Enduring love

This survey by the Open University looks like a potentially very interesting project which I hope will give us a different view of family life than the usual divorce statistics and household data (The following is taken from the website):

The Enduring Love? research project is an exciting development in the study of personal and family lives in contemporary Britain. Much recent policy, academic and professional research has focused on the causes and effects of relationship breakdown, but many heterosexual and same sex couples also remain together for significant periods of time. In some ways, then, these couples appear to sit outside a growing tendency towards serial or transitory relationships. To understand more about couples who stay together, our research will focus on the meanings and everyday experiences of long-term relationships. However we will not be presupposing that such relationships are uniformly loving or straightforwardly associated with contentment. The project will rather be concerned with what helps people sustain relationships and how cultural myths, such as finding ‘the one’ and living ‘happily-ever-after’, are understood and reconciled by adult couples whose own relationships may fall short of these romantic ideals.

I find this particularly interesting as a researcher writing about family life. I have found that the mainstream theoretical approach of focusing on what kind of family structures are the most stable lacks the subtlety needed to understand the complexity of family life in the modern world; how it survives, endures and even flourishes. Instead I propose that we focus on the characteristics of family life which are constitutive of familial survival and flourishing. Of course, this research focuses on couple relationships which is only one aspect of family life but an extremely important one. The project, which targets couples in long-term relationships, aims to deal with the idea that we need someone who will sweep us off our feet or match up to some romantic ideal. The survey questions themselves centre on issues of how domestic labour is divided, what do we find satisfying about our relationships, are we listened to by our partners, do we feel valued and so on. I will be watching out for the results of this, and their more in-depth interviews, with keen interest. And while you're here, if you're in a long-term relationship, however you define that, fill in the questionnaire!