This chapter concentrates on paired relations that—like those of Berg with R. M. and Kritzik with Harris—involve the possibility of extensive intimacy. In both these cases, the intimacy was sexual, but similar principles apply to a wide range of intimacy. Sharing of secrets, handling confidential files, providing advice, giving insider economic information, offering solace, and administering bodily care all involve different sorts of intimacy, but commonly occur in the absence of sexual relations. Whether sexual or otherwise, as Randall Collins has argued, paired intimate relations hold out the promise—and threat—of emotional interaction more intense and consequential than everyday social relations (Collins 2004, esp. chap. 6). They all require relational work: establishment of differentiated social ties, their maintenance, their reshaping, their distinction from other relations, and sometimes their termination.
Such intimate transactions occur over a wide range of pairs: friends, partners, neighbors, coworkers, employer-employee, professional-client, parents-children. In all of them, economic transactions frequently mingle with intimacy. As we shall see, in such pairs participants and third parties regularly match the relationship at hand with a matrix of possible relations between the two people, distinguish it clearly from nearby relations with which it might become confused, mark the boundary by means of concerted effort, and within the pair negotiate appropriate matches of relation, transactions, and media. They often invoke separate spheres and hostile worlds ideas and practices as they fend off inappropriate matches. Third parties obviously play important parts in shaping paired relationships: mutual friends introduce likely couples, parents try to block unfortunate matches, police monitor illegal transactions, couples themselves go to authoritative advisers for adjudication or support. This chapter will feature a great deal of third — party intervention—including legal intervention—in paired relations. But its analysis focuses on how interaction between the two principals works, and why. At first, I look at couples’ relationships in routine social practices. Later, I take up a parallel analysis of legal practices.
I begin with the pair as the most elementary setting for intimacy, giving special attention to courtship and sexual relations. The narrow focus will allow us to see the process of matching and boundary drawing more clearly. Chapter 4 will move on to caring relationships, those in which at least one party provides sustained and/or intensive life-enhancing attention to another. Caring relationships often involve more than two people, and therefore take us beyond the scope of the present chapter. But caring does not exhaust intimate relations between couples, since intimacy includes some forms of secret sharing, advice giving, personal scrutiny, and forceful intervention—for example, rape—that are by no means life-enhancing. Chapter 5, on households, will take up a setting in which intimate pairs and caring often coincide, but not always; cohabitation
sometimes takes place with a minimum of intimacy and caring. The book as a whole therefore looks at the intersection of intimacy and economic transactions through three different, and increasingly complex, lenses.
Given an interacting pair of people, the first lens consists of a series of questions:
• What is the name of this relationship?
• Where does it fit in the array of similar relationships?
• What marks its boundaries from the closest similar relationships?
• What combinations of names, transactions, and media are appropriate for this category?
• How do participants and third parties negotiate the definition?
• How do they negotiate the matching of definition, transaction, and media?
• What happens when one of the parties rejects the current matching as inappropriate?
• How do the parties negotiate transitions across boundaries into adjacent relationships?
How, in short, do couples and third parties do their relational work? In ordinary practice and in legal disputes, we can apply these questions to the whole range of intimate couples. The remainder of this chapter first surveys ordinary practice, then moves on to legal disputes.
In order to discipline the argument, I have omitted a number of fascinating topics in both practices and law, including marriage brokers (whether it is legal or proper for a broker to arrange a marriage), premarital agreements (under what conditions, if any, they constitute binding contracts), insurable interest (whether one party can properly take out insurance on another’s life), loss of consortium for engaged couples (whether one engaged party can sue for loss of the other’s companionship and services), gifts to employees (under what conditions and under what form are they forbidden, tolerated, or required), and finally, defensible reasons for breaking engagements.
When it comes to hostile worlds ideas, the chapter spends more time on the dangers that intimacy will corrupt professional, commercial, and bureaucratic relations than that such relations will corrupt intimacy. In contrast, the next chapter (on caring) devotes much more attention to the possible corruption of intimate relations by commercialism.