It would be trite to see young same-sex couples’ refusals to innovate with respect to sexual commitments simply as an illustration of how they mimic heterosexuality. Nevertheless, couples’ and partners’ investments in the link between commitment and sexual monogamy were clearly influenced by a sense of what mature committed relationships should be like. Even in […]

Three female couples did discuss sexual exclusivity at the beginning of their relationship. These couples’ sexual negotiations were generally lighthearted, and often took the form of ‘teasing’ or making playful statements about unacceptable behaviours. As Ellen (114a) recounted: I love Holly and I jokingly say, ‘I’m very jealous I don’t want to share her with […]

The young partners we interviewed invested sex with diverse meanings: it was important as a source of pleasure, linked to the ‘connection of souls and bodies’, an expression of love, and an aspect of intimacy and closeness. In some cases the quantity and/or quality of sex was seen as a measure of how the relationship […]

As discussed in Chapter 3, young formalised same-sex relationships need to be understood within the context of the enduring privileging of the couple as an adult relational ideal. Also, as noted in Chapter 2, part­ners viewed stability as central to a ‘good’ and fulfilling relationship or marriage. In this chapter we consider how the privileging […]

It is tempting to read the working of power into these relationships based on the arrangements the couples made for their financial affairs. For example, one female couple had an arrangement where the flat they lived in was in just one person’s name and where the incoming partner also paid her wages into an account […]

Blokland (2005) has argued that it is helpful to understand identity not as a fixed achievement by which one arrives at a place where one knows the kind of person one is forever after, but as a process which has no real end point and which is not linear (i. e. from a weak person […]

As suggested above, debt and debt management were crucial practical elements in the lives of these recently ‘married’ couples. Also, debt can shape future practices and has the power to distort aspects of relation­ships. Debt, of course, has strong moral connotations in cultures that are still influenced by a Protestant ethic and distaste for all […]

As discussed in Chapter 4, almost all of couples had lived together before formalising their relationships, and some saw their entry into civil part­nerships as signalling the ‘mature’ nature of the couple commitment. Thus civil partnership could provide couples with the opportunity to review their financial affairs with a mind to ordering them in a […]

Some empirical researchers have noted that getting respondents to talk about money can be difficult because money (in the form of income and wealth) is often deemed a private matter and, in the UK at least, discussing money issues in public is not ‘the done thing’. There is a coyness over wage or salary levels […]

An important strand of research on heterosexual money management was pioneered by Jan Pahl in Britain, who began a series of projects starting in the 1980s and continuing into the 2000s (Pahl, 1980; 1989; 1990). A core element to Pahl’s approach was the development of typol­ogies of money management in which she identified different systems […]