Varpu Alasuutari & Anna Heinonen
”Being part of a couple is widely seen and felt to be an achievement, a stabilizing status characteristic of adulthood”, Sasha Roseneil and colleagues write in their insightful book The Tenacity of the Couple Norm: Intimate Citizenship Regimes in a Changing Europe (2020), arguing that anything else but coupledom sets people in the margins of society, social life, and adulthood. But is romantic coupledom in its traditional, dyadic form the only significant relationship a person can have? In this blog post, we challenge that idea by looking into friendships, communal living, and practices of non-monogamy, and argue that significant relationships come in various forms.
When talking about non-traditional family forms, chosen families of friends, ex-partners, and (sometimes multiple) lovers are often mentioned in connection to LGBTQ+ people and their close relationships. Although this emphasis has later given space for discussion on same-sex marriage and (the legal rights of) rainbow families with children, in this text the discourse on chosen families works as an inspiration to explore the varieties of close relationships, both within and beyond the LGBTQ+ spectrum. Varied relationships structures do not limit themselves to sexual and/or gender minorities but take place among the heterosexual and cisgender population as well. However, in both groups, they may be disregarded as temporary and thus insignificant compared with kinship bound by blood or dyadic coupledom, guided by the (often unrealized) ideal of living together as a couple happily ever after.
Friendship and its temporalities
In sociology and social psychology, the importance of friendship is often connected to youth and teenage years, where it is seen as a valuable form of relating that helps teenagers to become emotionally more independent from their families of origin. However, friendship in adulthood has received less attention in research. Yet, for many of us, the significance of friendship does not fade in adulthood but becomes an essential part of it.
If we consider friendship as a relationship structure that stands out from the heteronormative and mononormative forms of close relationships, we can also consider it as something queer, or as something that queers the traditional understandings of family, love, belonging, and care. Following Jack Halberstam’s (2005) articulation of queer time, people leading queer lives do not (necessarily) follow the traditional life courses with particular stepping stones in a particular order, including getting married, forming families with (biological) children, and getting old and being cared for within this heteronormative family structure. Instead, lives lived in queer time may follow different and sometimes unexpected trajectories, and people leading such lives may value different types of relationships entirely. Instead of marriage and children, it may well be friendship that becomes the most valued relationship type in queer time.
Friendship’s value as a caring relationship is sometimes tied into its long-term nature: a friendship becomes worthy of social and legal recognition after it has endured in a certain form for a certain time (that is: being stable enough for long enough). Elizabeth Brake (2015), for instance, has argued that friends who have cohabited and cared for each other for decades should be entitled to marriage-like recognition and societal benefits. However, as Heather Love (2021) has noted, also friendships that do not last long may be intense and as such deeply significant. For Love, it is important to destigmatize and celebrate intimacies that are not long-lasting, but “contingent, aleatory, and impersonal” (Love 2021, 258). Short-lived friendships may become important, for instance, when they offer valuable support and belonging in a specific context, like in times of bereavement, or in some other difficult life situation that is mutually shared (Alasuutari 2020). Therefore, it is important to remember that the value of friendship does not limit itself to lifelong friendships (which accrue respectability via their temporal endurance), but also in shorter-lived friendships with situational importance.
There are also other important arguments made about friendship and time that reveal something essential about relationship norms. As noted by Kinneret Lahad (2021), friendship is often expected to endure breaks and irregularities better than other types of close relations. Ideally, friendship is considered timeless: it stays the same regardless of time passed in between meetups and disconnections in communication. (The same is hardly expected from romantic coupledom.) Of course, this is not always the case. Despite its timeless ideal, friendship is not immune to temporal ruptures, and friends may also drift apart if they lose their sense of connection and community. In the discussion of friendship, it is thus important to see beyond its ideals and hidden norms and remember that friendship, too, comes in various forms and deserves prioritization, attention, and time.
Communal living and spatial practices
Temporal arrangements in relationships are also necessarily spatial. Queer temporalities that challenge the couple normative life trajectory require particular spatial arrangements, as do the more normative life trajectories. One example of such spatiality is the normative idea of “settling down”. It means moving in with a romantic partner – preferably at one’s thirties, at the latest – in order to progress in life in a suitable timetable and to proceed from youth to adulthood. Thus, the temporality of the normative life course and an idea of appropriate housing intertwine.
Communal living queers this usual spatial and temporal path in life. It challenges couple normativity by building a home around other relationships than the couple and nuclear family. We have come to understand the couple and family life as the most important sites of intimate relating through a historical evolution of the modern home, which was designed for the nuclear family. In this process, a various bunch of servants, lodgers, and kin were evicted from the dwelling and the home was dedicated to intimacy in family. When friendships and roommate relations in communal living inhabit and form a domestic space, they challenge this equation of domestic intimacy with family ties and coupledom. Respectively, the common home introduces the notion of domestic intimacy to relations such as friendships, which are not usually lived in a shared home.
There is a variety of relationships lived in communal homes. Friendships are significantly represented along with more casual roommate relations that are mainly limited to only living together. We do not, however, often imagine friendship taking place in a common home. The common home introduces novel aspects to friendship, such as a certain banality through the recurring tasks of everyday life ranging from domestic chores to sleeping, taking care of personal hygiene, and so forth. The domestic space places these various practices under the gaze of others sharing the common home. Witnessing such embodied daily practices from close distance alters the experience of intimacy in the relationship (Heinonen 2021). It can generate novel depth to the relationship, but it can also be experienced as burdening, alienating, or being “too much”, since it puts in question the customary ways of friendship. In addition, living in a common home introduces responsibility and negotiations of power into the relationship for instance through the shared financial responsibility or the care of others and the space. This challenges the normative positive ideals usually tied to friendship, such as equality, flexibility, and reciprocity.
Through the example of communal living, a further question arises considering the significance of space for various intimacies. Manifold relational practices shape the experience people have of their relationships. The practices take their forms in space and time: people might for instance meet each other for a drink every now and then, sleep in the same bed, or keep in touch by sending messages. All of these practices are somehow spatial. They happen in different proximity to the other, the relationship focuses around different kinds of activities, and the activities produce different kinds of experiences of the relationship. Various normative understandings of e.g. age and sexuality regulate what kind of practices are possible within each type of relationship, but on the other hand, the practices might stir and reimagine these normative beliefs. What if “settling down” happened with a friend instead of a romantic partner? How would that be possible?
Non-monogamy and new intimate networks
Romantic coupledom can also be challenged within the context of romance itself. Different types of non-monogamous relationship practices (including e.g. polyamory, open relationships, and relationship anarchy) have become increasingly visible in media discourses on romantic and/or sexual relationships, showing that the dyadic couple is not the desired endpoint for all.
Non-monogamous relationship practices offer novel perspectives to close relationships not only in terms of their evident characteristic of having multiple partners/lovers but also in terms of relationships that may form between the so-called ‘metamours’. That is,people who are part of the same relationship constellation via a shared partner but not in a romantic or sexual relationship with one another. (For them, the relationship may take the form of friendship, or resemble the relationship with in-laws, or there may be no relationship at all.) The new types of intimacy that come to be in non-monogamous relationship structures require a new vocabulary, which has been developed in non-monogamous communities. Such communities, and their online spaces, are also important sources of peer support, despite the geographical distance of their members.
The research and public interest on non-monogamy are increasing, yet more attention needs to be paid to the everyday practices of such relationships and how they are affected e.g. by time, living spaces, and normative beliefs regarding love and relationships. As time is always limited, and as living spaces are often designed for couples, time and space can be expected to play a significant role in the navigation of multiple romantic, sexual, and/or metamour relationships. The questions of responsibility, care, and power sneak into non-monogamous relationships in novel ways, when considering e.g. how to share your time fairly with two or more partners (preferably, saving some of that time to friends as well), how to experience domestic intimacy if not living with any (or just one, or many) of your partners, and how to keep the metamour relationship as free and voluntary, if the metamour is sharing the home with your shared partner, and you have to see them too every time you see your partner at home. These are just some examples of issues that may come up when the network of romantic relationships is expanded. In addition, people in non-monogamous relationship structures are living their lives in a culture that prioritizes dyadic romantic love over other types of intimate relating, which undoubtedly has its effects on non-monogamous individuals and their relationships (much like such prioritization has its effects on friendship and communal living, too).
It remains for further research to explore in greater detail the temporalities, spatialities, practicalities, and affective normativities of non-traditional forms of close relationships. We, together with our colleagues in Intimacies beyond Identities, are planning such a project – and ready to study these issues further once the research funding for the project is secured.
Bibliography
Alasuutari, Varpu (2020). Queer-ystävyys perheenä ja tukiverkostona. In Lahti, Annukka; Aarnio, Kia; Moring, Anna & Kerppola-Pesu, Jenni (eds.) Perhe- ja läheissuhteet sateenkaaren alla. Helsinki: Gaudeamus, 167–181.
Brake, Elizabeth (2014). Recognizing Care: The Case for Friendship and Polyamory. Syracuse Law and Civic Engagement Forum 1(1).
Halberstam, Jack (2005). In a Queer Time & Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press.
Heinonen, Anna (2021). Friendship at Home: Everyday in Domestic Space Shaping Friendship Intimacies in Finnish Small-Scale Communes. Gender, Place & Culture, DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2021.1979937.
Lahad, Kinneret (2021). The Affective Temporalities of Friendship. Lecture, Morgan Centre Seminar. March 24th, 2021.
Love, Heather (2021). The Long Run. In Herring, Scott & Wallace, Lee (eds.) Long Term: Essays on Queer Commitment. Duke University Press, 250-266.
Roseneil, Sasha; Crowhurst, Isabel; Hellesund, Tone; Santos, Ana Christina & Stoilova, Mariya (2020). The Tenacity of the Couple-Norm: Intimate Citizenship Regimes in a Changing Europe. London: UCL Press.
