Friends, Neighbours and Distant Partners: Extending or Decentring Family Relationships?

Introduction1.1 There is a longstanding recognition that grasping the meaning and significance of any specific personalrelationship requires an understanding of the whole constellation of personal ties within which people areembedded. So for example, to understand kinship it is equally necessary to understand friendship (Allan,1979). This special collection brings together research which offers insight into personal relationships ofworking-age adults beyond or outside of the conventional domestic context of a co-resident couple with orwithout children. In comparison to the wealth of research on couple and parent-child relationships, otheradult personal relationships are relatively under-researched and it is hoped that this issue will encouragefurther work. Examples of the kinds of relationships considered here include sexual relationships andpartnerships between adults outside the family-based household (Holmes, Roseneil, Reynolds), thefriendships of those not living with a partner (Budgeon), the whole constellation of personal relationships ofsingle women (Simpson) and their negotiation of the identity ‘single woman’ (MacVarish), .neighbours(Boyce, Stokoe), and relations with paid carers who enter into family contexts (Pockney).1.2 These relationships are all outside the established package of partnership, parenthood and householdalthough all represent some aspects of intimacy: bodily, emotional and privileged knowledge of the otherperson. They have some affinities and overlaps with family practices while also having their own distinctcharacteristics. The detailed exploration of these different sets of practices, using a variety ofmethodologies, may help us understand their particular logics and rationales, as well as how they aredistinct from or have continuities with more regularly understood relationships of family and kinship. Theseindividual studies can also remind us of the significance and sources of the inequalities and externalstructural factors surrounding and shaping these relationships and limiting the degrees of freedom enjoyedby individuals.1.3 Having a more complete picture of the whole constellation of personal relationships is urgently neededto inform contested interpretations of social trends in personal life. One particular line of interpretation ofsocial change is that some of the non-familial relationships discussed in this collection are eclipsingfamilial relationships in their significance. In a review of research across personal relationships at the endof the twentieth century, Jamieson (1998, 1999) noted that although friendship was claimed theoretically asthe ideal intimate relationship, the couple remained the popular choice at the centre of adult personal life.However, at the time of this collection, a growing number of researchers, including contributors to thisissue, suggest the growing importance of adult friendships (Pahl and Spencer, 2004, Spencer and Pahl2006) and believe they are seeing the focus of personal life shift from the couple, and particularly thegendered, heterosexual, co-resident, family-founding couple, to a more fluid network of intimates includingfriends, lovers and neighbours (Budgeon, this volume; Roseneil, this volume; Roseneil and Budgeon, 2004,Savage, Bagnall & Longhurst, 2005). The suggestion is that this more fluid network may be taking over,practically and emotionally, as the important relationships in people’s lives and undermining the culturaldominance of conventional family relationships as the idealized relationships to which we aspire. A numberof contributions in this volume add to a body of recent research which suggests that the boundary between‘familial’ and ‘non-familial’ relationships is increasingly blurred in everyday lives. One way of portraying thisis in terms of the elasticity and constant stretching of the boundary of what constitutes ‘family’ as theconstellations that people designated as ‘familial’ become increasingly diverse. Another way of portrayingthis is to say that the idea and ideal of family is losing ground to different understandings of how life shouldbe lived. These different ways of interpreting the same trends disagree about how fundamental a shift inactual practices has taken place.