Boundaries of intimacy

Lynn Jamieson
In Families in Society: Boundaries and Relationships edited by Linda McKie and
Sarah Cunningham-Burley, Policy Press, 2005, 189-206.

Introduction
This chapter reviews how the concepts of boundaries and boundary work are
deployed in theorizing intimacy, in order to assess how these concepts furthers our
understanding of intimacy and social change. In everyday current usage, intimacy is
often presumed to involve practices of close association, familiarity and privileged
knowledge, strong positive emotional attachments, such as love, and a very particular
form of ‘closeness’ and being ‘special’ to another person, associated with high levels
of trust. Recent discussions of intimacy emphasize one particular practice of
generating ‘closeness’ above all others, self-disclosure. Intimacy of the inner self,
‘disclosing intimacy’ or ‘self expressing intimacy’ has become celebrated in popular
culture as the key to a ‘good relationship’ although some academic work has
suggested that this type of intimacy may be more of an ideological construct than an
everyday lived reality. The practices attended to in such conceptualization of intimacy
suggest an absence or lowering of boundaries among intimates in comparison to the
presence or heightening of boundaries between intimates and those outside of their
intimate relationships. In accounts of personal life intimates are described as if
encapsulated together by a protective boundary that stops distractions that would
otherwise interfere with their intimacy or by an exclusionary boundary that keeps
non-intimates out.

Although often not explicitly named as such, reference to boundaries and boundary
work has been a long standing aspect of theorizing the place of personal life in social
change. For social theorists of the emergence of ‘modernity’, the reconfiguration of
‘public’ and ‘private’ as separate spheres and renewed emphasis on individualism,
conceptualizing individuals as having unique inner selves, were necessary precursors
to the association of intimacy with private personal relationships. For some, private
intimacy was also the product of another facet of modernity: the development of
divisions of labour, specialization and bureaucracy, resulting in interaction organized
around the functions people perform or positions they occupy rather than ‘whole
persons’. Hence it is argued that individuals need intimacy to re-establish themselves
in ‘holistic, multifaceted interactions that contrast with the segmental, single-faceted
interactions of the relatively many role-relations’ (Davis, 1973, xxii).

The historical emergence of material and ideological divisions between ‘public’ and
‘private’ did not create gender neutral circumstances in which men and women
pursued intimate relationships as equals. Feminist work continues to discuss how
socially produced boundaries between genders are implicated in gender differences in
types and degrees of intimacy. Some feminist theory draws on psychoanalysis to
claim that a greater capacity for intimacy among women is a psychological
consequence of the conventional divisions of labor in parenting and the
distinctiveness of mother-daughter and mother-son relationships. Feminist theorists
also offer accounts that give greater explanatory weight to material factors such as
inequalities in social, economic and political opportunities constraining women to

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specialize in caring work and intimacy. Feminists have also analyzed gendered
cultural discourses about men’s and women’s differential emotional and romantic
needs that get folded into their conceptions of the self.

Such theorizing suggests that intimacy is impinged on or contingent on a number of

other boundaries including gender boundaries and the construction of privacy and that
intimacy itself requires boundary work. The notion of ‘boundary work’ is associated
with the anthropologist, Fredrick Barth (1969). Barth observed that the creation and
maintenance of social boundaries is an effortful activity involving cognition and
coordinated social action. In other words boundaries are created in ideas, thought, talk
and writing, discourse that creates consequential difference and division. Boundaries
must also be produced by more material forms of coordinated interaction, such as
moderating flows of exchange and modifying movements of people across space and
time. Many studies that explicitly discuss boundaries and boundary work are not
primarily concerned with intimacy but with the creation of social divisions involving
hierarchies and dominance such as gender, class and ethnicity. A number of theorists
argue that intimacy requires the flattening of hierarchy among intimates and the
creation of protective and exclusionary differences and divisions between intimates
and non-intimates. For example, among the classical social theorists of the nineteenth
century, Georg Simmel offered a detailed account of intimacy that emphasized the
enactment of privacy and exclusivity to protect against and exclude non-intimates
clearing the space for intimates to treat each other as ‘whole persons’. Simmel noted
that the intimate dyad, by definition, only lasts as long as both parties participate in
what each shows or gives only to the other. It is their private, exclusive, exchange
which generates trust and affect. In the twentieth century, Erving Goffman discussed
intimate relationships in terms of the everyday boundaries that people draw between
the relatively privacy of their ‘back stage’ and the performance they give in public.
Intimates are people who not only go ‘back stage’ into the private domain but with
whom tact and discretion, which he associates with role performance, is significantly
less important. In the remainder of this chapter aspects of these themes are traced to
contemporary debates. The notion that intimacy relies on and is intensified by keeping
‘others’ at a distance has been a recurrent theme in theorizing personal life. In the
following section this is illustrated by a review of twentieth century ‘sociology of the
family’ and its contemporary reworking. The subsequent sections review debate over
the antithesis or sympathy between intimacy and civic engagement, first dealing with
civic engagement as democratic citizens and then community participation. Finally,
the chapters turns to a more general discussion of what the research literature suggests
concerning if and when intimacy requires boundaries and boundary work.

Intensifying intimacy by keeping others distant

In the discipline of sociology from the 1950 through the to the 1970s, personal
relationships were typically discussed under the heading of the Sociology of the
Family which was preoccupied with what Talcott Parsons (1959) called ‘the relatively
isolated nuclear family’, a household firmly centred on a heterosexual couple, solely
occupied by the couple and their growing up children. The couple were theorised as
keeping emotional distance from everybody outside of their couple and parenting
relationships. In Parson’s view of social change, the marriage relationship and parent-
child relationships became more emotionally intense when more distance was created
between these relationships and all others, through geographical and social mobility

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and active boundary work on the part of the couple. He characterised this as a
historical shift from a time when the family household was more immersed in a wider
kin network and less clearly separated-off (Parsons 1959, Parsons and Bales 1956).

In the sociology of this period, wider family or kin relationships, friendships and
neighbouring relationships were typically studied in relation to this type of nuclear
family household which was referred to in both academic discussion and popular
usage as ‘the family’. In this approach, friends and neighbours were primarily seen as
useful occasional supplements to ‘the family’, people called on when family
resources, meaning those of the parenting couple, were stretched. Family
relationships, meaning heterosexual couple and parent-children relationships, were
unequivocally seen as THE primary relationships in people’s lives. In the hierarchy of
significant relationships, wider kin were next, providing important sorts of support to
families. Friends were positioned as rising in significance when kin and/or close
family were absent, for example, in the case of the widowed that live geographically
distant from kin.

Friendship was really only acknowledge as routinely of particular significance at one

particular stage of the life-course, that of youth, the transition from childhood to
adulthood. In the dominant theoretical paradigm of the period, functionalism, the
main work of socializing children and stabilising adult personalities was performed by
mothers within the emotionally intense interior of family households but somehow
children have also to learn to move on from this environment. ‘Peer relationships’, as
young people’s forms of association and friendship were often called, were theorised
as the relationships in which children learn to stand up for themselves, to compete, to
form alliances and independence from their family. The fact that children’s
friendships were and are typically gender segregated was seen as part of functional
socialization into appropriate gender roles. Girls learn femininity best with other girls;
boys learn masculinity best with boys (Parsons, 1962). Youth cultures were
blossoming all around analysts like Talcott Parsons and the most visible were
heterosexually charged and mixed gender. ‘Peer relationships’ of youth were
theorised as enabling young people to detach from their family of origin for long
enough to recreate the conventions, form heterosexual relationships, marry and create
their own new family of procreation, hopefully in that order. Youth cultures and peer
groups enabled young people to position themselves ready to find a partner. Peers and
friends, then, were reduced to institutions that give young people the mutual support
to move their emotional focus temporarily outside of the family, by providing a life-
course specific half-way house between ‘family of origin’ and ‘family of procreation’,
while also reinforcing masculinity, femininity and heterosexuality.

With hindsight some of this theorizing was recognised as expressing particular values
rather than describing or advancing understanding of the ways in which lives were
lived. The notion that family households turned in on themselves and become
inviolable, emotionally intense, child-centred domains was not simply a theme in
Parsons’ work but became part of the orthodox historical account of the emergence of
the conventional family. However, this was not an accurate description of how many
families lived in the early twentieth century (Jamieson, 1987). The historical
development of a characterization the family as a ‘haven in a heartless world’ a
private domain separated-off from the wider social world by protective boundaries
relies on a conception of divisions between ‘public’ and ‘private’ that has been

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comprehensively deconstructed by feminist work as a construction that helps mask
patriarchal arrangements (Millet 1971, Mitchell 1971). Parsons assumed that intimacy
requires a boundary between home and work that was necessarily simultaneously a
gender boundary between women at home and men at work. Many of the
characteristics that Parsons described as functional for the society were subsequently
re-described as key mechanisms for sustaining gender inequalities and the
subordination of women. By the twentyfirst century, many European family
households consisting of parents and children are also dual earner households. Few
now advocate a return to old gender division as an ideal. However, a persistent
finding of research on parenting couples concerns the different parts played by men
and women in sustaining intimacy in parent-child and couple relationships. Some
research on domestic divisions of labour has demonstrates how gender inequalities are
recreated while avoiding the discursive production of gender boundaries. In other
words, it is no longer acceptable to acknowledge that women do the cooking and
cleaning because they are women. It is perhaps not surprising that, despite this mental
manoeuvre, for some couples the persistent facts of unequal divisions of labour sits
uneasily with ideals of intimacy. Arlie Hochschild has repeatedly claimed that the
central crisis of heterosexual couple relationships is a ‘stalled revolution’ with women
doing more providing work without a matched contribution of men to caring work
(Hochschild, 2003).

David Morgan (1991, 1992, 1996) has analysed how change in family and marriage
across the twentieth century came to be characterised as a shift 'from institution to
relationship' (Burgess and Locke, 1945), with an implied shift from traditional and
public obligations to private pleasures and values. But as Morgan notes, the privatised
intimacy that ‘relationship’ implied in fact coincided with the emergence of ‘psy’
experts (see also Rose, 1996). Indeed, he argues that those with a vested interest in
claims to treat marital and relationship problems also had an interest in characterizing
social change in terms of a shift to ‘relationships’. One of the most influential
academic accounts of marriage in 1960s was Peter Berger and Hans Kellner (1964)
analysis of how marriage partners, which would now be written to include co-resident
couples or couples living apart together (Holmes, 2004), created a stable sense of
themselves and their world through dialogue. Berger and Kellner described how
dialogic efforts screened off parts of the social world as ‘not like us’ and crystallised
the individuals’ senses of self as part of the ‘us’ of the couple. Although not couched
in the language later used by Anthony Giddens (1992), Berger and Kellner were
describing something very close to Giddens’s subsequent account of couples jointly
constructing personal narratives of the self through a dialogue of self disclosure. In
Britain, David Morgan (1976) provided an overview of theoretical approaches to the
family which drew on feminist critiques. He criticised Berger and Kellner for an
idealised portrayal of marriage which failed to acknowledge the infrequency of men
and women having equal voice or choice in the dialogue(Morgan, 1982).

Sociological theorizing and research has moved a very long way since the 1960s. Few
now speak about ‘the family’ as if there is one universally recognised type of family.
Sociologists try to find out what ‘family’ means to people, male and female, at
different ages, stages and circumstances and focus on ‘family practices’ (Morgan,
2002), how people ‘do family’. This has not always involved explicitly considering
whether and how people create discursive or interactional boundaries around ‘family’
in comparison to other relationships. However, it is clear that for many people

4
boundaries are fairly flexible. Recent research suggests that the boundary between
‘familial’ and ‘non-familial’ relationships is increasingly blurred as the constellations
that people designated as ‘familial’ become increasingly diverse. Long term
partnerships outside of marriage, among both heterosexual and same sex partners, are
increasingly recognised as family relationships despite counter currents (Dunne 1997,
Rosneil and Budgeon, 2003, Weeks et al. 2001). It is not generally assumed, a priori,
that people have a finite capacity for intimacy and there is necessarily a zero-sum
equation between types of relationship. Some researchers suggest that friendships are
the most significant relationships for a growing number of individuals outside of
conventional couple relationships at all life course stages. Some authors suggests that
more open and less exclusive friendships may supplant couple relationships (Roseneil
and Budgeon, 2003). The trends of increasing number of people living alone are
sometimes interpreted in this light but, as the chapter on solo-living indicates many
solo-livers are not seeking alternative life-styles. Theorising of gender differences is
also much more sophisticated than in the 1960s. Much more is now known about
family households as sites of violence, abuse and domination, situations in which
abusers and dominators do boundary work to contain and control their intimates.
Children as well as adults are given a voice in research and this has shown that their
understandings of family boundaries and of intimacy may not coincide with those of
their parents. It is no longer presumed that those who do share a family household
necessarily have the same view and experiences of family life. Diversity is charted not
just of types of household but of family practices and experiences across and within
households. The starting point of research is more likely to be the whole constellation
of intimate relationships.

These advances in research illustrate the complexity of ‘doing intimacy’ and of the
potential parts played by boundary work. Nevertheless, the notion that intimacy is
cherished by keeping others at a distance has remained a recurrent theme in both
theoretical discussions and the research literature attempting to document how people
live their lives. The notion that exclusivity is a necessary aspect of intimacy is
retained in Anthony Giddens’s Transformation of Intimacy (1992) which has been a
particular influential text among researcher of intimate relationships. This offered an
optimistic analysis of the role of intimacy in social change. Giddens (1992) argued
that a qualitative shift in intimacy began to occur in the late twentieth century. In this
period, the faster pace of social change and heightened awareness of risk and
uncertainty, meant that conventional ways of doing things, including ‘being a family’,
gender identities and sexual identities, were increasingly open to reworking, as people
became more self-conscious of being makers of their own narrative-of-the-self. In this
climate, Giddens argued, people increasingly sought what I refer to as ‘self-disclosing
intimacy’ to anchor themselves in one or more particularly intense personal
relationships. He argues that people seek to anchor themselves in a ‘pure relationship’
in which mutual trust is built through disclosing intimacy.

A pure relationship is one in which external criteria have become

dissolved: the relationship exists solely for whatever rewards that
relationship can deliver. In the context of the pure relationship, trust
can be mobilised only by a process of mutual disclosure (Giddens
1991, p.6)
What holds the pure relationship together is the acceptance on the part
of each partner, ‘until further notice’, that each gains sufficient benefit

5
 from the relation to make its continuance worthwhile. Sexual
exclusiveness here has the role in the relationship to the degree to
which the partners mutually deem it desirable or essential. (Giddens,
1992, p. 63).

Relationships became more fragile, lasting only as long as they provide mutual
satisfaction, but they were also potentially more satisfactory, equal and democratic.
Sex was no longer harnessed to set scripts and couples could create their own rules of
sexual conduct. Although people continued to choose long term intimate
relationships, including marriage-like relationships and parenting relationships,
Giddens argued that diversity in styles of personal life inevitably also blossomed.

In describing the mechanisms by which people constructed self-disclosing intimacy,

Giddens suggested that exclusionary boundaries have to be drawn around intimate
relationships. Although sexual exclusivity is not a necessary condition of the ‘pure
relationship’ he envisaged some form of boundary work in order to secure trust. He
referred to the psychoanalytic suggestion that dyadic sexual relationships in adulthood
are a site for recreating the ‘feeling of exclusivity that an infant enjoys with its
mother’ (1992, p. 138). He identified trust as a key element of intimacy that requires
exclusionary practices; trust ‘is not a quality capable of indefinite expansion … the
disclosure of what is kept from other people is one of the main psychological markers
likely to call forth trust and to be sought after in return’ (Giddens, 1992, pp.138-9).

Authentic intimacy and public democracy or illusory intimacy and empty

democracy?
Giddens’s account in The Transformation of Intimacy does not share the suspicion of
other analysts that devoting energies to exclusionary intimate relationships will
detract from the wider social fabric. While acknowledging that exclusionary boundary
work is necessary to create the trust and sense of being special of disclosing intimacy,
it seems that a personal life so constructed can coincide with civic engagement.
Some have claimed that intimacy can be oppressive, and clearly this may be so if
it is regarded as a demand for constant emotional closeness. Seen, however, as a
transactional negotiation of personal ties by equals, it appears in a completely
different light. Intimacy implies a wholesale democratising of the interpersonal
domain, in a manner fully compatible with democracy in the public sphere. There
are further implications as well. The transformation of intimacy might be a
subversive influence upon modern institutions as a whole. For a social world in
which emotional fulfilment replaced the maximising of economic growth would
be very different from that which we know at present. (Giddens 1992, 3)

Giddens is not the fist author to claim compatibility between growing intimacy and
civic engagement. The 18th century philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment saw
intimate friendship as a 'modern' pattern made possible by the separation of personal
relationships from commercial activities allowing friendship to become matter of
sympathy and affection devoid of calculation of interest (Silver, 1997). For thinkers
like Adam Smith, however, the possibility of more intimate friendship did not herald
growing indifference to non-intimates but rather coincided with the blossoming of an
altruistic civil society. 'No benevolent man ever lost the fruits of his benevolence. If

6
he does not gather them from the persons from whom he ought to have gathered them,
he seldom fails to gather them, and with a ten-fold increase, from other people.'
(Adam Smith, 1759, 225 quoted in Silver, 1996).

A more pessimistic rendering of the associated changes in intimacy and civic

engagement is more typical of current theorizing. Just as Parsons’ work suggested
putting more emotional energy into ‘the family’ required withdrawal from wider kin,
so many analysts suggest a tension between private intimacy and public or civic
engagement. The more sophisticated versions of this concern also acknowledge that
the division of public and private is an ideological construction, discursively
produced. For example, Lauren Berlant, a Professor of English, offers a recent version
of the argument that transformative civic engagement is undermined by the illusory
promise of self fulfillment offered by ‘ideologies and institutions of intimacy’
(Berlant and Warner, 2000, Berlant 1997).

Ideologies and institutions of intimacy are increasingly offered as the vision of a

good life for the destabilised and struggling citizenry of the United States, the
only (fantasy) zone in which a future might be thought and willed, the only
(imaginary) place where good citizens might be produced away from the
confusing and unsettling distractions and contradictions of capitalism and
politics (Berlant and Warner, 2000, 317)

For Berlant the ideological division between private intimacy and wider politics is
partially effective in directing creative energies into non-subversive conventions of a
frequently doomed to fail normal intimacy.

This sense of opposition is sometimes expressed as between exclusionary intimacy

and inclusive community, as is discussed further in the next section. There seems to
be support for this thesis in the suggestion that intense binding ties can be less
integrative of the wider social fabric than weaker ties which bridge across boundaries
between social groups (Putnam 2000, Granovetter 1973)

In contrast to fears of a retreat behind the protective boundaries of intimate life, other
authors diagnose the problem of ‘post-modernity’ as the loss of any boundaries
between personal life and the wider social world. There are long running versions of
the view that competitive individualism and rampant consumerism of capitalism
washes over and corrupts all in its path including intimacy and personal life. This
argument recognises the division between public and private as largely illusory and
suggests that without any real protective boundaries around intimacy it is difficult to
construct a meaningful personal life which could provides a nurturing ground for
social transformation. Richard Sennett (1998, 2004) and Zygmunt Bauman (2003)
have provided recent versions of this type of account. In their work, one way of
reading the problem is the impossibility of creating the type of boundaries around
intimate relationships that were imagined by family sociologists of the mid-twentieth
century.

‘Public community’ versus ‘private intimacy’

In 1995, Graham Crow and Graham Allan suggested that 'intimacy implies a degree
of intensity and uniqueness which it would not be possible to sustain with all
members of a community, because intimacy and community imply different

7
principles.' (1995, 10). The weight of evidence concerning how people ‘do intimacy’
in conducting their families, friendships and neighbouring relationships, however,
indicates no such contradiction. Just as not all forms of ‘individualism’ are
incompatible with commitment to collective action (Lichterman 1996, Delanty 2003,
121) so not all forms of intimacy are incompatible with either ‘community’ or civic
engagement.

Contemporary studies of particular places find some people who have a sense of
community, and for whom being a local is an important self-defining characteristic,
involving a sense of common cause with other locals, although most people do not
live in circumstances which they would define in these terms. However, a village
dweller who knows most of the residents in the locality, identifies it as a community
and himself or herself as a local, does not inevitably have a pattern of intimate
relationship that is constructed on different principles from that of an urban dweller
who thinks neither in terms of community or being ‘local’(Fischer, 1982, 260). .If
asked to map their personal relationships in terms of their ‘importance’ or ‘closeness’
most rural and urban dwellers alike would identify an inner circle of friends and kin.
The balance between friends and kin may vary across the urban/rural and also the
number of people who located within an outer envelope rather than an inner circle
(see also Pahl and Spencer 2004). However, the village ‘local’ is very unlikely to
place all others designated as ‘locals’ in his or her inner circle. The practice of
creating a boundary between those with whom one is particularly intimate and ‘the
rest’ is widespread and not incompatible with community or civic engagement.
Numerous studies have demonstrated the coexistence of willingness to help others in
the locality and practices of intimacy which are reserved for an inner circle. For
example, this is shown to be typical of Hightown on the Isle of Wight, England
(Crow, Alan and Summers, 2002). Graham Crow returns to the issue of the
relationship between community and intimacy with less certainty of their
incompatibility in his book Social Solidarities (2001). Here Crow notes that ‘The
connection between ‘intimacy’ and ‘community’ is a problematic one in that the two
are not always compatible. Situations in which they come into conflict test the
loyalties of individuals by requiring them to identify one or other as priority.’ (2002,
122). He goes on to suggest that people’s first loyalties are not necessarily to their
family but to a much narrower constituent of intimates, often the occupants of their
family-household, in other words their inner circle of intimates.

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Intimacy, social change and boundary practices?
The discussion above indicate the extent to which assumptions about boundaries and
boundary work infuse much theorizing and debate about social change and personal
life. Assumptions about the need for boundaries around ‘the family’ dominated
‘family sociology’ in the mid-twentieth century. The notion that intimacy requires
keeping ‘others’ at a distance has carried on into contemporary debate about our
capacities for intimacy, and the implications of changes in personal life for social
cohesion, democratic citizenship and community participation. Current theoretical
positions are not always well supported by research evidence. The pessimistic
accounts of social change which suggest that people are increasingly unable to sustain
intimate relationships because of their failure to create protective barriers against
selfish individualism seems to have relatively little grounding in empirical work.
While clearly there are episodes of discontent and upheaval in many people’s intimate
lives, the evidence does not typically suggest a turning away from intimate
relationships. Most people sustain a personal social network of more or less intimate
relationships and derive a great deal of pleasure from them. A case has also been
made by reference to research for challenging the view that intimacy is incompatible
with ‘community’.

Existing research indicates that not all of the basic activities that women and men use
to create intimate relationships necessarily require protective or exclusionary
boundaries to be successful. While boundaries often play a part in creating a sense of
being the ‘special one’, the ideal of couple relationship for many, not all practices of
intimacy create boundaries. Some caring activities and ways of spending time
together need not be exclusive, dyadic or ‘family only’ projects. Across the range of
parent-child, couple, other family relationships, and friendship relationships, there are
many different ways of ‘doing intimacy’ documented in the research literature. Some
of the ways in which relationships become different and special are forms of
institutionalization that side-step the need form more conscious boundary creation or
active boundary maintenance. For example, much of what distinguishes intimate
relationships from other relationships concerns shared history, common property and
shared projects.

Parent-child relationships, particularly mother-child relationships, are often thought of

as intensely intimate family relationships but it is not obvious that this relationship
typically relies on boundary work to protect its intimacy. Mothers and fathers may
work to keep their children ‘close’ and actively seeking to spend time with and to
‘know’ their children. However, a number of studies have shown that parental
attempts at ‘knowing’ are sometimes experience by children as monitoring and
control rather than intimacy (Brannen et al 1994, Solomon et al, 2002). For some
children, their home life is separated off from their friendship relationships by
boundary work that includes never or rarely bringing friends home. For example,
children with drug or alcohol abusing parents sometimes adopt strategies that prevent
the possibility of their friends being exposed to domestic chaos or strange behaviour
by their parents (Bancroft et al, 2002). However, in Britain the majorities of older
school age children are friend focused and regularly bring children to their parental
home across class backgrounds (Jamieson and McKendrick, 2005). In many
children’s lives, at least in middle-childhood, it is practical acts of being cared for and
expressions of interest, concern and love that reassure children that a parent cares
about them. Low key, everyday reassurance of a parent or parents ‘being there’allows

9
these relationship to be both a key intimate relationship and a taken for granted
background support, while they focus on the dramas of friendship relationships
(Borland et al. 1998).

Research on couples offers a mixed picture in terms of the place of boundary work.
Some couples clearly operate protective and exclusionary practices to sustain
intimacy and privilege their couple relationship above all others. But some research
also suggests that boundary work is not the mainstay of couple relationships and
some researchers suggest a shift away from coupledom as the focal point of intimacy.
Gender differences and divisions continue to have implications for intimacy among
heterosexual couples although the situation has changed radically since the mid-
twentieth century. Intimacy, domesticity and femininity are not as routinely
discursively produced as coterminous boundaries. Men and women both talk of
seeking intimacy and equality although they invest differently in the work of
sustaining relationships and households.

Research suggests that, at least up until late middle-age, most adults are still seeking
life-long relationships. The meaning of marriage has changed in ways which have
closed the moral distance between marriage and cohabitation without marriage
(Jamieson et al 2002). Commitment does not mean an obligation to stay together for
life. Commitment, as seen, for example, by younger respondents in Jane Lewis’s
(1999, 2001) two generational study, rather than an obligation to stay with a partner
through ‘thick and thin’ refers to the presumption that this will happen because love
will last, the valued qualities of the other person will last and the relationship will
remain good enough for a life together. In this sense, everyday ideals for life-
partnerships, married or otherwise, have moved closer to what Giddens (1991, 1992)
describes as ‘the pure relationship’. However, what subsequently sustains the
relationship is a mixed repertoire of practices of intimacy and processes that
subsequently institutionalise the relationship. Boundary work is only a part of this
picture.

Although disclosing intimacy with its requirement for exclusivity may not be the
bedrock of most couple relationships, this does not necessarily preclude the presence
of some boundary practices as a routinely part of couple relationships. The ideal of
monogamy, for example, may provide some with reason for keeping others at a
distance. A range of studies suggest that relatively exclusive and sexually
monogamous couple relationships remain the dominant ideal sought by most people
as their key source of intimacy in adult life. While significant numbers of people who
subscribe to the ideal are not fully monogamous, monogamy is the dominant practice
among heterosexual and lesbian couples. For example, Green (1997) found that serial
monogamy was the dominant pattern of relationships in a London based politically
radical lesbian feminist community. This was despite a degree of political suspicion
of marriage-like couple relationships as potentially recreating the perceived
deficiencies of heterosexual unions and undermining autonomy and freedom for
political activism. Gay men may be less likely to practice sexual monogamy but use
other forms of boundary work to protect their long term relationships.

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Non-monogamous couples may be particularly likely to use exclusionary rules to try
and sustain a sense of having a unique and ‘special’ relationship because other
conventional boundaries are absent (Jamieson, 2004).. Some non-monogamous
couples are very clear about which relationship is the primary relationship and have
rules designed to ensure that other sexual relationships cannot interfere with its
privileged time and space. For example, secondary relationships must only be at
conducted a certain distance from home or only in certain time intervals. Other
couples require that ‘other relationships’ are brought home for scrutiny and to be
made to confront the physically reality of an ongoing domestic partnership. The
exceptional few who have two partners rather than a primary and secondary
relationship may nevertheless still use practices of protecting and scheduling in
‘special time’ to create ‘special relationships’ with more than one partner. Again there
are examples of this in the literature:
I now spend three nights of the week with Dee, and three with Jasna.
Sundays are my nights off. I move back and forth between the home I
share with Dee, and Jasna’s apartment. I celebrate my birthday twice,
and I vacation with each partner, spending Judeo-Christian holidays
with Dee and Greek-Orthodox holidays with Jasna. (Gartrell, 1999, p.
31).
Across the range of ways in which intimacy can be understood and practiced,
arguably self-disclosing intimacy is the most exclusive form of intimacy in terms of
demanding privileged dyadic time. Although as Giddens claims, this form of intimacy
may not be incompatible with civic engagement, time is finite even if capacity for
engagement with others is not. The notion that it is important to deeply know another
person and to constantly refresh that knowledge may demand a more exclusive
devotion of time than other forms of doing intimacy. Trying to sustain multiple
relationships on this basis, whether with children as a parent or with partners as an
adult, may leave little time, particularly if negotiated around paid employment. In the
description above there is only one ‘night off’ from Dee and Jasna. Ironically, then,
perhaps this understanding and practice of intimacy is the most suitable candidate for
the claim that a shift to intimacy is to the detriment of ‘community’. But then the
research also indicates that relatively few relationships are exclusively founded on
self disclosing intimacy.

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Theorists are better equipped to describe social change if they pay attention to the
details of the ways in which people ‘do intimacy’ and address lives as they are lived.
However, research has rarely focused explicitly on the role of boundaries and
boundary work in personal life. Assessing the value of particular theoretical positions
would be greatly assisted if understandings of the place of personal relationships in
social change included knowledge of the extent to which living personal lives and
‘doing intimacy’ involves protective or exclusionary boundaries. It is possible to
draw lessons from existing research about the significance of a number of boundaries
for intimacy and personal life. The discussion has touched on the boundary between
familial and non-familial intimate relationships, the relationship between gender
boundaries and intimacy, and the significance of boundaries between personal life and
‘community’ or civil society. It has not been possible to explore any of these themes
thoroughly not only because of the constraints of space but also because of the limits
of existing research. There is a case for a much more explicit research focus on these
themes and for a more direct exploration of the significance of boundary work within
and between types of intimate relationships.

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