Abstract
This chapter looks at the life stories of a group of 24 men whose long-lasting relationships resemble the companionate marriage in all but name. It is remarkable that, despite persistent, public stereotypes of youthful promiscuity or loneliness in old age and despite a long history of minimal social recognition of or support for gay, couple relationships, a substantial minority of a quarter of the men from the international sample (n = 97) provided evidence of gay men’s capacity to conduct stable, long-lasting relationships. It is remarkable also that these men’s relationships should so closely resemble the companionate marriage when in the five decades since the 1960s the couple relationship has undergone radical changes, becoming at the same time more flexible and subject to change and more fragile, less permanent.
We are one and the same person I think now. … We have turned into the same person — grumpy, difficult, intolerant [laughs] shouting at the TV.
(Bryce, aged 63, Manchester)
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Notes
See P. Robinson (2008) The Changing World of Gay Men (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 125–8.
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For discussion of changing shape of heterosexual couple relationships, see, for example, Z. Bauman (2003) Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (Cambridge: Polity Press); U. Beck and E. Beck-Gernsheim (1995) The Normal Chaos of Love, trans. M. Ritter&J. Wiebel (Cambridge: Polity Press), pp. 5–9; and E. Beck-Gernsheim (2002) Reinventing the Family: In Search of New Lifestyles, trans. P. Camiller (Cambridge: Polity Press), passim. A useful critique of Beck and Beck-Gernsheim’s arguments about the shape and nature of contemporary relationships can be found in C. Smart (2007) Personal Life: New Directions in Sociological Thinking (Cambridge: Polity Press), pp. 18–20. For the effects of individualisation on the couple relationship in the 1960s and 1970s, see E. Shorter (1976) The Making of the Modern Family (Glasgow: William Collins). For preliminary discussion of companionate marriage as a basis for couple relationships in Australian gay men, see Robinson Changing World, pp. 126–8.
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© 2013 Peter Robinson
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Robinson, P. (2013). Long-Lasting Relationships. In: Gay Men’s Relationships Across the Life Course. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137314680_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137314680_4
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