narratives of three generations of urban middle-class - eTheses ...

satisfaction giving meaning to life. It becomes one’s secular religion (Beck and Beck-
Gernsheim, 1995: 168). However, as love becomes more important than ever before at
the same time it becomes more elusive. Although love is a product of individualization it
is in a way a move against it (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995: 182). As much as it lays
stress on being different, being one’s own self, it promises togetherness to all those
lone individuals (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995: 196).
A pessimistic interpretation of this ‘transformation of intimacy’ is ‘liquid love’ (Bauman,
2003) in ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman, 2000), of men and women with weak bonds,
specifically with none of the strong durable bonds that would allow the possibility of a
stable self-definition and self-assertion that Giddens, as I will show, has espoused.
Bauman (2000) expresses the contradictory nature of this institutionalized individualism
as conflicting desires to tighten the bonds yet keep them loose, engendering what he
conceptualizes as ‘Liquid Love’ in a ‘Liquid Modernity’.
An optimistic interpretation of the ‘transformation of intimacy’ is a ‘democratized
intimacy’ based on ‘pure relationship’ which despite making relationships more fragile,
give rise to a more gender equal ‘confluent love’ or shared sense of self disclosure and
‘plastic sexuality’ or a more responsive or creative form of sexuality, that is mutually
pleasurable (Giddens, 1992). “A pure relationship is one in which external criteria have
become dissolved: the relationship exists solely for whatever rewards that relationship
can deliver” (Giddens, 1991: 6). This transformation of intimacy is intertwined with the
reflexive ‘narrative of self’ (Giddens, 1992: 75). It is the ‘freeing’ of agency from
structure that allows for increasing reflexivity with regard to the norms, rules,
expectations and forms of authority associated with the ‘social’ life of modernity (Adkins,
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