ESRC RESEARCH GROUP ON CARE, VALUES AND THE FUTURE OF WELFARE

University of Leeds

Shelley Budgeon , University of Leeds
Sasha Roseneil, University of Leeds

Cultures of Intimacy and Care Beyond "The Family": Friendship and Sexual/ Love Relationships in the Twenty-First Century

Originally presented at the:

INTERNATIONAL SOCIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION
WORLD CONGRESS OF SOCIOLOGY

BRISBANE JULY 2002

RESEARCH COMMITTEE ON FUTURES RESEARCH
RC O7, SESSION 4

THE SOCIAL WORLD OF THE XX1 CENTURY
THE FUTURE OF FAMILY AND KINSHIP CULTURE

Please do not quote without authors' permission

`I don't think that's [marriage] the right way.'

`Why not?'

`Because… You know when they do those human pyramids? That's the sort of model for living I'm looking at now.'

`What are you talking about, Marcus?' Will asked him. It wasn't a rhetorical question.

`You're safer as a kid if everyone's friends. When people pair off … I don't know. It's more insecure. Look at it now. Your mum and my mum get on OK.' It was true. Fiona and Rachel saw each other regularly now, to Will's agonizing discomfort. `And Will sees her, and I see you, and Ellie and Zoe, and Lindsay and my dad. I've got it sorted now. If your mum and Will get together, you think you're safe, but you're not, because they'll split up, or Will will go mad or something.'

Ali nodded sagely. Will's urge to scald had been replaced by an urge to shoot Marcus and then turn the gun on himself.

`What if Rachel and I don't split up? What if we stay together forever?

`Fine. Great. Prove it. I just don't think couples are the future.'

Nick Hornby, About a Boy (2000: 275-6).

It might perhaps be seen as somewhat obstreperous of us to present a paper at a session on "the future of family and kinship culture" of which the basic premise is that we should re-frame our analytic. Taking the risk of being thus regarded, it is our argument that if we are to understand the social world of the twenty-first century, and, in particular, the future of intimacy and care, sociologists, should, like twelve year old Marcus, de-centre "family" and the heterosexual couple in our intellectual imaginaries. And like the central characters in "About A Boy", we should learn to recognize the importance of the intimacy and care which flows through networks of friends in an age characterized by the instability of romantic dyads and powerful processes of individualization. Whilst we recognize that the idea of "family" retains an almost unparalleled ability to move people, both emotionally and politically, we want to suggest that much that matters to people in terms of love, intimacy, care and sociability increasingly takes place outside "family".

This paper comes out of an ongoing research project on "Friendship and Non-Conventional Partnership", which is part of a larger programme of research (the ESRC Research Group for the Study of Care, Values and the Future of Welfare) which is exploring the ways in which practices of care and intimacy, and the values which people hold with regard to care and intimacy, are changing. The paper seeks to make an intervention in debates about the future of family and kinship culture, by setting out the theoretical position which has guided our research, and then offering a very early taste of our findings. The first section provides a critique of the limitations of much family sociology and the sociology of gender for the heteronormative frameworks within which they operate, and then proposes an extension of the framework within which contemporary transformations in the realm of intimacy have tended to be analysed. This leads us to suggest that there is a need for research which focuses on the cultures of intimacy and care inhabited by those who might be seen to be living at the cutting edge of these processes of social change. In the second part of the paper, therefore, we draw on our ongoing research on those who could be regarded as the most "individualized" sector of the population - adults who are not living with a partner - to explore, through two case studies, how individuals are narrating their experiences of intimacy and care in the context of contemporary social and cultural change.

Thinking Beyond the Heteronormative "Family"

As the mainstream success of Nick Hornby's novel and the film based on it attests, along with a plethora of television shows such as "Friends", "Seinfeld", "Ellen", and "Will and Grace", popular culture may be proving rather better at proffering stories which explore the burgeoning diversity of contemporary practices of intimacy and care beyond the heteronormative family than is sociology. If we were to seek our understanding of contemporary cultures of intimacy and care from the sociological literature, we would be given to believe that they are almost solely practised under the auspices of "family". This is not to deny that the sociologies of family and gender have sought to meet both the empirical challenge of social changes in family and gender relations, and the theoretical challenge of anti-essentialist, postmodern, black and minority ethnic feminist, and lesbian and gay emphases on difference and diversity; there have been significant shifts within these sub-fields. They have, most notably, moved on from an early focus on the study of "family and community", which were "yoked together like Siamese twins" (Morgan, 1996:4), through the early phase of feminist intervention, which focused on unequal gender divisions of care and intimacy in the family, to a predominant concern today with the analysis of family change and diversity. Moreover, many British and US family sociologists have engaged with the problem of the concept of "family", in an era of increasing levels of family breakdown and re-formation. David Morgan (1996), for instance, suggests that we should use "family" not as a noun, but as an adjective, and proposes a notion of "family practices" to counter the reification of the concept. Others have sought to deal with social change and the challenges posed by lesbian and gay movements and theorists by pluralizing the notion of "family", so that they now always speak of "families". The currently dominant approach in Anglo-American sociologies of gender and family emphasizes the diversity of family forms and experiences, and how the membership of families changes over time, as they breakdown and re-form, and, certainly in its more liberal minded incarnations, welcomes lesbian and gay "families of choice" into the "family tent". This shift has been an important one, particularly as a counter to the discourse of "family values", which developed in the US and UK during the 1980s and 90s and was explicitly anti-gay and anti-feminist. However, we would suggest that these moves to pluralize notions of "family", even when they embrace the study of lesbian and gay families, are insufficient to the task of understanding both the contemporary and the future experience of intimacy and care for two reasons. First, they leave unchanged the heteronormativity of the sociological imaginary; and second, they are not grounded in an adequate analysis of contemporary social change.

Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner have recently argued that heteronormative public culture in the United States constructs belonging to society through the "love plot of intimacy and familialism", restricting "a historical relation to futurity… to generational narrative and reproduction" (2000:318). Their argument is a powerful one, but it is not just US public culture that finds it hard to see those who are not heteronormatively coupled as centrally part of the social formation, and to think of the future outside a generational mindset. Sociology continues to marginalize the study of love, intimacy, care and sociality which takes place beyond that which it defines as "family", even as that which it defines as "family" - or at least "families of choice" - may have been expanded in scope. The heteronormative assumptions that under gird the sub-fields of the discipline in which the study of intimacy and care is largely conducted - the sociologies of family and gender - continue to produce analyses which are overwhelmingly focused on monogamous, dyadic, co-residential (and primarily hetero) sexual relationships, particularly those which have produced children, and on changes within these relationships. Jo Van Every's (1999) systematic survey of British sociological research and writing on families and households published in 1993 found that there was "an overwhelming focus on the `modern nuclear family'", that is, on married couples who lived together in households only with their children. She argues convincingly that "despite all the sociological talk about the difficulty of defining families and the plurality and diversity of family forms in contemporary (postmodern?) societies, sociologists were helping to construct a "normal" family which looked remarkably similar to that which an earlier generation of sociologists felt confident to define" (1999:167).

The "non-standard intimacies" (Berlant and Warner, 2000) created by those living non-normative sexualities pose a particular challenge to a discipline which has studied intimacy and care primarily through the study of families. Although some lesbians and gay men refer to their emotional networks quite consciously - often with a knowing irony - as "family", it could be suggested that the adoption of the term "families of choice" by writers such as Kath Weston (1991) and Jeffrey Weeks et al (2001) to encompass describe lesbian and gay relationships and friendship networks actually serves to direct attention away from the extra-familial, counter-heteronormative nature of many of these relationships. In contrast to the integrationist imperative articulated in the "families of choice" terminology, Berlant and Warner's queer approach emphasizes the radically alternative aspects of non-heteronormative lives:

There is considerable evidence from sociological and anthropological research to suggest that friendship, as both a practice and an ethic, is of foundational and particular importance in the lives of lesbians and gay men. Networks of friends, which often include ex-lovers, form the context within which lesbians and gay men tend to lead their personal lives, offering emotional continuity, companionship, pleasure and practical assistance. Building and maintaining lives outside the framework of the heterosexual nuclear family, and sometimes rejected, problematized and marginalized by their families of origin, lesbians and gay men ground their emotional security and daily lives in their friendship groups. Weeks, Heaphy and Donovan (2000) and Roseneil (2000) draw attention to the blurring of the boundaries of, and the movement between, friendship and sexual relationships which often characterizes contemporary lesbian and gay intimacies; friends become lovers, and lovers become friends - and many have multiple sexual partners of varying degrees of commitment (and none). Moreover, an individual's "significant other" may not be someone with whom she or he has a sexual relationship:

Practices such as these de-centre the primary significance that is commonly granted to sexual partnerships and mount a challenge to the privileging of conjugal relationships in research on intimacy. Non-normative intimacies - those between friends, non-monogamous lovers, ex-lovers, partners who do not live together, partners who do not have sex together, those which do not easily fit the "friend"/ "lover" binary classification system - and the networks of relationships within which these intimacies are sustained (or not) - largely fail to be registered in a sociological literature which retains an imaginary which, without ever explicitly acknowledging it, sees the heterosexual couple as the heart of the social formation, as that which pumps the life-blood of social reproduction.

Nothing substantially has changed since Beth Hess pointed out in 1979 that there is "no large corpus called the `sociology of friendship'" to provide an alternative archive for the study of intimacy and care beyond the family. It is not just the heteronormativity of the discipline which has rendered friendship largely invisible. The sociological tradition, from the founding fathers onwards - Tonnies's distinction between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, Marx's work on alienation, Durkheim on forms of social solidarity, Weber on bureaucratization, the Chicago school on urbanization - has tended towards the position that the development of modernity renders social relationships increasingly impersonal, and affective bonding is seen as increasingly marginal, with the result that the discipline has never granted as much importance to the study of informal, private and sociable relationships as it has to matters of public, economic and political organization. Friendship lies fundamentally in the realm of the pleasurable, emotional and affective, areas which have been relatively neglected by order-seeking, serious minded sociologists concerned with issues of structure, regulation and institutionalization. There have been exceptions, as in the work of Simmel (1950), in the ethnographic work of Whyte (1943) on "street corner society", of Litwak and Szelenyi (1969) on "primary groups" of kin and friends, and in the 1950s and 60s, in the British tradition of community studies. More recently there have been a small number of studies of friendship, but overall there cannot be said to be a sub-field of the discipline devoted to the study of friendship comparable to the well-established sociology of family and kinship. It is time, we would like to suggest, for this to change, and for research which focuses both on friendship and on "non-conventional" forms of sexual/ love relationships - and the interconnections between the two.

Expanding Our Understanding of the Transformation of Intimacy

There is now a substantial body of literature which takes as its starting point the belief that we are living through a period of intense and profound social change in the sphere of intimacy. In the context of a wider argument about the undoing of patriarchalism, Castells (1997) suggests that the patriarchal family is under intense challenge, and that lesbian, gay and feminist movements around the world are key to understanding this challenge. Giddens's (1992) argument about the `transformation of intimacy' and Beck and Beck-Gernsheim's (1995; 2002) work on the changing meanings and practices of love and family relationships posit the idea that in the contemporary world processes of individualization and de-traditionalization and increased self-reflexivity are opening up new possibilities and expectations in heterosexual relationships. With a (rather cursory) nod in the direction of feminist scholarship and activism, their work recognizes the significance of the shifts in gender relations consequent particularly on the changed consciousness and identities which women have developed in the wake of the women's liberation movement. Giddens considers the transformation of intimacy which he sees as currently in train to be of `great, and generalizable, importance' (1992:2). He charts the changes in the nature of marriage which are constituted by the emergence of the `pure relationship', characterized by "confluent love", a relationship of sexual and emotional equality between men and women, and he links this with the development of `plastic sexuality', which is freed from `the needs of reproduction' (1991:2). He identifies lesbians and gay men as `pioneers' in the pure relationship and plastic sexuality, and hence at the forefront of processes of individualization and de-traditionalization. Beck and Beck Gernsheim argue that "the ethic of individual self-fulfilment and achievement is the most powerful current in modern society" (2002:22), and the desire to be "a deciding, shaping human being who aspires to be the author of his/ her life" is giving rise to unprecedented changes in the shape of family life. Family membership shifts from being a given, to a matter of choice, and as social ties become reflexive, and as individualization increasingly characterizes relations among members of the same family, we are moving into a world of the "post-familial family" (Beck-Gernsheim, 1999).

Whilst there are undoubtedly criticisms to be made of this body of work, (e.g. Jamieson, 1998), this literature maps the theoretical terrain from which investigations of the future of intimacy and care must proceed, and has proved extremely influential on those conducting empirical research on family change. However, we wish to suggest that literature does not exhaust the theoretical analyses of contemporary social change on which those seeking to understand cultures of intimacy and care should draw. Following Roseneil (2000), we propose an extension of this analysis which considers how the wider sexual organization of the social is undergoing transformation. Not only is there a trend towards the "normalization" of the homosexual (Bech, 1999) in most western nations, as there are progressive moves towards the equalization of legal and social conditions for lesbians and gay men, Roseneil (2000) argues that we are currently witnessing a significant destabilization of the homosexual/ heterosexual binary which has characterized the modern sexual order. She suggests that there are a number of `queer tendencies' at work, and play, in the contemporary world which are contributing to this fracturing of the binary:

• the development of a queer auto-critique of the modern identity categories of the lesbian and gay subject, which destabilizes the "homosexual" side of the binary;
• the emergence of hetero-reflexivity, which means that heterosexuality becomes a named and self-consciously produced category, as a result of the potency of the challenges posed by its other - homosexuality;
• the cultural valorizing of the queer in popular culture, so that increasingly sexual and gender transgressions and counter-normativities become positively marked, rather than stigmatized and excluded;
• and, perhaps most significantly for our argument here, the de-centring - both socially and at the level of the individual - of hetero-relations. As a result of the dramatic rise in divorce rates over the past 30 years, the increase in the number of births outside marriage (and to a lesser extent outside any lasting heterosexual relationship - births to mothers who are `single by choice'), the rise in the proportion of children being brought up by a lone parent, the growing proportion of households that are composed of one person, and the climbing proportion of women who are not having children, the heterosexual couple, and particularly the married, co-resident heterosexual couple with children, no longer occupies the centre-ground of western societies, and cannot be taken for granted as the basic unit in society. Processes of individualization and detraditionalization are releasing individuals from traditional heterosexual scripts and from the patterns of heterorelationality which accompany them. By 2000 only 23% of all households in the UK comprised a married couple with dependent children (Social Trends, 2001), and broadly similar patterns are observable across Europe, North America and Australia. Postmodern living arrangements are diverse, fluid and unresolved, constantly chosen and re-chosen, and heterorelations are no longer as hegemonic as once they were. It could be said that we are experiencing the `queering of the family' (Stacey, 1996), as meanings of family undergo radical challenge, and more and more kinship groups have to come to terms with the diverse sexual practices and living arrangements chosen by their own family members. At the start of the twenty first century there can be few families which do not include at least some members who diverge from traditional, normative heterorelational practice, whether as divorcees, unmarried mothers and fathers, lesbians, gay men or bisexuals. At the level of individual experience, as heterorelations are de-centred, friendship networks become more important in people's everyday lives, and the degree of significance and emotional investment placed in romantic coupling comes to be re-evaluated.

The effect of these tendencies is to pose an intense challenge to the hierarchical relationship between the two sides of the homosexual/ heterosexual binary, and its mapping onto an outside/ inside opposition. This queering of the social calls into question the normativity and naturalness of both heterosexuality and heterorelationality, and increasingly means that ways of life that might previously have been regarded as distinctively "homosexual" are becoming more widespread. Giddens's rather throw away remark that that lesbians and gay men are forging new paths for heterosexuals as well as for themselves is developed by Weeks, Donovan and Heaphy who suggest that `one of the most remarkable features of domestic change over recent years is … the emergence of common patterns in both homosexual and heterosexual ways of life as a result of these long-term shifts in relationship patterns' (1999a:85). They see both homosexuals and heterosexuals increasingly yearning for a `pure relationship', experiencing love as contingent, and confluent, and seeking to live their sexual relationships in terms of a friendship ethic (Weeks, Heaphy and Donovan, 2001).

Alongside the need for more research exploring the impact of individualization and reflexive modernization on people's intimate lives, there is a need for empirical investigation of the extent to which Roseneil's posited destabilization of the homosexual/ heterosexual binary is taking place. Our research therefore seeks to explore both the individualization/ reflexive modernization thesis and the queering of the social thesis, by examining the extent to which there might be, across the spectrum of sexualities:

• a diversification in the forms of sexual/ love relationships, and the more widespread embrace of forms, such as those discussed earlier, which are less conventionally heteronormative, and more commonly associated with lesbians and gay men;
• a de-centring of sexual/ love relationships within individuals' life narratives;
• an increased importance placed on friendship in people's affective lives;

Case Studies in Intimacy and Care Beyond "The Family"

Methodology

In-depth narrative interviews were conducted with 53 people aged between 25 and 60, living in three localities in Yorkshire, England. These localities were chosen as being representative of differing gender and family cultures. Our localities, therefore, contrast an ex-mining town which is more traditional in terms of gender and family relations with a town in which alternative lifestyles and practices are prevalent, and a multi-ethnic inner city, urban area characterised by a diversity of gender and family practices and a large number of single person households. Other characteristics taken into account in our sampling frame included age, gender, sexuality, relationship status, living arrangements, and 'race'.

Table One: Description of Sample Characteristics N=53

All the interviewees did not live with a partner at the time of interview, and might therefore be considered as particularly "individualized". The theoretical focus on reflexivity and individualisation of Giddens (1992) and Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002) requires as Rustin (2000:46) argues a re-orientation of social science methods towards the study of individual lives. This involves an ontological re-orientation based upon the recognition that "individuals have agency, that biographies make society and are not merely made by it". By studying individual biographies "distinctive life strategies, trajectories, or kinds of self recognition" are uncovered as "building blocks from which a larger understanding of society can be imagined" (Rustin, 2000:47). In attending to individual biographies we wanted to gain an understanding of the extent to which, and the ways in which, people are living in non-conventional cultures of intimacy, by studying the practices they are engaged in and the values that underpin these practices.

Our aim was to give the people we interviewed the opportunity to tell us what was important to them which we achieved through the use of very broad questions that allowed the meaning of the narratives told to us to unfold in the course of the interview. Our questions allowed people to talk openly in a broad context about their lives and were phrased in the form: "Tell me about the people who are most important in your life, tell me about a time when you cared for a friend, tell me what it's like to be single" and so forth. Here we relied upon the fundamental premise of the narrative method - that people make sense of their lives and communicate this understanding through telling stories and that they tell stories about things that are important to them. We supplemented our open ended questions with a concentric circle diagram exercise. This comprised a set of 6 circles within which people were asked to write the names of the people who are significant to them and to indicate what kind of relationship this is. This exercise required the interviewee to orient themselves to their network of relationships and to reflect upon the meaning and significance of those relationships. It also provided us with a visual representation that we could take away with us to aid in our analysis of the narratives.

We would now like to discuss two of the women we interviewed - Karen and Polly - whose narratives speak of many of the issues we have raised in the first part of the paper and offer individual instances typical of highly individualised, reflexive, and non-conventional cultures of intimacy.

Themes "Beyond the Family" - The Case Studies

Karen is 35, single and has two daughters aged seven and thirteen. She works in the film industry as a hair and make up artist. Three years ago her 13 year relationship (they were not married) with the father of her 2 children broke down when he had an affair. Since then her life has undergone a significant re-orientation and transformation. Polly, who is one of Karen's closest friends is 36 years old, single and currently running her own business with a friend in arts administration. Three years ago Polly decided she wanted to have a child but did not want to do this within the context of a conventional heterosexual relationship. Due to fertility problems and ineligibility for IVF treatment as a single woman she decided to adopt a child and was matched with Alice, a seven year old girl of mixed race parentage. Polly and Alice have been together for 2 years.

At the time of the interview, the decision that Karen and Polly had made 18 months earlier to buy a derelict house, fix it up and raise their daughters together as single parents was central to their narratives. Karen explained that the decision to do this came at a time when both of them had hit 'rock bottom'. Karen had just split up with her long term partner and for Polly the process of adopting her daughter was becoming complicated, uncertain and stressful. They had been close friends for many years and had relied upon each other through many times of difficulty but out of this particular set of circumstances came the idea to rely upon each other in a more concrete sense - that is to pool their resources together and create a life for themselves and their children.

Karen's biography is different from Polly's: she had a child at age 23, was involved in a long term relationship for 13 years then became single again at age 33 and is now developing her career. Polly, in contrast has who has worked in theatre all her life has travelled extensively up until recently, has not been involved in any long term sexual relationships and is now ready to lead a more stable life with her daughter Alice. Although Karen's and Polly's life trajectories have differed across their respective life courses their needs and goals coalesce in important ways at this particular juncture in their lives.

Karen says that their relationship is like being married and in some ways it has become a different kind of relationship for them since making the commitment to buy the house together. It is in effect an emergent form of intimacy that goes beyond either friendship or sexual partnership and because of this there are times when their lifestyle choice causes confusion because it does not easily fit into a pre-defined category. For instance in attempt try to make sense of the situation people will often assume this arrangement is a lesbian relationship.

In the narratives of Karen and Polly a number of significant themes which are central to re-thinking intimacy and care beyond the family emerge. First these narratives are about a life 'project' - that is both Karen and Polly spoke of the decisions they had made as a conscious effort to produce a particular set of conditions and a particular way of life for themselves. Secondly, a key aspect of their life projects is the placing of children at the centre while also de-centring the hetero-relational through a commitment to keeping sexual relationships at the periphery. This marginalisation of sexual relationships is also produced by the way in which their life projects are framed by a context of a network of highly important friendships which are privileged at the expense of sexual relationships. Their living arrangements are constituted by a set of practices which challenge conventional meanings of family, undermine hetero-relational hegemony and bring into being non-normative intimacies.

Centrality of Friendships

Karen and Polly have a wide network of geographically dispersed friends who figure centrally in their narratives but they are also embedded locally in a network of friendships that is held together by a conscious and self reflexive mutual commitment to provide support and care. Many of these friends have chosen to live in the same area of Leeds in order to be close to each other and Karen and Polly's house is very much a central location where people drop in, come and go, and sometimes stay for extended periods of time. Karen's and Polly's daughters are also close to these friends and as Karen says these friends provide another 'anchor' for her children. Prior to the break up of Karen's relationship she had been living several hours away from Leeds but after the break up she returned to Leeds specifically because of her friendships here. When this happened everyone gathered together not only to physically move her and her children back to Leeds but they also actively put in place the things she would need upon her return. Contacts in the film industry found her a job, a house was rented and decorated for her and a school was found for the children. Similarly, a good friend of Polly's who was living in London was also having a difficult time recently and so Polly has overseen the purchase and renovation of a house on the street where they live for this friend to move to with her children. Another friend, Sue was also going through a personal crisis and moved to Leeds to become part of this network of care. Polly very much brings people into this network when she sees them struggling in their lives. As she said to Sue "you're too far away from me but I can bring you here and I know that your lives are gonna improve because I can introduce you to these people and they're fabulous".

Friends/Family

Many of Karen and Polly's friends have children and the way in which Polly describes their movement through daily life as an 'entourage' conjures up an image of a great bundle of animated energy. This is a creation that is extremely important to Polly because it has parallels with the way in which she grew up on a street where all the local families knew each other. Polly speaks about this group of friends and their children in a way that suggests a blurring of the category friend and family. She refuses terms such as mine, hers, theirs and instead speaks about 'the children' in collective terms. Similarly she speaks about 'the grandparents' but does not designate them as her parents or Karen's or the parents of any of her other friends. This is fluid family based on a chosen belonging that incorporates friends, ex-lovers, children, and kin. In the following example Polly describes the "family" outings they regularly embark upon.

Polly: The weekend before went to Brimham rocks so we do that lovely family day out which is great. We all go out together and we take a picnic and go off and do mad things… Lulu's Karen's and my family live down south. When it comes to summer holidays you know, Alice (her daughter) has been off with Karen down to her parents for a week. The girls have been over to my parents in Devon or if someone's going down the motorway it's "well take the kids and drop them off such and such" so there's that whole thing which is great and all the grandparents have opened their arms towards the children which is just great!

Children at the Centre

One of the strongest motivations behind Polly's and Karen's decision to buy the house together was to provide a safe and stable environment for the children. As close friends and two single parents they felt that they could give each other a commitment and provide support to each other and their children in a way that would be significantly more secure that if they attempted to pursue this in the context of a love relationship with a man. In effect they do co-parent and share the management of the household. For example when Karen had to go away for three months to work on a film in Morocco Polly took over running the house and caring for the children. The stability that this situation affords them is also bolstered by the wider context of the friendship network within which they are living. They are re-working the notion of 'stability' often associated with conventional family forms by de-centring a sexual relationship as the basis for security and replacing it with a reliance upon friendships.

Shelley: Was there an understanding that this would be more secure?

Polly: Yes, I think so and its doing that long term financial thing you know. Karen's been shat on financially by her ex. I've always been very good with money and doing that sort of stuff and what we want is the priority in our lives to be for the children. You know all of them have been through an emotional time. What they need is security. We can give them that security. We can give them a loving environment. We can give them a mad, mental house that is "The Hilton". We have hundreds of people coming to stay all the time but that's their home. One of us is always there and it's that long term thing. The house is there for them…We'll always keep the house because that's for the children and it is a financial investment we've made…and the support and help we get from each other, we rely on that more than the emotions that go along with a partner, with a man.

The choices that Karen has made are very much about wanting her daughters to understand that one can choose to live differently. For example part of Karen's reason for living in the area where they do is because of the diversity of people living in the neighbourhood. Two Muslim brothers live with their families next door, a lesbian couple live on other side, and a prostitute lives across the road. Karen explained that she wanted her daughters to be exposed to all sorts of people and circumstances because this reminds her of her own upbringing in London. The diversity that characterises this neighbourhood contrasts significantly with the "white, middle class and bigoted" small village in Sussex where she had been living before her relationship broke. Karen wants stability for her children but she also wants to expose them to a wide range of different of ways of living so they will grow up with an awareness of the wider world. She implicitly wants them to see that there are many ways to live one's life and so part of her own project is the self conscious undermining of taken for granted "white, middle class" values which she does through choosing to live in an inner city area rich in cultural diversity.

Karen:…we also chose here because it was a difficult area with varied you know. I don't want my children to be out in a village because I just, where I come from in Sussex it was so bigoted, so white, so middle class, no other experience of the world outside them, and I couldn't do with my children being brought up totally in that and I think that's also why I'm always travelling round with the girls and saying 'look this is life' and 'these are the people you see and this is awful but this is fantastic' so I suppose in that sense here - but it also gives me that feeling of London, you know, multi racial, multi cultural, because that's what I came from as well.

De-centring sexual relationships

Karen has been single for the past 3 years although has been involved in some short term relationships, however, she says she fears commitment and with everything she has in her life - the house, her children, her career and close friends - she doesn't need a man. Indeed for Karen relationships have proven 'risky'. The end of her relationship with her daughter's father has had a profound effect on her life and her girl's lives. The relationship with her ex-partner and his family has deteriorated since the break up and continues to be difficult but Karen feels that it is important for her children to maintain a relationship with their father and their family. Polly often acts as a mediator and facilitates the relationship of Karen's daughters with their father because the situation is so precarious at times. As a result of these experiences Karen's life has been significantly reoriented and for the time being sexual relationships are not a priority. The risk of becoming a couple for Karen outweighs the benefits and through short term attachments, avoiding commitment and maintaining friendships and her children as priorities she is happy to manage her involvement with men in such a way as to limit their impact on her happiness.

Karen: I was in a long relationship for 13 years. We've been separated for three years now so I've been on and off single. I've had a variety of boyfriends and it's been fantastic…I don't want to tie myself up totally to anybody but last year I did have somebody who came into my life who was very special but that was so terrifying…I said you know, it can wait, it doesn't have to happen now. This is more important here - my security for my girls. You know I'd lived with someone for 13 years. I don't need to go diving back into anything like that, for a long time. So it's not a major part for me… No, I'm really enjoying this moment and I enjoy finding somebody new that comes along for a short term but I don't involve them or try not to involve them too much with what's here.

Keeping sexual relationships in a peripheral position is also part of Polly's project. If Polly were to meet a man she would keep that relationship separate from her daughter until she was absolutely certain that it was secure, again putting her child first. The categories of lover and friend in many of her relationships blur but it is only in the context of friendship that ex-lovers become central to her life. A number of her sexual relationships are now primarily friendships to her and these men remain a source of support. Indeed one of Polly's and Karen's closest friends who has bought a house nearby is an ex-partner of both of them. Polly does not currently have a partner and like Karen she commented that there are times when people presume that she is a lesbian because of her living arrangements and parenting with Karen. Thus their living arrangement triggers hetero-reflexivity for both Karen and Polly, by provoking encounters with the heteronormativity of those with whom they come into contact, and provides an example of how a mode of living intimacy and care which strongly parallels the "life experiments" , or "families of choice", of lesbians and gay men (Weeks, Heaphy and Donovan, 2000; Weston, 1991) is being practised by two individuals who do not identify as homosexual.

It is particularly interesting that this consciously constructed life project, in which a network of friendships is central, and heterosexual relationships are marginalized, is not articulated through any explicitly feminist discourse by either Polly or Karen. This suggests that what might have been a politicized strategy pursued by those within feminist/ lesbian communities in the 1970s and 1980s, might now be extending to those who do not think of themselves as feminists or lesbians, and who are living lives fundamentally constructed within the individualized era which has been, at least partially, created by feminism.

Conclusion: Imagining Futures Beyond the Family

In this paper we have proposed that for those who are interested in thinking about the social world of the twenty-first century, a shift in gaze beyond the study of "the family" as the privileged locus of practices of intimacy and care is necessary. In the context of processes of individualization, reflexive modernization, detraditionalization, and the destabilization of the homosexual/ heterosexual binary, there is a need for an approach which is able to grasp the ways in which what matters to people in terms of intimacy and care increasingly cannot be contained even by a redefined notion of "family". Whilst the analysis of our empirical data is still at an early stage, we would like to predict that an exploration of networks and flows of intimacy, care and love, of the extent and pattern of such networks, and the viscosity and velocity of such flows, and the study of their absence, is likely to prove more fruitful than attempts to re-contain contemporary intimate lives within the concept of "family". Such an approach poses important theoretical, substantive and ontological challenges to the discipline.

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