Intimacy as a Double-Edged Phenomenon? An Empirical Test of Giddens*

In a series of books published since 1990, Anthony Giddens has explored the impact of globalization on the personal relationships and inner lives of those living in the advanced capitalist societies of the West. Of particular interest to him have been intimate, sexual relationships, which he views as tending, under the weight of globalization, away from a “traditional” model and toward a “posttraditional” form in which the relationship is seen as a means to self-development and is expected to be dissolved when it no longer serves this purpose. These posttraditional or “pure love” relationships, Giddens argues, hold great promise for human freedom and happiness, but are so unpredictable that they also threaten to overwhelm people with anxiety and lead them to engage in compensatory addictive behaviors. This article empirically examines Giddens’s claims. Data come from a nationally representative survey of Americans in midlife. Results show that people in pure love relationships reap the rewards to which Giddens points, but experience few of the negative side effects. The theoretical implications of the findings are considered. Among the world-historical changes considered by the founders of sociology to have given birth to the modern social order, few occasioned as much anxiety as did detraditionalization — the receding, in Western Europe, of customs and beliefs that had, given the relative stability of feudalism, anchored people’s lives in predictable, transgenerational practices. Although Emile Durkheim and Max Weber recognized the benefits modernity might bring, both worried that as * Names in alphabetical order. For help with this article we thank Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Larry Bumpass, Charles Camic, Deborah Carr, Robert Hauser, Hans Joas, Gerald Marwell, and Devah Pager. Direct correspondence to Neil Gross, Department of Sociology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles CA 90089, or Solon Simmons, Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1180 Observatory Drive, Madison WI 53706. 532 / Social Forces 81:2, December 2002 traditionalism faded, individuals would lose their sense of social rootedness and would no longer have their spiritual, creative, and communal needs met. The most prominent heir to this “genuine ambivalence” (Sica 1988:165) about modernity and detraditionalization is Anthony Giddens. Moving away from an earlier focus on action theory (see Bryant & Jary 1991; Cohen 1987, 1989; Craib 1992; Giddens 1979, 1984, 1987; Sewell 1992; Tucker 1998), Giddens has, over the course of the 1990s, pursued an ambitious theoretical project: tracing the effects, on people’s inner lives, of the major transformations of the contemporary era (Giddens 1990, 1991, 1992, 1994, 1998, 2000). Paying special attention to new forms of global interdependency, Giddens theorizes that the expert systems that serve as globalization’s infrastructure operate on the basis of decontextualized knowledge, the cultural authority of which calls into question the local knowledge on which tradition depends. In Giddens’s view, globalization thus furthers the Enlightenment project of loosening the grip of tradition, enhancing people’s capacity to live their lives autonomously. But Giddens sees detraditionalization as a “double-edged phenomenon” (1990:7). Drawing on various strands of psychoanalytic thought, he argues that “ontological security” — a “sense of continuity and order in [the] events” (Giddens 1991:243) that make up one’s life — is a basic psychological need. Yet Giddens maintains that life in posttraditional societies is filled with ontological insecurity, for in such societies “an indefinite range of potential courses of action . . . is . . . open to individuals” (28-9), which destabilizes long-term life narratives. In such a context, anxiety abounds, as do new psychopathologies of addiction that arise as defense mechanisms against anxiety when tradition can no longer serve this purpose. Giddens’s views on modernity have received substantial attention from theorists (e.g., Bryant & Jary 2001; Held & Thompson 1989; Jamieson 1998; Kaspersen 2000; Mestrovic 1998; O’Brien, Penna & Hay 1999). But no one has empirically tested his claims about the relationship between detraditionalization, autonomization, and psychological insecurity. This article is a preliminary effort to fill this lacuna. We focus specifically on Giddens’s discussion of detraditionalization in the realm of intimate relationships. We begin by explaining how, according to Giddens, globalization has fundamentally altered the nature of all personal relationships. We then synopsize Giddens’s account of recent changes in intimate relationships in particular, showing why he views the shift away from traditional relationship forms as both advantageous and risky. We go on to derive, from this discussion, five hypotheses about the psychological consequences of posttraditional intimate attachments. We test these hypotheses using data from a nationally representative study of U.S. adults age 25-74. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings. Intimacy as a Double-Edged Phenomenon? / 533 Globalization and Personal Relationships Giddens’s account of detraditionalization is inextricably bound up with his analysis of globalization. Central to the debate among theorists of globalization is a concern that the complex of processes commonly labeled “globalization” represents nothing new (see Albrow 1997; Guillen 2001; Held et al. 1999; Robertson 1992; Sklair 1991; Waters 1995). In this debate, Giddens sides with those who view today’s globalized world as a radically new social configuration, even though he sees it as one arising out of the process of modernization. It is in the context of this “discontinuist” (Giddens 1990:5) vision of contemporary society that his views about personal relationships can best be understood. For Giddens (1984), a key dimension along which social systems vary is in the degree to which they are organized around interactions between agents who are distant from one another temporally and spatially. Premodern societies, he argues, were primarily composed of interactions within local, place-based kinship and friendship networks and communities. In modern societies, however, “the level of time-space distanciation is much greater” (14). As the modern nation-state grew in tandem with industrialism and capitalism, it developed “surveillance capacities” and a monopoly on legitimate violence that gave it “coordinated control over delimited territorial arenas” (57, emphasis in original), making interactions with physically absent others a routine feature of social life for its citizenry. At the same time, with the onset of modernity, people’s lives become tied to the world capitalist economy, the international division of labor, and the world military order (Giddens 1990:71). These global interconnections, Giddens argues, have attained record levels of density in recent years with the development of new communications and transportation technologies, which have facilitated the expansion of international trade and the growth of world financial markets and have also accelerated the pace of cultural diffusion, thrusting us into a period of “radicalized” modernity (Giddens 1994, 2000). As a result, we now live in a world in which “distant events . . . affect us more directly and immediately than ever before” (Giddens 1998:31). Concomitant with the increasing time-space distanciation of modern social life is the “disembedding” (Giddens 1990:21) of individuals from local, place-based orientations. Disembedding, in Giddens’s theoretical vocabulary, refers to the process whereby people develop the psychological resources to gear their interactions toward physically absent others. The most important such resource is trust. Giddens suggests that modern social intercourse would be imperiled were individuals unwilling to trust the legions of physically absent others on whom they are dependent (1994:89-90). According to Giddens, modernity’s answer to this trustinculcation problem is the authority of expert systems. Individuals put their trust in such systems — for example, the medical system, the financial system, or the aviation system — because they are state regulated, because they legitimate 534 / Social Forces 81:2, December 2002 themselves by reference to an ideology of bureaucratic rationality, and because they claim to operate in accordance with the findings of technical science. And it is precisely trust in expert systems that is the condition for disembedding: “An expert system disembeds... by providing ‘guarantees’ of expectations across distanciated time-space. This . . . is achieved via the impersonal nature of tests applied to evaluate technical knowledge and by public critique... used to control its form” (Giddens 1990:28). But as expert systems “stretch” (28) time and space, they also change the nature of personal relationships: relationships between friends, lovers, family members, etc. First, expert systems, functioning alongside the on-going division of labor, eliminate some of the exigencies upon which such relationships once rested. In such a context, personal trust, which is no longer anchored in necessity, “becomes a project... to be ‘worked at’ by the parties involved... [T]rust [in modern societies] has to be won, and the means of doing this is demonstrable warmth and openness” (121). The second way expert systems affect personal relationships is by making them objects of analysis. Because the personal relationship has today been drawn into the domain of psychological or pop-psychological expertise, it has become radically detraditionalized: informed less than it was in premodern societies by sacred folk beliefs about the rules of combination, behavior, temporality, and duration that such relationships should ideally follow. In science, and in the expert systems that legitimate themselves by reference to it, “critique of even the most basic assumptions of a perspective is not only in bounds, but called for” (Giddens 1994:86). But the intrinsic revisability of expert knowledge is antithetical to traditional wisdom, which is characterized by unquestionability and which is, accordingly, looked down upon by “experts” in the modern sense of the term. In addition, whereas the knowledge that informs expert systems is based on “impersonal principles” (85), traditional belief is fundamentally local and has sacred status only because the principles it expresses are tied to the collective identities of particular social groups. In a culture that privileges expert knowledge, traditional views about personal relationships begin to appear antiquated. Intimacy and the Rise of the Pure Relationship Giddens believes that globalization and the rise of expert systems have wrought changes in every type of personal relationship. Of particular interest to him, however, are intimate, sexual relationships. In The Transformation of Intimacy (1992), he characterizes the shift such relationships have undergone as a shift from the ideal of “romantic” love to that of “pure” or “confluent” love.1 Intimacy as a Double-Edged Phenomenon? / 535 Romantic love, Giddens argues, does not predate modernity. Although discourses of love could be found in premodern societies, Giddens maintains that when premodern peoples thought of love, their referent was not to romance, but to passion: to an all-encompassing sexual attraction for another that was “disruptive” insofar as it “uproot[ed] the individual from the mundane,” “generating a break with routine and duty” (Giddens 1992:38, 40). Love was thought to be disruptive in part because it was seen as connected to the supernatural; it was an emotion that overcame people when the forces of an unpredictable “cosmic order” (41) intervened in their lives. Because love was viewed in this light, it was regarded as “dangerous . . . from the point of view of social order and duty” and for this reason was “nowhere . . . recognized as either a necessary or sufficient basis for marriage” (38). In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, passionate love did not disappear, but there arose alongside it a new conceptualization: love as romance. On this understanding, love is still connected to “cosmic fate” (41), but is now viewed as a phenomenon whereby individuals who strive to embody the idealized qualities of their genders find another who, “by being who he or she is, answers a lack which the individual does not even necessarily recognise” (45). In this way, “the flawed individual is made whole” (45). Central to this view of love, according to Giddens, is that it provides a narrative within which an individual can make sense of the unfolding of his or her life. In nineteenth-century romance novels, the lives — especially of women — were portrayed as “quest[s] . . . in which selfidentity awaits its validation from the discovery of the other” (45). Insofar as individuals saw their lives as quests of this kind, they could project themselves forward in time, anticipating, if they had not already found their one true love, the moment when this would happen, and envisioning what their lives would be like from that point onward: a life-long marriage coupled with parenthood. In Giddens’s view, romantic love was connected to rationalization because an intimate relationship, viewed through the lens of romantic love, was “a potential avenue for controlling the future, as well as a form of psychological security (in principle) for those whose lives were touched by it” (41). To say that romantic love was intertwined with rationalization, however, is not to claim that those who embraced this cultural complex managed to throw off all the shackles of “mysticism and dogma” (40) against which the Enlightenment had been directed. For the notion of romantic love, especially the assumption that it entailed a life-long (heterosexual) marriage, was folded into common sense, religious tradition, and jurisprudence, so that individuals who wished to deviate from the life-course trajectory implied by the romantic love narrative found themselves up against powerful constraints. In the second half of the twentieth-century, however, the romantic love ideal began to be pushed aside by a genuinely detraditionalized cultural framework: intimacy as what Giddens calls “pure” or “confluent” love. He 536 / Social Forces 81:2, December 2002 defines a “pure” relationship as one in which “a social relation is entered into for its own sake, for what can be derived by each person from a sustained association with another; and which is continued only insofar as it is thought by both parties to deliver enough satisfactions for each individual to stay within it” (58). Whereas romantic love relationships revolved around idealized visions of manly strength and womanly virtue, the pure relationship is an effort to achieve, through constant communication, an intimate knowledge of the other’s unique and authentic self. Whereas romantic love entailed a lifelong commitment, a defining feature of pure love is that intimacy is sought as a means to self-development, so that a condition for entry into such relationships is the implicit agreement that if the values, interests, and identities of the partners begin to diverge in noncomplementary ways, the relationship loses its reason for being and becomes subject to dissolution. An individual who is committed to a pure love relationship — even through marriage — is therefore committed only contingently. But pure love differs from romantic love in other ways as well. Whereas romantic love relationships centered around the material comforts of hearth and home, the “core” of pure love relationships, according to Giddens (1991), is “reflexive questioning” of the status of the relationship “in which the question, ‘Is everything all right?’ figures as a leading motif” (91). Whereas under the romantic love ideal, “the element of sublime love tends to predominate” (1992:40), “confluent love for the first time introduces the ars erotica into the core of the conjugal relationship” (62). Finally, whereas romantic love relationships were normatively heterosexual, “confluent love, while not necessarily androgynous . . . presumes a model of the pure relationship in which . . . a person’s sexuality is [but] one factor that has to be negotiated as part of a relationship” (63). In Giddens’s account, the rise of the pure love relationship is related, in complex ways, to globalization and the growth of expert systems. First, insofar as the decontextualized knowledge on which expert systems rest undermines the authority of tradition — while globalization, simultaneously, brings people into contact with a wide variety of cultural practices — lifestyle choices, i.e., the choices individuals make between competing practices of everyday living, become the “very core of self-identity” (1991:81). Individuals, faced in these circumstances with the cultural mandate to achieve self-understanding by weaving together coherent narratives of self-development from the threads of their past, present, and anticipated future lifestyle choices — what Giddens calls the “reflexive project of the self” (9) — gravitate toward relationships that center on authenticity and self-disclosure, on the pursuit of similar lifestyles, and that are sufficiently contingent that they do not threaten to block unanticipated lines of personal development. Second, as individuals pursue self-actualization, they become increasingly reliant on expert systems of therapy or on therapeutic discourse more generally. These systems ask the individual to continually “conduct a self-interrogation in Intimacy as a Double-Edged Phenomenon? / 537 terms of what is happening” in the relationship so that the status of the relationship and its dynamics can be assessed (76). Such pressures push in the direction of relationships in which emotional communication and reflexive questioning play central roles. Moreover, since therapeutic expert systems recognize adherence to tradition to be a valid lifestyle choice only insofar as that adherence is consistent with the entirety of the individual’s psychological needs — in other words, since expert systems refuse to bow to traditional authority as such — reliance on therapy or the discourse surrounding it leads people away from relationships in which they are constrained by tradition, i.e., away from the romantic love ideal and toward the pure love relationship. Third, as individuals put their trust in expert systems, becoming less oriented than their counterparts were in the past toward local kinship groups and communities, these groups lose their capacity to ground intimate relationships: to provide the framework of moral obligation and trust that intimate partners need to assure themselves they will not be taken advantage of by the other. In such a context, trust comes to depend on “the opening out of the individual to the other, because knowledge that the other is committed, and harbours no basic antagonisms towards oneself, is the only framework for trust when external supports are largely absent” (96). Such an opening out is a defining characteristic of pure love. Of course, Giddens does not believe that globalization and the growth of expert systems are the only social changes to have abetted the rise of the pure love relationship. Also of crucial importance, in his eyes, are, on the one hand, fertility decline, and, on the other hand, the growing acceptance of contraceptive technologies. These interrelated developments made possible “a progressive differentiation of sex from the exigencies of reproduction” and ushered in an era of “plastic sexuality” in which, especially for women, “sexuality became malleable . . . and a potential ‘property’ of the individual” (1992:27). Plastic sexuality, in turn, militated in favor of the pure relationship. Women were freed from much of the fear previously associated with sex, fear “of repetitive pregnancies, and therefore of death, given the substantial proportion of women who perished in childbirth” (27) and could now make sexual fulfillment a life-goal and a condition for remaining in relationships. The severing of sexuality from reproduction — reproduction being a focal point of concern in most societies — also made it so that “heterosexuality is no longer a standard by which everything else is judged” (1992:34). The logic of plastic sexuality thus gave cultural support to “interest groups and movements . . . claiming social acceptance and legal legitimacy for homosexuality” (33), paving the way for the emergence of a view of intimacy that, in principle, does not rely on assumptions about “natural” gender complementarities. The feminist movement, too, Giddens argues, played an important role in the appearance of the pure love relationship. Feminist campaigns against domestic violence 538 / Social Forces 81:2, December 2002 and in favor of equality in housework, child-care arrangements, and emotional caretaking made traditional, romantic love relationships seem retrograde. These campaigns were carried out in conjunction with the mass entry of women into the paid labor force, a development which greatly enhanced women’s authority in relationships with men by undermining the homemaker/breadwinner dichotomy. As a consequence of these changes, the pure love relationship is now, according to Giddens, the dominant cultural form in the posttraditional advanced capitalist societies of the West. To be sure, Giddens does not suggest that all contemporary relationships achieve the ideals of pure love. “The degree to which intimate spheres are transformed in this way,” he insists, “plainly varies according to context and differential socioeconomic position, in common with most of the traits of modernity” (Giddens 1991:98). Nevertheless, he claims that “reasonably durable sexual ties, marriages and friendship relations all tend to approximate today to the pure relationship” (87). The Pure Relationship as a “Double-Edged” Phenomenon On the whole, Giddens sees the transition to the pure love relationship as cause for celebration. The major advantage of such relationships, he argues, is that they are more egalitarian than their romantic love counterparts. Because romantic love rested on essentialist assumptions about natural gender differences, “for women dreams of romantic love” — dreams enshrined as obligations in some family, community, religious, and legal contexts — “all too often led to grim domestic subjection” (Giddens 1992:62). Subscription to the romantic love ideal also hindered women’s ability to break up with abusive and emotionally unavailable men and to find sexual fulfillment. The pure relationship, in contrast, allows for escape. But in Giddens’s eyes, the pure relationship is superior even if the individuals involved have no wish to escape, because it takes seriously the values of autonomy and equality. Describing the pure relationship, he notes: A good relationship is a relationship of equals, where each party has equal rights and obligations. In such a relationship, each person has respect, and wants the best for the other. The pure relationship is based upon communication, so that understanding the other person’s point of view is essential. Talk, or dialogue, is the basis of making the relationship work. Relationships function best if people don’t hide too much from each other — there has to be mutual trust . . . Finally, a good relationship is one free from arbitrary power, coercion or violence.