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How Black and White Women Innovate with Situationships at Midlife

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How are midlife women reshaping the bounds of intimacy without the pressures of traditional commitment? Our study uncovers how Black and white women, frustrated with conventional relationships, are innovating with ‘situationships’—a blend of casual and committed liaisons—to maintain autonomy and explore romantic and sexual fulfillment.

Image courtesy of interviewee. November 15, 2024

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This video discusses the concept of "situationships," which are relationships that exist between casual liaisons and committed partnerships. Defined in the research as sexual or romantic interactions lasting at least six months without expectations of commitment or public acknowledgment, these relationships are often characterized by ambiguity.

The study involved interviews with 53 American women aged 35 to 55, who reported varied experiences in their situationships. While younger women tend to view these relationships negatively, perceiving them as unproductive in the pursuit of traditional goals like marriage and family, older women often saw them as beneficial, allowing them to engage in sexual and romantic experiences without the emotional risks associated with more serious partnerships.

The participants in the study came from diverse backgrounds, with a mix of races and economic statuses. The findings reveal that women who are economically secure may have different dating priorities than those who are less secure, sometimes leading to a state of celibacy among economically disadvantaged women.

Moreover, the research emphasizes that the term "situationship" is not entirely new; rather, it represents a recognition of diverse relationship forms that have existed for a long time. The study highlights the need for further exploration of women's sexual and romantic lives, particularly those outside conventional relationship structures.

Ultimately, the text underscores that while situationships may be preferred by some women for emotional and practical reasons, there remains a desire for more serious relationships when suitable partners are available. The research points to structural changes needed to support diverse family arrangements and the welfare of women and children in modern society.

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Here are five key points from the video about "situationships":

1. **Definition and Characteristics**: Situationships are described as a form of relationship that falls between casual liaisons and committed partnerships. They generally last at least six months without expectations for commitment or public acknowledgment, resulting in a relationship that exists in an undefined space.

2. **Demographics and Perspectives**: The study conducted in-depth interviews with 53 American women aged 35 to 55, revealing diverse experiences and attitudes toward situationships. While younger women often view situationships negatively as a waste of time, older women perceive them pragmatically, valuing the benefits of companionship and intimacy while avoiding less desirable long-term commitments.

3. **Social and Economic Convideo**: The research indicated that economic security and race influenced women's involvement in situationships. Women facing economic precarity were more likely to be celibate, while those with more economic stability engaged in situationships to fulfill emotional and physical needs, viewing them as preferable to being single.

4. **Challenging Traditional Romance Narratives**: The women interviewed often rejected traditional romantic ideals, opting instead to pursue relationships on their own terms. They sought companionship without the pressure of conventional romantic expectations, emphasizing autonomy and the desire to protect their personal and familial interests.

5. **Implications for Future Research and Policy**: The findings suggest a need for better demographic research to capture the evolving landscape of relationships and sexuality. The authors argue that this may require structural changes in society and policy to support various family and relationship forms, particularly as societal norms around marriage and childbearing continue to shift.

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Here are some key quotes extracted from the video regarding the concept of "situationships" based on the convideo :

1. **Definition of Situationship**:
- "Situationship is a relationship form that sort of sits in between a kind of casual liaison and a committed relationship."
- "We define them as a sexual and or romantic liaison lasting at least six months, defined by a lack of expectation on one side or the other, that the relationship will lead to a commitment or be publicly acknowledged."

2. **Perception by Different Age Groups**:
- "Younger women are still hoping being in a situationship could in fact be experienced... as kind of a waste of time or as not leading to that."
- "For the women who were over 35 that we talked to, situationships were experienced somewhat differently... they could avoid some who are not viewed as particularly desirable as life partners."

3. **Study Methodology**:
- "We did quite lengthy in-depth interviews with 53 American women... and there was a lot of variation on both class and race."
- "We ended up writing this paper in part because after we collected the data, we just could not work out... whether they were dating, whether they were looking, whether they were in relationships, whether they were single."

4. **Challenges of Defining Relationships**:
- "We started hearing them talk about what they were doing as situationship."
- "Some of them said, ‘you know, this is sort of like a relationship, but not.’"

5. **Cultural and Economic Convideo**:
- "There’s more opportunity for women especially to live autonomous lives and be economically secure outside of marriage."
- "Women who were highly economically precarious were more likely to be celibate... struggling to access any form of love, sex, intimacy."

6. **Desire for Better Options**:
- "Everything else being equal, if they thought that they could find a man... would treat them well, was respectful... that they would have preferred that, but that was not on the table."
- "A situationship was much better than celibacy, but not as good potentially as marriage, but marriage was not on offer."

7. **Perceptions of Autonomy and Independence**:
- "They were just... over it a bit. They were like, ‘I can live on my own. I can be independent.’"
- "Some of the autonomy was about protecting their children from other men being involved in their lives."

8. **Emotional Boundaries**:
- "They were also engaging in a kind of a bounded investment emotionally as well."
- "It is... emotionally protective for some of them."

9. **Pushing Back Against Romantic Norms**:
- "These women were actually kind of pushing back on that... in ways that I think were probably more radical than they understood."
- "They were just living their best life and doing what they needed to do to protect themselves."

10. **Implications for Policy and Society**:
- "If governments are invested in maintaining fertility... they probably need to make a lot more serious structural changes."
- "It does suggest that given this kind of the range and the declining stigma associated with being single... that governments need to really probably move a lot more assertively towards supporting families."

These quotes encapsulate the primary themes and findings regarding the nature of situationships, the demographic focus of the study, and the broader implications for society.

X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:90000

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Situationship is a relationship form that sort of sits in

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between a kind of casual liaison

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and a committed relationship.

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In the paper, we define them as a sexual and

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or romantic liaison lasting at least six months, defined

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by a lack of expectation on one side

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or the other, that the relationship will lead

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to a commitment or be publicly acknowledged.

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In other words, it just sort

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of sits there in an undefined space.

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This particular project was based on interviews with women

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who are 35 to 55 years old,

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but a lot of like the, well, the little bit

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of existing scholarship

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and the large amount of social media

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attention has been to younger women.

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And a lot of the mass media type articles are like, how

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to find out if you're in a situationship

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so you can get out of it.

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Situation ships bad, bad, bad.

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And that is because if, if younger women are still hoping

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for marriage, families, kids, sort of the whole package

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being in a situation ship could in fact be experienced

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by some younger women as kind of a waste of time

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or as not leading to that.

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But for the women who were over 35 that we talked to,

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situation ships were experienced somewhat differently.

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Not always entirely positively,

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but much more so in the sense of being able to avoid some

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of the risks of partnering with men, especially men

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who are not, they did not view as particularly desirable

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as life partners and getting at least some of the benefits

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of being in, a sexual romantic relationship.

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So it, it allowed to get some

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of the good while avoiding a lot of the be.

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We did quite lengthy in-depth interviews with 53

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American women who were located at all, lived in all kinds

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of different places in the United States,

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mostly southeast Michigan,

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but some of them were located everywhere,

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and they were like slightly more than half African American

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and the rest were white

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and they were mixed in terms of their economic situation,

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their degree of kind of economic precarity.

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So there was a lot of variation on both class

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and race in the interviews were quite lengthy.

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We talked about their whole sexual romantic relationship,

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history, childhood, what they learned about,

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sex and romance, and then just kind

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of collected their whole narrative.

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And to be clear, also, we, we interviewed people

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who were not in an exclusive relationship.

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That is, they did not understand themselves

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as stably partnered

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or if they had one partner, they were looking for more.

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So we, we selected on people who were open to

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or interested in finding additional partners. So this

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Was not just a, you know, random sample of people

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who were married and the, like, these were people who were,

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who were in fact looking

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and we kind of, we ended up writing this paper in part

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because after we collected the data,

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we were just frankly baffled by what the women were doing.

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We just could not work out what

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initially just kind of whether they were dating,

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whether they were looking,

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whether they were in relationships,

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whether they were singled or single.

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Because, because their situations were well situation chip.

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And we didn't have the language for that

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until we started listening to the interviews.

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And it was actually the interviewees themselves that sort

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of gave us the language.

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We inductively through the interviews,

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started hearing them talk about

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what they were doing as situation chip.

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Not all of them, in fact, relatively few of them,

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but a lot of them were using terms like, you know,

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just like, well, it's sort of like a relationship, but not,

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or this is my, you know, some of them said, you know,

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sort of, just sort of side, side thing

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or they just, they struggled to define it,

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but some of them use the term situationship.

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I don't actually think it's quite as new

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as the term would suggest in the sense

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that I think people have been engaging in quite complicated

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and uncategorized types of like sexual

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and romantic liaisons for a long time.

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But I do think over the kind of larger span of kind

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of history and in the United States and in other, you know,

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and actually we've been hearing that this is true in the,

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this this is happening in the UK

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and other places around the world.

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I, I talked to a British journalist a a while back.

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It was like, wait, this is happening here.

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But I think that because a marriage is no longer compulsory

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in many societies

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and there's more opportunity for, women especially

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to live autonomous lives

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and be economically secure outside of marriage,

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there just is more space for things to kind of, that are,

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that are kind of not in a con in a conventional

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structure to, to emerge.

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But yes, this, the term has definitely become more prevalent

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in the media in the last, in the last few years,

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and not as much as we would have maybe expected actually.

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So there was both white

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and black women were engaging in ships,

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and both the women who were more economically secure

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and the ones who were more precarious women

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who were highly economically precarious,

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were slightly more likely than other women that we talked

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to, to be celibate, that is doing absolutely nothing at all.

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Like it seemed like there was a little, there was a sense

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of like having to be sort of, at least some degree

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of economic security was required to be able

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to get into the mix at all.

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And white women, and particularly on the younger end

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of the age continuum that we talked to, were more likely

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Slightly only slightly to be conventionally dating

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that is out on a kind of Bumble or OkCupid

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and going on sort of conventional dates.

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And women sort of who were older

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and black women were less likely to be doing that.

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And, and black women ever

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so slightly more than white women were in fact currently

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involved in situation Chip.

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But actually the differences weren't as pronounced

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as we might've thought they would.

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I think that the differences sort of emerge out of patterns

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of privilege and disadvantage in the sense that there's,

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I mean, we kind of started the project interested in sort

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of inequalities of like intersectional inequalities of love

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and romance, and this notion that class race, gender, age,

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sort of conventional sort of body views

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of attractiveness would mean

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that people would have more access to love sex intimacy,

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particularly in more conventional forms.

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And we did find that to be the case that,

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that there are definitely distinct patterns in terms of

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who has, who has access to the more socially valued

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or higher status ways of doing love, sex intimacy,

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and who has access to love sex intimacy at all.

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We found for the, the women who were sort of most

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economically disadvantaged that they were ended up celibate,

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they couldn't, they were struggling to access any form

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of love, sex, intimacy.

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Um, so yeah, so that was, and Ed,

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and also this form, the situation ships itself like a many

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of the, kind of the women would have said that

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everything else being equal, if they thought

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that they could find a man who was,

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a decent guy, would treat them well, was respectful, was

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employed, was kind of going to be able

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to pull his own weight

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and was genuinely available

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for a fully committed life partnership type of relationship

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that they would have preferred that,

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but that that was not on the table.

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So that they, so that the kind of options that were,

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that in other words, a situationship was much better than

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celibacy, but not as good potentially as marriage,

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but marriage was not on offer.

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We were only looking at, women who were open to sexual

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and romantic relationships with men.

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So the women who were queer identified were sort of bisexual

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or kind of questioning

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or kind of not fully identifying as lesbian.

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Like, I am not having any, anything to do with men.

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It would be really, really interesting for future research

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to engage more thoroughly across the kind of gender

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and sexual identity spectrum in terms of kind

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of virginity of relationship forms.

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What we would probably expect to see

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and what would be consistent with what we found is that, is

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that, is that willingness to be, expansive in, you know,

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one dimension around sexuality might be associated

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with being willing to be expansive on another, in the sense

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that the women who that we talked to who were some amount

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of non heterosexually identified were,

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were I think some somewhat more open to, you know, sort

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of more unconventional relationship forms.

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Yeah. But most of the women that we, we talked to

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actually perceive themselves as, as, as heterosexual

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and mean, we would, I mean, definitely tried in every aspect

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of the way we conducted the research to be kind

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of respectful of ev you know, everyone we talked to,

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to really listen and,

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and in fact the coming up with the situation, chip

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as a term itself was kind of out of our like,

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real conviction that we needed to just really hear

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and kind of reflect back to, you know, in our publication

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and our scholarship, what was, what they were at,

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what people's experiences actually were.

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And, and, particularly the,

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the black women who were interviewed.

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Uh, we matched the kind of interviewee

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and interviewers by race almost most of the times as one

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of the women on the team was an African American woman.

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And what they would often say to her is,

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nobody has asked us, nobody cares.

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Everybody just wants to see, black women's sexuality

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as a problem, but,

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but have not been asking, about pleasure, desire,

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intimacy, like what's, you know, what's working.

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And they were very appreciative of being asked to talk about

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what was, what was like affirmatively like working

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or what their experiences actually were.

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And so, so we did very much try in kind

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of in the representation in the, the final, paper

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to do the best we could to sort of give voice

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to the experiences of the individuals that we talk to.

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We often, the kind of risks to women

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of bad relationships are sometimes not kind

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of fully acknowledged.

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I mean, we know about the really bad consequences of sort

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of intimate partner violence and,

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and the like, which is quite common, but,

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but the ways that women can get, swept into like lots

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of caretaking work that they, that they might not want

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to be doing or that they, they, you know, they kind

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of losing themselves, the kind of merged identities

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and the women that these were, again, women, 35

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to 55 years old,

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and Mo many of them had been

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around the block a time or two.

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They had had previous relationships with men.

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They, some of them had been married, many

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of them had children, and they were a little bit kind

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of just over it a bit.

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They were just, they were like, I can live on my own.

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I can be independent if they had kids.

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They didn't necessarily want to involve men who were kind

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of, you know, would be in a stepparent role deeply

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into their children's lives.

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So some of, some of the autonomy was about,

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protecting their children from,

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other men being involved in their lives

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and staying, having a single identity meant

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that when they were out in public, if they, they,

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if they did happen to meet Mr. Wright, they they could be,

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they could kick the, you know, the, the guy

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that they were currently seeing to the curb

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and potentially get, get involved in a more,

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a committed relationship with someone

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who might be a better bet.

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So it preserved, it kept options open as well.

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In terms of the emotional piece of it,

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it is in some ways kind of emotionally protective as well

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for some of them in that there's a lot of emotional,

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psychological kind of risk when one is like all in

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and deeply, deeply in love with someone when is really

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like throwing over just a lot of kind of trust

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and just kind of a just, you know,

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investing a lot emotionally in that person.

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And so they were also engaging in a kind of a bounded,

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some of them sort of bounded investment emotionally as well.

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So, you know, seeking, comfort, sex,

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friendship, companionship.

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But some of them were just a little bit leery about going

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like, buying into the whole romantic kind of like,

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you know, happily ever after.

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Love is all, like love will conquer all they were.

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That's, and that having women kind of push back on romance,

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I mean, we're just, we're fed these kind of romantic scripts

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and all of these, you know, there's romance novels

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and romantic comedies

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and all of this with this notion that sort

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of romance is like the thing to put at the center of life

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and that will conquer everything.

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These women were actually kind of pushing back on that.

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They were, they were sort of challenging that in kind

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of an interesting way, in ways

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that I think were pr probably more radical than they,

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than they understood,

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as they did not actually understand themselves as, as kind

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of as particularly, you know, kind of radical

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or transgressive folks.

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They were just like living their best life

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and doing what they needed to do to protect themselves.

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I mean, I think one, one thing that you know,

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I would argue is that, sort of access

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to economic security ability to support children,

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shouldn't be contingent upon, marital status

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or relationship form that the children's welfare

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and just general, that the kind of that welfare benefits

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or kind of the basic security should not flow through having

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to have organize one's family structure in any

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particular way.

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But I mean, this is connected to this whole larger set of,

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issues that is flowing through I think discussions in,

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in the US and, and around the globe.

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I mean, certainly and, Japan, Korea, China,

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other places about sort of fertility decline

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and the, the sort of the movement away from kind

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of conventional family structures.

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And I think kind of what this, how this paper connects to

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that is that if governments are invested in

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maintaining fertility, they,

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and they want to do so in a way that is supportive of women

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and kind of women's autonomy, they probably need

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to make a lot more serious structural changes than they are

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have currently been known that they are willing to do.

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And even that may not work well, kind of actually everything

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that has been written

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and comes out suggests that it's extremely,

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extremely difficult to move people, to kind

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of have children or move to kind

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of conventional family forms if

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that's not what they want to do.

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But it does suggest that that given this kind of the range

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of alternatives that are available now

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and the declining stigma associated with being single

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or having no children

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or having other relationship forms, it does mean

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that governments that are invested in fertility need to need

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to really probably move a lot more assertively towards

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supporting families, sort of, you know,

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family leave policies making, just making it easier

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for people to have children if they want them.

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I think that we actually know surprisingly little about

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what, women in midlife are doing sexually,

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and actually in some ways what,

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what people are doing sexually,

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because a lot of sort of demo demographic research

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uses categories related to relationships

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and sexuality that are outdated

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and don't actually allow people in their responses to, to,

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to even offer up what they're up to.

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And so, so one of the values of this kind of

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grounded inductive research here is to collect information

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that then can feed back into survey design

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and design better questions that then could,

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allow demographers to get better, sort

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of representative, more representative data on

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what people are actually doing.

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And that's, I mean, a limitation of this kind of research is

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that it cannot be generalized.

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I do wanna make sure that the audience is aware

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that this was a small, sample of people that we kind

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of happen to be able to recruit into this project.

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So we, we can't speak from this to what the prevalence

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of this practice is in the larger population, kind

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of in the US or, you know, certainly nowhere else.

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But what we can add is insight into what questions,

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individuals who are doing kind

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of representative survey research would, would need to ask

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to kind of figure out what people, what people were doing.

Understanding Situationships: Perspectives of Women Aged 35-55

00:00:00 - Situationship is a relationship form that sort of sits in between a kind of casual liaison and a committed relationship. In the paper, we define them as a sexual and or romantic liaison lasting at least six months, defined by a lack of expectation on one side or the other, that the relationship will lead to a commitment or be publicly acknowledged. In other words, it just sort of sits there in an undefined space.

00:00:35 - who are 35 to 55 years old, but a lot of like the, well, the little bit of existing scholarship and the large amount of social media attention has been to younger women. And a lot of the mass media type articles are like, how to find out if you're in a situationship so you can get out of it. Situation ships bad, bad, bad. And that is because if, if younger women are still hoping

00:01:10 - being in a situation ship could in fact be experienced by some younger women as kind of a waste of time or as not leading to that. But for the women who were over 35 that we talked to, situation ships were experienced somewhat differently. Not always entirely positively, but much more so in the sense of being able to avoid some

Exploring Women's Perspectives on Situationships

00:01:40 - who are not, they did not view as particularly desirable as life partners and getting at least some of the benefits of being in, a sexual romantic relationship. So it, it allowed to get some of the good while avoiding a lot of the be. We did quite lengthy in-depth interviews with 53 American women who were located at all, lived in all kinds of different places in the United States,

00:02:08 - but some of them were located everywhere, and they were like slightly more than half African American and the rest were white and they were mixed in terms of their economic situation, their degree of kind of economic precarity. So there was a lot of variation on both class and race in the interviews were quite lengthy. We talked about their whole sexual romantic relationship, history, childhood, what they learned about, sex and romance, and then just kind

00:02:41 - And to be clear, also, we, we interviewed people who were not in an exclusive relationship. That is, they did not understand themselves as stably partnered or if they had one partner, they were looking for more. So we, we selected on people who were open to or interested in finding additional partners. So this Was not just a, you know, random sample of people who were married and the, like, these were people who were, who were in fact looking and we kind of, we ended up writing this paper in part because after we collected the data,

Defining Situationships: A New Relationship Language

00:03:16 - We just could not work out what initially just kind of whether they were dating, whether they were looking, whether they were in relationships, whether they were singled or single. Because, because their situations were well situation chip. And we didn't have the language for that until we started listening to the interviews. And it was actually the interviewees themselves that sort of gave us the language.

00:03:45 - started hearing them talk about what they were doing as situation chip. Not all of them, in fact, relatively few of them, but a lot of them were using terms like, you know, just like, well, it's sort of like a relationship, but not, or this is my, you know, some of them said, you know, sort of, just sort of side, side thing or they just, they struggled to define it, but some of them use the term situationship.

00:04:18 - as the term would suggest in the sense that I think people have been engaging in quite complicated and uncategorized types of like sexual and romantic liaisons for a long time. But I do think over the kind of larger span of kind of history and in the United States and in other, you know, and actually we've been hearing that this is true in the, this this is happening in the UK and other places around the world. I, I talked to a British journalist a a while back. It was like, wait, this is happening here.

Evolving Relationship Dynamics: Women's Autonomy and Situationships

00:04:50 - in many societies and there's more opportunity for, women especially to live autonomous lives and be economically secure outside of marriage, there just is more space for things to kind of, that are, that are kind of not in a con in a conventional structure to, to emerge. But yes, this, the term has definitely become more prevalent in the media in the last, in the last few years,

00:05:21 - So there was both white and black women were engaging in ships, and both the women who were more economically secure and the ones who were more precarious women who were highly economically precarious, were slightly more likely than other women that we talked to, to be celibate, that is doing absolutely nothing at all. Like it seemed like there was a little, there was a sense of like having to be sort of, at least some degree of economic security was required to be able

00:05:50 - And white women, and particularly on the younger end of the age continuum that we talked to, were more likely Slightly only slightly to be conventionally dating that is out on a kind of Bumble or OkCupid and going on sort of conventional dates. And women sort of who were older and black women were less likely to be doing that. And, and black women ever so slightly more than white women were in fact currently involved in situation Chip.

Intersectional Inequalities in Love and Intimacy

00:06:22 - as we might've thought they would. I think that the differences sort of emerge out of patterns of privilege and disadvantage in the sense that there's, I mean, we kind of started the project interested in sort of inequalities of like intersectional inequalities of love and romance, and this notion that class race, gender, age, sort of conventional sort of body views of attractiveness would mean that people would have more access to love sex intimacy,

00:06:54 - And we did find that to be the case that, that there are definitely distinct patterns in terms of who has, who has access to the more socially valued or higher status ways of doing love, sex intimacy, and who has access to love sex intimacy at all. We found for the, the women who were sort of most economically disadvantaged that they were ended up celibate, they couldn't, they were struggling to access any form of love, sex, intimacy.

00:07:26 - and also this form, the situation ships itself like a many of the, kind of the women would have said that everything else being equal, if they thought that they could find a man who was, a decent guy, would treat them well, was respectful, was employed, was kind of going to be able to pull his own weight and was genuinely available

Navigating Relationship Preferences: Situationships vs. Marriage

00:07:58 - that they would have preferred that, but that that was not on the table. So that they, so that the kind of options that were, that in other words, a situationship was much better than celibacy, but not as good potentially as marriage, but marriage was not on offer. We were only looking at, women who were open to sexual and romantic relationships with men. So the women who were queer identified were sort of bisexual

00:08:31 - or kind of not fully identifying as lesbian. Like, I am not having any, anything to do with men. It would be really, really interesting for future research to engage more thoroughly across the kind of gender and sexual identity spectrum in terms of kind of virginity of relationship forms. What we would probably expect to see and what would be consistent with what we found is that, is that, is that willingness to be, expansive in, you know,

00:09:04 - with being willing to be expansive on another, in the sense that the women who that we talked to who were some amount of non heterosexually identified were, were I think some somewhat more open to, you know, sort of more unconventional relationship forms. Yeah. But most of the women that we, we talked to actually perceive themselves as, as, as heterosexual and mean, we would, I mean, definitely tried in every aspect

Listening to Untold Narratives: Black Women's Experiences in Situationships

00:09:35 - of respectful of ev you know, everyone we talked to, to really listen and, and in fact the coming up with the situation, chip as a term itself was kind of out of our like, real conviction that we needed to just really hear and kind of reflect back to, you know, in our publication and our scholarship, what was, what they were at, what people's experiences actually were. And, and, particularly the, the black women who were interviewed.

00:10:05 - and interviewers by race almost most of the times as one of the women on the team was an African American woman. And what they would often say to her is, nobody has asked us, nobody cares. Everybody just wants to see, black women's sexuality as a problem, but, but have not been asking, about pleasure, desire, intimacy, like what's, you know, what's working. And they were very appreciative of being asked to talk about

00:10:36 - or what their experiences actually were. And so, so we did very much try in kind of in the representation in the, the final, paper to do the best we could to sort of give voice to the experiences of the individuals that we talk to. We often, the kind of risks to women of bad relationships are sometimes not kind of fully acknowledged. I mean, we know about the really bad consequences of sort

Empowerment and Independence in Modern Relationships

00:11:05 - and the like, which is quite common, but, but the ways that women can get, swept into like lots of caretaking work that they, that they might not want to be doing or that they, they, you know, they kind of losing themselves, the kind of merged identities and the women that these were, again, women, 35 to 55 years old, and Mo many of them had been around the block a time or two. They had had previous relationships with men.

00:11:37 - of them had children, and they were a little bit kind of just over it a bit. They were just, they were like, I can live on my own. I can be independent if they had kids. They didn't necessarily want to involve men who were kind of, you know, would be in a stepparent role deeply into their children's lives. So some of, some of the autonomy was about, protecting their children from, other men being involved in their lives and staying, having a single identity meant

00:12:08 - if they did happen to meet Mr. Wright, they they could be, they could kick the, you know, the, the guy that they were currently seeing to the curb and potentially get, get involved in a more, a committed relationship with someone who might be a better bet. So it preserved, it kept options open as well. In terms of the emotional piece of it, it is in some ways kind of emotionally protective as well for some of them in that there's a lot of emotional,

Challenging Romantic Norms: Women's Perspectives on Love and Autonomy

00:12:42 - and deeply, deeply in love with someone when is really like throwing over just a lot of kind of trust and just kind of a just, you know, investing a lot emotionally in that person. And so they were also engaging in a kind of a bounded, some of them sort of bounded investment emotionally as well. So, you know, seeking, comfort, sex, friendship, companionship.

00:13:14 - like, buying into the whole romantic kind of like, you know, happily ever after. Love is all, like love will conquer all they were. That's, and that having women kind of push back on romance, I mean, we're just, we're fed these kind of romantic scripts and all of these, you know, there's romance novels and romantic comedies and all of this with this notion that sort of romance is like the thing to put at the center of life

00:13:42 - These women were actually kind of pushing back on that. They were, they were sort of challenging that in kind of an interesting way, in ways that I think were pr probably more radical than they, than they understood, as they did not actually understand themselves as, as kind of as particularly, you know, kind of radical or transgressive folks. They were just like living their best life and doing what they needed to do to protect themselves. I mean, I think one, one thing that you know,

Reevaluating Family Structures and Economic Security

00:14:15 - to economic security ability to support children, shouldn't be contingent upon, marital status or relationship form that the children's welfare and just general, that the kind of that welfare benefits or kind of the basic security should not flow through having to have organize one's family structure in any particular way. But I mean, this is connected to this whole larger set of,

00:14:47 - in the US and, and around the globe. I mean, certainly and, Japan, Korea, China, other places about sort of fertility decline and the, the sort of the movement away from kind of conventional family structures. And I think kind of what this, how this paper connects to that is that if governments are invested in maintaining fertility, they,

00:15:18 - and kind of women's autonomy, they probably need to make a lot more serious structural changes than they are have currently been known that they are willing to do. And even that may not work well, kind of actually everything that has been written and comes out suggests that it's extremely, extremely difficult to move people, to kind of have children or move to kind of conventional family forms if that's not what they want to do. But it does suggest that that given this kind of the range

Reevaluating Family Structures and Sexuality Research

00:15:49 - and the declining stigma associated with being single or having no children or having other relationship forms, it does mean that governments that are invested in fertility need to need to really probably move a lot more assertively towards supporting families, sort of, you know, family leave policies making, just making it easier for people to have children if they want them. I think that we actually know surprisingly little about

00:16:21 - and actually in some ways what, what people are doing sexually, because a lot of sort of demo demographic research uses categories related to relationships and sexuality that are outdated and don't actually allow people in their responses to, to, to even offer up what they're up to. And so, so one of the values of this kind of grounded inductive research here is to collect information

00:16:55 - and design better questions that then could, allow demographers to get better, sort of representative, more representative data on what people are actually doing. And that's, I mean, a limitation of this kind of research is that it cannot be generalized. I do wanna make sure that the audience is aware that this was a small, sample of people that we kind of happen to be able to recruit into this project. So we, we can't speak from this to what the prevalence

Insights for Improving Survey Research on Relationships

00:17:41 - of in the US or, you know, certainly nowhere else. But what we can add is insight into what questions, individuals who are doing kind of representative survey research would, would need to ask to kind of figure out what people, what people were doing.

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