Introduction

The history of the family and complexity of social change has generated vibrant scholarly debate. Taken together, the variety of new family forms and trends observed in recent decades (including marital breakdown, reconstituted families, cohabiting couples, transnational families, lone parents, gay and lesbian families, working mothers, civil partnership, assisted reproduction, delayed and declining fertility, and voluntary childlessness) has been said, in some quarters, to reflect an overall decline in the family based on marriage and perhaps even a decline in ‘the family’ itself (Popenoe 1993). Prominent social theorists, such as Giddens (1992), Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (1995) and Bauman (1995), have written extensively about the ‘transformation of intimacy’ that is said to characterize family change in late modernity. For Giddens (1992), a radical transformation in intimate relations was underway in the last decades of the twentieth century, with potentially radical consequences for the entire social fabric (Jamieson 1999). In this perspective, since intimate relationships are no longer held together by law, tradition or financial necessity, they are inherently tentative and unstable and are only continued insofar as they are thought by both parties to deliver enough satisfaction for individuals to stay in them (Giddens 1992: 58). High rates of divorce, women’s rights and lone parenthood in Western societies, for example, were considered symptoms of individualization, fluidity and detraditionalization, where the expressed needs and choices of individuals are said to take priority over the conventions of social institutions, such as family and marriage. The role of reproduction in sexual relations began to wane while the notion of romantic love for personal fulfilment was considered to have gained significance.