Troubling Traditional and Conventional Families? Formalised Same-Sex Couples and ‘The Ordinary’

Abstract

This article explores the value of the concept of ‘the ordinary’ in analysing formalised couple and family relationships. This is a concept that is coming to the fore in discussions of same-sex relationships. It is often associated with heterosexual tradition, convention, and normativity with respect to the social institutions of marriage and family and has also been defended as representing the everyday politics of contemporary post-traditional, non-conventional, and non-normative couples and families. The article explores the value of focusing on ‘the ordinary’ for connecting what might appear to be contradictory developments in formalised couple and family life by drawing on data from a UK study that was based on both joint and individual interviews with 50 same-sex couples, where partners were aged under 35 when they entered into civil partnership, prior to the availability of same-sex marriage. First, it considers some of the ‘ordinary’ troubles that formalised same-sex couples and families encounter and the ways in which they can be simultaneously viewed as traditionally conventional and post-traditional or non-conventional. Second, it examines how civil partners’ accounts of their ordinary experiences of love and care were underpinned by and troubled traditional meanings and conventional practices associated with married couples’ commitments. Third, it analyses how partners’ comparisons of previous generations’ marriages to their civil partnerships (which they tended to view as ‘ordinary marriages’) appear to trouble traditional conventions as regulative while simultaneously espousing emergent conventions as freeing. Taken together, participants’ personal accounts point to how by focusing on ‘the ordinary’ we can address a characteristic of contemporary family that some commentators have trouble grasping: its double nature. By this, I mean the ways in which family forms and practices can be simultaneously traditional and post-traditional, non-conventional and conventional, as well as troubling of and incorporated into the social institutions of marriage and family. The analysis highlights how the concept of the ordinary provides a way into the double thinking required of sociology to understand marriage and family as contemporary social institutions.