Women narrate later life remarriage: Negotiating the cultural to create the personal

Abstract

Narrative provides a window to experience in a way that is different from traditional research methods. In this study, narrative affords both a holistic vantage point on later life relationships, and at the same time, a “view from the inside”—older women's own accounts of single life, relationship development, and remarriage. The narratives were obtained in interviews with eight recently remarried women between the ages of sixty-five and eighty. A two-stage analysis addresses, first, the narrative content—the phenomenology of remarriage for these older women. The second stage focuses on process, analyzing how cultural-level narratives are drawn upon in the creation of the women's personal stories. Based upon these analyses, we discuss the ways that a narrative approach can inform our understanding of later life relationships, and we comment on the potential of narratives such as these to rewrite a script for older women's relationships.