Understandings of family among wives and husbands: reconciling emotional closeness and cultural expectations

ABSTRACT

Family research has highlighted an increasing fluidity in understandings of family with many recent studies focusing on personal relationships and on the relational character of family phenomena in diversifying familial contexts. In this study, we explore how personal understandings of family are constructed by balancing individual preferences and general rules of kinship. This article focuses on who is considered a family member by wives and husbands in opposite-sex couples after the first years of (the first) marriage. The data consist of qualitative interviews with 32 individuals, women and men from 16 couples, living in Southern Finland. Information on family conceptions was collected using the Family Network Method questionnaire completed at the end of interviews. Our results show that despite the conventional family structure within which interviewees live – that is, a married opposite-sex couple, most often with children – understandings of family vary greatly between spouses. The family form does not determine interviewees’ views on who constitutes family. Rather, family understandings draw from balancing between perceived emotional closeness, genealogical proximity and cultural expectations, producing different and sometimes conflicting tendencies of family belonging delineated in our analysis.

KEYWORDS:

• Family understandings
• couples
• nuclear family
• emotional closeness
• family relations
• kinship relations

Acknowledgements

We thank the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable questions and comments that helped us to revise the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Aino Luotonen is a researcher at the University of Helsinki. Her PhD study in sociology concerns family and kinship ties, friendship and relational networks of couples and families.

Anna-Maija Castrén works as a professor of sociology at the University of Eastern Finland. She has studied the evolvement of relationship configurations in a life-historical perspective, post-separation family and kin relationships and weddings.

Notes

1 At the time of the interviews, only couples consisting of two individuals representing the (legally) opposite sex were allowed to marry in Finland. According to the interview discussion, interviewees consisted of men and women whose gender identity matched their biological sex.

2 The interviews took place between March 2014 and June 2015.

3 One research participant had been internationally adopted as an infant.

4 Three couples did not return the questionnaire and the closeness values can thus be analysed for only 13 couples. However, we did not exclude these three couples from our analysis, since the main data, the FNM listings, are available as well as all the information collected during interviews.

5 While all our interviewees were married, not all of their siblings and parents were married. Instead, some cohabited or were in living apart together (LAT) relationships. Within the ‘in-law’ category, we do not differentiate between these types of partnerships.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Kone Foundation (085116, 087073) and by the University of Helsinki (490070).