“Growing, Listening, Learning”: How Progressive Couples Signal Relationship Ideals

• In Event: Family Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 13: Relationship Dynamics and Quality

Abstract

Long-term, committed relationships have transformed over the past century. Once an economic necessity that nearly always meant heterosexual marriage, romantic relationships are now socially sanctioned in various forms and understood as a means to self-actualization and personal fulfillment. Through this process of deinstitutionalization, once-dominant norms regarding gender roles, conflict management, and other features of romantic partnerships weakened. In this paper, we ask how contemporary couples who seek to distance themselves from older relationship models signal their partnership as “good” or “ideal.” Drawing on 50 interviews with self-identified liberal or progressive couples, we analyze respondents’ stated ideals alongside their observed interactions to uncover the cultural scripts governing their understanding of what a relationship should look like.

Guided by interpretive approaches that treat interviews as sites of meaning-making, we analyze both partners’ accounts and their real-time interactions during collaborative interview tasks. Although theories of the deinstitutionalization of marriage emphasize growing individualization and choice in intimate life, our findings show that progressive couples nonetheless converge around particular, recognizable relational patterns that constitute the “ideal relationship”: (1) “healthy” conflict practices emphasizing emotional regulation, teamwork, and therapeutic communication; (2) an orientation toward continual relationship growth and optimization; and (3) the explicit celebration of men’s distance from traditional masculine norms, particularly through emotional openness and reflexivity. Couples not only articulated these ideals but actively performed them in interaction, while also distinguishing their relationships from those they perceive as traditional or undesirable.

Our findings suggest that rather than a complete deinstitutionalization of marriage where “anything goes,” we may be moving towards competing institutionalized relationship regimes, with progressive couples converging around alternative norms that emphasize healthy conflict, relationship optimization, and celebration of non-hegemonic masculinity. Such norms of the progressive, contemporary couple lean heavily on therapeutic-discourse and an increasingly widespread focus on individuality and self-optimization.

Authors

• Chloe Jane Rosenstock, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Allison Daminger, University of Wisconsin-Madison