Couple Relationships in the 21st Century

Research, Policy, Practice

Jacqui Gabb, Janet Fink

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783319596976
• eBook ISBN: 9783319596983
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy
• Index: Social Sciences

This book presents an incisive and engaging account of love, intimacy and personal life in contemporary Western society. The authors draw on rich qualitative and large-scale survey data to explore how couples communicate with each other, negotiate the pressures and pleasures of parenthood, and the vagaries of sexual desire and intimacy across life course. Focusing on 'the everyday', Couple Relationships in the 21st Century unpicks the ordinary and often mundane relationship work that goes into sustaining a relationship over time, breaking down the dichotomy between enduring relationships of quality and good enough or endured relationships. It contests the separation of couples into distinct relationship types – defined through age, parenthood or sexuality. Looking through the lens of relationship practices it is clear that there is no 'normal couple': couples are what couples do.

With a foreword by Dr Reenee Singh, Director, London Intercultural Couples Centre and Co-Director, Tavistock Family Therapy and Systemic Research Centre, this new extended edition provides an invaluable critical insight on contemporary experiences of coupledom and will be essential reading for scholars and students, clinicians working in couple and family therapy, and those involved in relationship support services.

© The Author(s) 2018

Jacqui Gabb and Janet FinkCouple Relationships in the 21st CenturyPalgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Lifehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59698-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Jacqui Gabb¹ and Janet Fink²

(1)

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

(2)

University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, UK

End Abstract

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? study ¹ 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 coaliti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Relationship Work
• 3. Communication
• 4. Sex and Intimacy
• 5. Unsettling Coupledom
• 6. Conclusion
• Backmatter