatial dimension of couple practices brings into view how ideas and experiences of home are crucial in building a sense of togetherness and creating opportunities to nurture relationships (Neustatter, 2012). We hope, therefore, that the book’s analysis of the importance of home as a point of actual and imagined stability amidst the fluid and complex emotional dynamics of couple relationships will be of relevance to professionals and practitioners working to implement effective relationship education and support services. We also hope that our emphasis on the home as occupying a special place in couples’ imaginary of long-term relationships will provoke further policy debate about the effects on couples working to sustain their relationships of, not least, housing benefit changes, the ‘bedroom tax’, homelessness and the shortage of affordable homes in Britain.

Demographic and policy contexts

In England and Wales, 42 per cent of marriages end in divorce (Office for National Statistics (ONS), 2012) with between 200,000 and 250,000 couples separating every year (Coleman & Glenn, 2009). Recent trends in the divorce rate indicate a decline (ONS, 2012) but nevertheless the number of divorces in England and Wales remains high. There has also been a corollary long-term decline in the marriage rate since the early 1970s. In response to this climate of make-and-break relationships, much recent policy, academic and professional research has been concerned with the causes and effects of relationship dissolution. Studies have tended to focus on the ‘stressors’ that contribute to relationship breakdown (Walker, Barrett, Wilson, & Chang, 2010) and the adverse impact of ‘marital distress’ and ‘family fragmentation’ on the health and well-being of men, women and children (Markham & Halford, 2005). At the same time, other studies have suggested that 85 per cent of people have a good relationship with their partner (Sherwood, Kneale, & Bloomfield, 2014), while the married couple with or without children remains the most common type of relationship unit in the United Kingdom (Beaumont, 2011). Seven in ten households are still headed by married couples and figures show an increase in marriages of 5.3 per cent between 2011 and 2012 (equating to one marriage every two minutes), with the largest percentage of 21 per cent and 25 per cent, respectively, among women and men aged between 65 and 69 (ONS, 2014). In the first five years of civil partnerships (December 2005–2010), over 46,000 same-sex partnerships had been registered (ONS, 2011), pointing to the enduring appeal of couple relationships across the sexual spectrum.

Political and policy interest in this area has tended to concentrate on families with children, and particularly their parenting practices, rather than couple relationships per se. From New Labour government (1997–2010) initiatives such as Every Child Matters (DfES, 2003), Every Parent Matters (DfCSF, 2007) and Support for All: Families and Relationships (DfCSF, 2010) through to Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition government (2010–2015) reforms, including the Children and Families Act (2014) and the Troubled Families programme, there has been little discernible shift in policy orientation. The rhetoric of ‘hard-working families’ and the importance of quality relationships for family life remain recurrent themes. These have, however, increasingly served to cleave apart those who are understood to be striving to help themselves and those whose lives have been constituted through discourses of blame around welfare dependency, failed relationships and ‘poor’ parenting (Fink & Lomax, 2014). This latter group have then, in turn, become subject to ‘a whole raft of bruising austerity measures’ introduced by the coalition government (O’Hara, 2014, p. 1). In these policy and political contexts, love is often perceived as both the solution and the problem (Wilkinson, 2013). Love can sustain couple and family relationships in the face of adversities; its absence destines relationships to fail, financial hardship to ensue and greater welfare support to be needed. The concerted government focus on family breakdown (Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), 2014b) and its associated policy directives such as the introduction of a transferable tax allowance for married couples (CSJ, 2013) are thus positioned as a necessary response to the ‘social damage’ caused by separation and the annual cost of family breakdown, estimated at £44 billion (CSJ, 2014a).

Such narrow policy responses have not, however, been without their critics. The Relationships Alliance, formed of four leading relationship support organisations – Relate, Marriage Care, OnePlusOne and the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships – has, for example, suggested a range of alternative policy proposals to support couple relationships that go beyond the purely financial (Relationships Alliance, 2013a; Relationships Alliance, 2014). One of its recommendations is the targeted provision of services at those life transition points, such as unemployment, becoming a parent and retiring, that have long been recognised in academic, policy and practitioner research as ‘stressors’ (Walker et al., 2010) that some couples struggle to cope with. At a ‘Relationship Summit’ (College of General Practitioners, London, 18 August 2014), in the long run-up to the 2015 general election, Prime Minister David Cameron announced that all future domestic policies would have to pass a ‘family test’ that would examine their impact on family relationships. This book, then, like the rationale behind the Relationships Alliance’s recommendations and manifesto, speaks to the importance of attending to the intersections of everyday emotions and experiences in couple relationships when seeking to understand how people manage the challenges and difficulties that can be encountered in long-term relationships.

Academic contexts

Different academic disciplines have taken different methodological approaches to the study of couple relationships in order to interrogate a range of issues and concerns. Work completed under the umbrella of social psychology has, for example, emphasised how people perceive their couple relationships as continually developing and lasting ventures (Duck, 2007; Mashek & Aron, 2004) – a finding reinforced by the Enduring Love? study wherein couples regularly imagined their futures together. Research from longitudinal studies of cohorts (born in 1946, 1958 and 1970) provides a generational dimension, highlighting coterminous continuities as well as change such as strikingly high levels of relationship dissatisfaction among the younger age cohort. Gender remains significant across the cohorts, driving changes in couple relationships, notably as a result of women’s increased participation in the labour market and education. Moreover, women in couple relationships seem to be expressing more ambivalence about whether children are ‘an important part of life’ (Ferri & Smith, 2003, p. 124), although they feel less positively about childlessness than men (Koropeckyj-Cox & Pendell, 2007). Here, as our findings also illustrate, the intersections of gender and parenthood are crucial. Many childless couples believe that they have a closer relationship than parental couples (Hird & Abshoff, 2000). Comparative work with childfree couples and new parents in the early stages of parenthood supports this assertion (Lawrence, Rothman, Cobb, Rothman, & Bradbury, 2008), although research on how intimacy might change or even increase during childrearing years is limited (Kouneski & Olson, 2004).

Sociologically informed UK research purely focused on understanding the couple relationship was, until recently, quite dated (Askham, 1984; Bell & Newby, 1976; Blood & Wolfe, 1960; Clark, 1991; Edgell, 1980; Fitzpatrick, 1988). The contemporary relevance of these studies of marriage and long-term couple relationships does, however, remain (Lewis, 2001; Mansfield & Collard, 1988; Marsden, 1990) and has enabled us to interrogate the extent to which professed transformations in intimacy (Giddens, 1992) have impacted on lived experience. For example, it is claimed that there has been a wholesale democratisation of intimacy which has brought about a sea change in personal and sexual commitments (Beck & Beck-Gersheim, 1995), reconfiguring intimate life (Giddens, 1992; Jamieson, 1998). Attention has thus been drawn to the diversity of intimate practices and family arrangements (Jamieson, Morgan, Crow, & Allan, 2006; Williams, 2004) and relationship–residence formations (Duncan & Phillips, 2008; Roseneil & Budgeon, 2004) that can be found in contemporary Britain, particularly around heterosexual (Hockey, Meah, & Robinson, 2010; Hooff, 2013) and same-sex (Heaphy, Smart, & Einarsdottir, 2013) partnerships. Notwithstanding such diversity, the romantic ideal of one partner meeting all our emotional and sexual needs does appear to remain steadfast, stretching across differences in sexuality and circumstance (Smart, 2007). Furthermore, while the democratisation of love (Giddens, 1992) may be enshrouded in the rhetoric of egalitarianism, the feminist critique of this social theorising draws on a wealth of compelling empirical research evidence to highlight a quite different reality (Jamieson, 1999). The feminist adage that ‘it starts when you sink into his arms and ends with your arms in his sink’ still often rings true in practice, as we discuss later in the book.

Socio-cultural contexts

The continuing investment in the idea of ‘the couple’ saturates the cultural imaginary and is reinforced by a burgeoning mass-culture industry which ‘tickles our senses with an abundance of images, fragrances, tastes and music’ (Lindqvist, 1996, p. 47) related to ideas of romance, love and eroticism. Couple relationships appear repeatedly as a topic of popular and journalistic interest (Blyth, 2010; Figes, 2010; Gottlieb, 2010; Reibstein, 2006), historical research (Langhamer, 2013; Waller, 2010), autobiographical and biographical studies (Fraser, 2010; Hodgkins, 2012), TV documentaries (BBC4, 2012) and in Hollywood blockbusters and European art-house cinema. Flurries of media reporting appear in response to statistics about marriage and divorce, including emerging relationship phenomena such as ‘grey divorce’ (ONS, 2012), and extensive features are written around new research such as that reporting seeming changes in sexual behaviour and attitudes (National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal), 2013). Couples celebrating golden and diamond wedding anniversaries are regularly featured in local press and asked for ‘personal tips’ on maintaining relationships, while the proliferation of chat shows and ‘real life’ magazines, which take as their focus the intimate disclosure of personal emotions around countless relationship issues, adds weight to the argument that we are living in a therapeutic culture (Furedi, 2004).

Running alongside the insistent presence of couple relationships in these different print, online and visual sources is an equally sustained focus on couples in popular therapy, evidenced through the attention afforded to couple relationships in self-help books, therapeutic TV programmes and advice columns in newspapers, magazines and online. As Eldén has argued:

Therapists, life coaches, and other experts are eager to share their analysis of what is wrong in people’s lives and to offer methods, tools and solutions to achieve a happy life. (Eldén, 2011, p. 144)

Achieving a ‘happy life’ in the context of our study is understood to require work in order for the relationship to ‘succeed’. Indeed, such has been the influence of this popular therapeutic discourse that the socio-cultural and political contexts in which couple relationships are situated and imagined have increasingly drawn on the language of working at relationships, relationships that work and supporting couples to make relationships work better. This ‘working at it agenda’ also features consistently in professionally oriented guidance and practice directed at family support, intervention and relationship advice (Chang & Barrett, 2009).

We do not have the scope to engage with the vast volume of literature in this ever-growing self-help market (for a critical review see Barker, Gill, & Harvey, 2015). There is, however, much to commend in a lot of this literature. Indeed, our findings on relationship work echo the qualities and strategies recommended in some of its key texts. For example, in The Five Love Languages (2010), author and psychologist Gary Chapman identifies five essential ingredients in a successful couple relationship: words of affirmation; quality time; receiving gifts; acts of service; and physical touch. While the sociological critique of ‘emotion culture’ and the professed reflexive turn has quite rightly pointed to the power of silence and the significance of what we do not talk about (Brownlie, 2014), our findings can add to the therapeutic field. Our robust, large-scale research evidence is attentive to both what is said and what is left unspoken – and, importantly, what is communicated when words are not spoken. Actions (or, in our terms, practices) can, we would argue, speak louder than words. Moreover, the critical lens that we use to analyse our data draws on and extends a range of theorising to interrogate and understand the richness of multidimensional experience in lived and living long-term couple relationships.

Couple practices

Relationships, as we have noted, are always situated at the intersections of different political, policy and socio-cultural contexts. They are also experienced through everyday, often mundane interactions, gestures and practices. Our analysis is, therefore, informed by the significance of context and underpinned by the conceptual framework of ‘relating practices’ (Gabb, 2011a), particularly the ways in which this can be used to critically engage with ideas and experiences of the couple and coupledom. We develop this framework in two ways. First, as a means to examine what couples ordinarily do and through which patterns of relating can be traced. Second, as an opportunity to engage with and extend the practices approach, which has been so influential in British family sociology and curiously absent in extant couple research. There are a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Relationship Work
• 3  Communication
• 4  Sex and Intimacy
• 5  Unsettling Coupledom
• 6  Conclusion
• Appendix 1:  Researching Couples Long-Term Relationships
• References
• Index