Introduction

As other chapters in this book have shown, patterns of partnership, family and household constitution have altered quite dramatically over the last generation. In particular, partnership behaviour has changed with lower levels of marriage, higher rates of divorce and a far greater incidence of cohabitation (Allan and Crow, 2001). One consequence of this is the decreasing overlap between sex, marriage and birth, a trinity that had previously been strongly linked (Lewis and Kiernan, 1996). Importantly too, there are now more individuals living alone out of choice (see Wasoff, Jamieson and Smith in this volume) or who are sharing households with non-related others (Heath and Cleaver, 2003). With the rising numbers of stepfamilies, there are also more people living in ‘family households’ in which the kin relationships involved are potentially more contestable than was previously common. Moreover the ‘family/kinship’ connection of unregistered partnerships – the majority of cohabitations – is clearly also more problematic and contentious than the familial networks of those who are married.

One feature of these changes that is frequently highlighted is the greater uncertainty that now exists in different aspects of family membership. Whereas previously there was relative stability in family membership, this is no longer the case to anything like the same degree. The issue here is not that family relationships were constant or unaltered over time. The ‘content’ of these relationships obviously changed as people aged and developed different interdependencies and patterns of exchange. Rather the issue is the greater unpredictability that there now is about partnerships and lifecourse patterns, and the implications this has for family and household constitution. Changing practices of partnership formation and dissolution have been especially important in raising questions about cultural understandings of ‘family’, ‘commitment’ and the moral significance of individual happiness or satisfaction in the construction of the lifecourse (Giddens, 1991; Beck and Beck-Gersheim, 1995). To draw on Simpson's (1998) striking transposition, whereas once the stable nuclear family model captured family experience quite securely, increasingly the unclear family challenges our understandings of family cohesion and family boundaries.

While the sorts of change discussed here have resulted in more complex ideas of family boundedness emerging, they and other social and economic changes have also had an impact on understandings of friendship and its significance in the social lives we construct.