Ponencia
Couples relationships in today's Chile: Between collective monologue and thirdness
Autor
Sharim-Kovalskys, Dariela Lea
Araya, Carolina
Institución
Resumen
The goal of the research upon which this paper is based was to investigate the
subjective experience regarding couple relationships and it is part of an ongoing
investigation regarding intimacy from a gender and intersubjective perspective. The
methodology used was qualitative, using life-story reports and focal groups. Men and
women from middle-class homes in the Metropolitan Region, between the ages of 25
and 45 years old were interviewed.
In the last decades, the sociological reflection regarding individualization processes has
become an important element of consideration when interpreting the transformations in
the field of couple relationships (Luhmann, 1985; Moreno, 2008). The individualization
phenomenon would be expressing the cultural and social changes of the last half of the
20th century, in which individuals would go from strongly being subject to institutionally
established and fixed roles, to new ones in which they must build by themselves their
own identities (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2003; Ehrenberg, 2000; Moreno, 2008). At the
same time, nowadays choosing to live with somebody is a free and personal choice, not
subject – apparently – to the social and cultural demands of its vision of what a couple
should be. The modern couple would be marked by references to romantic feelings and
the value of sexual appeal, besides the importance of the individual projects within the
couple’s relationship context (Moreno, 2008). The idea of romantic love would then be
giving way to other types of love. Giddens (1992) has called “confluent love” that love
which does not aspire to the fusion of the individualities of the members of the couple,
but to the search of a “pure” relationship, a more democratic one, based fundamentally
on a kind of intimacy that includes emotional communication and the rewards that come
from it (Giddens, 1992). However, at least in our Latin American countries, the ideal of
love would seem to co-exist with the vision of romantic love. People would still be facing
contradictions associated with the paradox between the search for individual liberty and
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the love gratifications of a couple’s life, still understood under a romantic ideal. Hence, a
tension between autonomy and intimacy is created. Notwithstanding, couple
relationships are still our ideal today. In Chile, according to information from the PNUD
(2002), being in a couple relationship is ever more important in our repertoire of social
bonds, being that the affective and erotic relationship becomes a bond with a meaning
in and of itself.