Freedom and Choice in Personal Relationships

Abstract

Following accelerated social and geographical mobility in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western societies, loosening kinship and neighbourhood ties coincided with aspirations towards a new kind of intimacy. As a result, changes in social relationships in late modernity have been characterised by two apparently contradictory trends. On the one hand, today’s emphasis on love and sexual intimacy involves the privileging of intense personal, sexual bonds over other kinds of social ties. On the other hand, this intensity of personal bonds coincides with an accent on more fluid, loose, transitory relationships corresponding to a more mobile lifestyle. New forms of household arrangements, moving populations, rising divorce rates and modes of interaction mediated by new media technologies, led to the re-evaluation of the model relationship. Dilemmas thrown up by the apparent freedom and choice of personal relationships in contemporary Western society are the subject matter of this chapter. By tracing how personal bonds are being characterised in contemporary Western society, this chapter considers ways in which friendship is being exploited as a model for the majority of intimate sexual and familial relationships, both heterosexual and homosexual. It pinpoints key aspirations that exploit the concept of friendship in the pursuit of freedom, choice and equality in modern relationships.