ABSTRACT
The process and timing of leaving home in Europe has been gaining academic attention the past decades. This is so because this demographic and transitional event provides evidence about the cultural and structural heterogeneity in Europe. Types and timing of conjugality and differences about housing markets, together with cultural contexts and values, are usually given as conjoint causes for the mentioned heterogeneity. But the effects of love-related events in the process and timing of leaving home do not begin or end at conjugal unions. Ruptures, heartbreaks, disputes and conjugal orientations have strong consequences in the trajectories towards adulthood. These effects can only be grasped through qualitative research, capable of giving love and affection the analytical protagonist role they deserve. Only accumulation of comparison-friendly qualitative knowledge on romantic trajectories can allow the study of the heterogeneity of conjugal trajectories. In this research, 52 Portuguese young adults were inquired by biographical interviews and life calendars. Holistic-form analysis provided evidence that the love-related events are significant for changes in the residential trajectories. Five cases were chosen to illustrate the three clusters identified: ‘long relationships and delayed departures’, ‘heartbreaks and breakups, speeding up residential autonomy’ and ‘out of the closet, into a new home’.
Introduction
In the two past decades, the process and timing of leaving home in Europe has been attracting increasing academic attention in both youth studies and life-course research. This is because the demographic and transitional event of leaving the parental home is an indicator of social change in the processes of transition to adulthood (Aassve et al. 2002), and an analytical ‘blessing’ that is exceptionally good at indicating structural, cultural and individual conjoint effects and heterogeneities across Europe (Billari 2004). So although literature suggests the process of leaving home is often the cause or result of work or family transitions, school-to-work transitions and family formation processes still occupy a hegemonic place in studies on youth and transitions to adulthood. However, a holistic understanding of transitions to adulthood that takes the intertwined nature of every sphere of life into account can only gain from the perspective offered by studying the process of leaving home, as it interacts with the classic transitional spheres (Nico 2014).
The different types and timings of the beginning of conjugality statuses, the extraordinary disparities between housing markets,1 and also cultural contexts and values, are usually given as interrelated causes of the heterogeneity of the different European countries in terms of the age at and process by which people leave home. The countries with homeownership-oriented housing markets that offer few opportunities or youth policies for transitional, rented, shared, and/or affordable living arrangements are predominantly found in Southern Europe. Together with the fact that more recent generations of young people do not seem to acquire the economic conditions needed to leave home alone without a romantic partner, this has contributed to an increase in the age at which people have been leaving home in these countries (in comparison with Nordic or Scandinavian ones, for instance). Portugal – the context of the present case study – is a clear example of this (Nico and Caetano 2015). Compared to other countries, the association of residential semi-autonomy2 to enrolment in higher education is very limited and does not have a relevant effect on the age of leaving home. Nonetheless, it has been increasing (Ramos 2015), and qualitative research shows that educational paths and achievements also have an important impact on the process – much more than the timing – of leaving home. This topic is developed further below.
The tendency to leave home through conjugality rather than individually in southern countries is, however, over-interpreted under the influence of individual, religious and/or cultural values (Nico 2014, 2015a). Because comparative research projects on these matters are hegemonically quantitative, the extent to which these alleged social values and orientations are actually reflected in young people's trajectories remains a ‘black box’ (Holdsworth et al.2002). As the demographic events they are, marriage or entry into a partnership do not provide sufficient information for conclusive analysis of the effect of young people's romantic and cultural orientations. This is because the effect of love-related events on the process and timing of leaving home does not begin with conjugal unions. The consequences that romantic breakups, heartbreaks and disputes have for trajectories towards adulthood are substantial, but almost impossible to research in quantitative terms. This is especially true of leaving-home processes, particularly in countries like Portugal, where young people apparently still mainly rely on romantic paths to leave their parental home (Nico 2011).
This is an important methodological implication of this article. The effects of romantic turning points can only be grasped through qualitative research, capable of giving love and affection the analytical protagonist role they deserve in the overall understanding of transitions to adulthood. They should be grasped, however, through longitudinal lenses, that take temporality and causality issues seriously and thoroughly. This chronological concern to biographical methods is a step towards the necessary comparability between qualitative research, namely about such unstandardised and/or intimate events. Thus, recognition and accumulation of comparison-friendly qualitative knowledge on romantic trajectories is necessary for the study of the heterogeneity across territories and transformation across time of conjugal trajectories and orientations. This is true for many other qualitative research and sociological topics: the introduction, in qualitative inquiry mechanisms, of comparability instruments (such as the life calendar).
The present paper presents evidence from research in which 52 young Portuguese adults were surveyed using biographical interviews and life calendars – evidence that contributes to a better understanding of the so-called ‘black box’ (Nico 2011). Holistic-form analysis of these 52 cases confirmed that romantic careers and events had a relevant impact on young people's residential trajectories. Identification of all the romantic turning point events in the respondents’ trajectories revealed three types of relationship between ‘Love event & Leaving home’. Five individual cases were chosen to illustrate these ideal types, and other cases were used as brief complementary examples. The three types found are ‘long relationships & delayed departures’, ‘heartbreaks and breakups & the speeding-up of residential autonomy’, and ‘out of the closet & into a new home’. These types are used to structure the presentation of the results. This presentation format was chosen in order to avoid the failure ‘of much qualitative work in the postmodern or narrative modes’, which makes the researcher's ‘interactive research process the centre of study in itself’ and causes him/her to ‘forget what can be learnt from the stories which are told’ (Thompson 2004: 254).3 Respecting the fact that turning points are ‘processes’ (Abbott 2001) or ‘stories’ (Becker 1994), individual cases are presented and analysed simultaneously, rather than detaching sentences from their narrative and logical sequence – a format that has already been used in several publications (such as Lahire 2004 [2002]; Thomson 2009; Henderson et al. 2009 [2007], among many others). This analysis and type of presentation hopefully help reinforce the need to see leaving home as a process and not an ‘outcome’.
Falling in and out of love and contemporary processes of leaving home
Leaving home has quite recently acquired the status of an autonomous indicator of adulthood. In the mid-twentieth century no generational unit would have attributed that important and autonomous a status to ‘living independently’, unless it was somehow related to other markers of adulthood (Hareven and Adams 2004: 363). Leaving home was solely the means and symbol of a successful transition into a different, socially recognised, socio-demographic sphere of life (such as marriage, parenthood or the labour market) (Blatterer 2009 [2007]). This occurred within a specific socio-economic and historical context that provided the conditions needed for the transitions to be concentrated in time, with great interdependency and co-occurrence. Some authors call this period a ‘historical anomaly’, for having exceptionally rapid transitions to adulthood (Fussel and Furstenberg 2005: 59; Furlong and Cartmel 2007 [1997]: 56; Mitchell 2007 [2006]: 8). However, since the 1980's and 1990's residential autonomy has become a marker of adulthood that is valid in itself (as it was at the beginning of the century, for different reasons). Nowadays, even when leaving home does not represent the means to accomplish any other transitional event, it is an end in itself, and represents an important transition to adulthood (Goldscheider and Goldscheider 1999: 34). In this sense, the increased importance of residential autonomy in comparison to other transitional markers, such as leaving school, entering the labour market, initiating a conjugal relation or having a child (Jones 1995: 1), has been stressed since the 1990's. Its analysis also provides comparative value added, in the sense that at a time of ‘overall social and economic convergence in European countries, it is hard to find social indicators with such striking differences among EU countries as those related to leaving home’ (Aassve et al. 2002: 259).
Leaving home is one of the events that contribute to the ‘demographically dense’ (Rindfuss 1991) period within the transition to adulthood; but this period is also particularly dense and rich in turning points that are capable of converting ‘normal’ into ‘choice’ biographies and vice versa, of re-directing a person's life in unsuspected or unplanned directions, or of having discrete, accumulated or immediate effects throughout his/her life course. These turning points are an excellent example of the very essence of life course theory and should not be neglected in research that intends to capture life in its movement across time. Some research projects have been trying to establish the sociological importance of these moments, especially in the early adulthood period (Thomson et al. 2002; Thomson 2009, Henderson et al. 2009 [2007]), but many investigators have encountered obstacles, particularly in identifying, selecting, collecting and comparing them. Part of the problem with the scientific validity of these events has to do with the fact that they are located between two opposite epistemological postures. Where the quantitative and somewhat positivist causality paradigm is concerned, some authors argue that the study of individual turning points constitutes ‘undoable science’ (Lieberson 1985), because it is impossible to determine the causal effect of such events with precision. Others, concerned with a comprehensive understanding of life, argue that despite the impossibility of measuring the effects of these events on a person's life, ‘we need a quite different kind of research and theory than we are accustomed to’ (Becker 1994), one that is capable of tackling the stories, history and processes behind individual trajectories – in the present case, residential ones.
Turning point events, which are complex combinations of personal and situational attributes, provide new avenues of research (Shanahan and Porfeli 2007: 107–8) with regard to residential trajectories. They are instruments through which individuals understand their life trajectory (Shanahan and Porfeli 2007: 117), and should therefore be attributed the status of a legitimate empirical object in the social sciences. It is, however, still necessary to carefully define and circumscribe just what is meant by ‘turning points’. Turning points are defined less by the improbable (as chance events are) or negative (as critical points are) nature of the event-as-cause, and more by the effect – voluntary or not – they have on the redirection of the life course. This consequently implies the subjective and individual evaluation of the mere existence of that effect. Turning points are thus defined by the restructuring effect – voluntary or otherwise – they have on the course of individual lives. The mere existence of a turning point implies its identification by the individual, for they are ‘inherently narrative events’ (Abbott 2001: 251) and must be identified retrospectively (George 2009: 169). For one reason or the other, these are moments that redefine the future and create a rupture with the past (George 2009: 169).
The turning points considered in the present research were the romantic ones. This choice took account of the results of a larger, quantitative research project on leaving-home processes in Europe, which confirmed that conjugality was one of the most important predictors of the timing of leaving home on one hand, and the importance of love-related events in the redirection of housing projects and autonomy of the Portuguese case study on the other (Nico 2011).
Methods and data
In order to comply with the proposed definition of turning points, the methodological design employed an important set of criteria, not only with regard to data collection, but also to the selection and theoretical clustering of the turning points and the way in which data are analysed and presented.
The data collection method was designed to suit the concept of ‘turning point’, as well as to avoid the danger of the ‘biographical illusion’ highlighted by Bourdieu (1997 [1993]). To that end data were collected (and constructed) by a combination of biographical interviews and life calendars. This mixed technique was applied to 52 young adults with different social backgrounds, residential situations, gender and educational status. A life grid was filled out in order to both structure the interview and enhance conversation and biographical accounts (Nico and Van der Vaart 2012; Nico 2015b).
These individuals were selected and contacted using the snowball strategy. Each one was a complete stranger to the researcher and was indicated by a shared friend or co-worker. The fact that both the interviewer and the interviewee, who were strangers at the time of the interview, had a shared acquaintance immediately produced an implicit intermediated trust. This made the researcher a ‘particular kind of confidant, the kind that disappears after the interview’, to whom secrets can more easily be told, and the ‘receptor of words to which not even those the closest to us have access to’ (Lahire 2004 [2002]: 33). The interview became a ‘joint construction’ (Clausen 1998), in which the known ‘confessional effect’ (Brückner and Mayer 1998: 152) provided rich, detailed and profoundly reflexive pieces of information. This was decisive for the identification of the turning points in the interviewees’ lives and the explanation of their effects.
This method proved suited to collecting the complexity and detail of the story the respondents told when given the opportunity to enunciate and simultaneously elaborate on all the episodes that influenced their life courses. Because only the detail testifies to the importance of the event (Becker 1994: 186), this level of information was fundamental to the observation and identification of turning points as processes (Abbott 2001) or stories (Becker 1994: 188). Alongside the narratives (biographical interviews recorded and subjected to content analysis), it was also important to collect chronologically organised data – a goal that was achieved through completing a life calendar, which provides the means to more precisely analyse the interdependency and sequence of all the events (demographic or not, important or irrelevant, in the narrative account of the respondent's life course).
The selection of the data relevant to this analysis what done thought various steps. The first step was the identification of turning points across the life course of each individual. This has primarily to be done by the interviewee him/herself, due to the very nature of these events. They are ‘inherently narrative events’ (Abbott 2001: 251) that can only be self-identified retrospectively, (George 2009: 169). The process went through the following steps:
The researcher identified and filtered the turning points with some effect on the residential career (N = 39 in 27 trajectories).
These turning points were free-coded according to intimate and life spheres, and those related to romantic and love experiences (17 out of the 39) were filtered for the present article. The other clusters of turning points identified were ‘death, grief and illness’ and ‘agency and reflexivity’ – referring to moments of reflection or re-interpretation of the past (McLeod and Almazan 2002: 396).
The 17 romantic turning points identified were coded according to:
Their romantic nature. The categories that emerged from the material were: ‘Long relationships’, ‘heartbreaks and breakups’, and ‘out of the closet’.
Their residential effect. Here the categories that emerged from the material were: ‘delayed departures’, ‘speeded-up departures’, and ‘into a new home’.
The final typology found – which is in principle mutually exclusive, but leaving home is a process, so different types may apply to the same person at different life moments – links the two preliminary types of turning point: ‘Long relationships, delayed departures’, ‘Heartbreaks and breakups, speeding up residential autonomy’, and ‘Out of the closet, into a new home’.
Love-related events and leaving-home processes
Romantic love is a force for individual change (Person quoted by Thorsell 2002: 131) and creates social relations (Torres 1987, 2002). This is true because ‘affection is a form of creation par excellence of social life, in both a metaphorical and a real sense’. The ‘theoretical importance of love’ is therefore assumed here – that is, love is analysed as an element of social action and consequently of social structure (Goode 1959: 38). In the present article we consider both the positive and negative (relationship breakups, heartbreaks, etc.) sides of love to be a relevant ‘kind of driving force for action which, within the context of the values of contemporary societies, is powerful enough to create new social relations’ (Torres 2004: 18). ‘Sociology must not allow positivist myopia to deny’ emotions and feelings the ‘status of scientific object’ (Lopes 2002: 59).
The importance of the relationship between the family formation process and the timing of leaving home in Europe has been widely addressed in the literature. It has mainly been analysed using quantitative data, and the findings have helped explain most of the heterogeneity in the timing of living home in Europe, since conjugal destinations are associated with leaving home at higher ages, and therefore with southern European countries and/or less recent generations (Nico 2011). However, an approach of this type, based solely on quantitative data and extensive methodology, is not capable of capturing the intentionality and the improvisations involved in these moments of synchronisation and de-synchronisation of romantic trajectories and leaving-home processes.
The importance of love-related career and performance during the transition to adulthood comes in two shapes. On one hand, learning how to begin, maintain and end romantic relationships is undoubtedly one of the most important skills in the transition to adulthood from the personal development point of view (Snyder 2006: 161 quoted by Reifman 2011: 20; Regalia et al. 2011: 150–1). On the other, because there is a great interdependence between the various careers and spheres of life, the fact that love has that modifying power (Manning et al. 2011: 317) means it interferes with transitions to adulthood in a holistic manner.
However, neither is the interdependency of spheres of life the same across an individual life course, nor is this relationship immune to social stratification by sex, social background, or especially education. More highly educated young adults are overrepresented in the group of individuals who left home without a romantic partner, renting rather than buying an apartment and recording a much higher number of romantic relationships and longer periods with no relationships. These individuals tend to leave home alone either as a rebound from a breakup (more women), or as a consequence of entering the labour market (more men). They present less predictable life sequences, but the timing of leaving home is more standardised and earlier. On the other hand, young people with lower educational levels are overrepresented in the group of individuals who left the family home to live in a conjugal relationship, buying more than renting, recording a more normative life sequence and romantic relationship patterns, but presenting a much less standardised and much later timing in terms of leaving home. As mentioned above, the romantic turning points with effects on residential careers were clustered in three groups. One was ‘Long relationships, delayed departures’, where trajectories are characterised by a strong interdependency between the timing and duration of the process of leaving home and the circumstances of the relationship maintained while co-residing with parents. The second was ‘Heartbreaks and breakups, speeding up residential autonomy’. This group, where women are overrepresented, is characterised by processes of leaving home involving rebounds from broken relationships and heartbreaks. Breakups have a major effect on a shift in or reconversion of life plans that include residential autonomy. The third group comprises young people whose residential autonomy directly had to do with their homosexual orientation and the fact that co-residing with their parents was preventing them from fully experiencing and assuming their homosexuality (Table 1).
Type . | Prevalent social characteristics . | Before turning point . | After turning point . | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Romantic turning point . | Biographical paradigm . | Residential consequence . | Biographical paradigm . | ||
Long relationships, delayed departures | Women and Men | No turning point – too stable a relationship | Relationship and family formation as the centre | Postponed residential autonomy | No change |
Qualified and Non-qualified | |||||
Traditional family values | |||||
Heartbreaks and breakups, speeding up residential autonomy | Women | Breakup | Relationship and family formation as the centre | Anticipated non-conjugal residential autonomy | Identity, leisure and work at the centre of the biography |
QualifiedMobileTowards renting | Heartbreaks (due to unilateral decisions) | ||||
Out of the closet, into a new home | Men | Decision to live in accordance with sexual orientation | Leisure at the centre of the biography | Anticipated non-conjugal residential autonomy | Identity and freedom at the centre of the biography. Plans to have a relationship at the centre of the biography |
Qualified | |||||
Both tradition and non-tradition-oriented families | |||||
Towards renting or home ownership |
Type . | Prevalent social characteristics . | Before turning point . | After turning point . | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Romantic turning point . | Biographical paradigm . | Residential consequence . | Biographical paradigm . | ||
Long relationships, delayed departures | Women and Men | No turning point – too stable a relationship | Relationship and family formation as the centre | Postponed residential autonomy | No change |
Qualified and Non-qualified | |||||
Traditional family values | |||||
Heartbreaks and breakups, speeding up residential autonomy | Women | Breakup | Relationship and family formation as the centre | Anticipated non-conjugal residential autonomy | Identity, leisure and work at the centre of the biography |
QualifiedMobileTowards renting | Heartbreaks (due to unilateral decisions) | ||||
Out of the closet, into a new home | Men | Decision to live in accordance with sexual orientation | Leisure at the centre of the biography | Anticipated non-conjugal residential autonomy | Identity and freedom at the centre of the biography. Plans to have a relationship at the centre of the biography |
Qualified | |||||
Both tradition and non-tradition-oriented families | |||||
Towards renting or home ownership |
Long relationships, delayed departures
The main characteristic of this group is that long relationships increase the age at which people leave home – that is, a longer relationship suggests individuals with a greater propensity to postpone leaving the parental home. This is because in these cases the expectation that the residential project will eventually be a conjugal one is stronger for at least one of the members of the couple. In this sense, being in a long-term relationship implies a smaller window of opportunity for individual action towards residential autonomy. This was as frequent for men as for women. This propensity to postpone leaving home can occur for various reasons: ‘linked lives’, ‘dealing with inertia’, and ‘relationship protocols’.
Lives are linked
The synchronisation of two individual life courses in a couple's trajectory is of key importance, especially for the most traditionally orientated young people: those who intend to leave home through conjugality, particularly marriage and homeownership. A conjoint optimal point in the two professional careers is needed for these young people to identify a perfect timing for leaving home (together). Since professional and personal lives have their own ups and downs, often alternately, years may pass before that double optimum point occurs. Having strong expectations of getting married and being a homeowner also helps increase the time spent in pursuit of residential autonomy. The combination of these aspects with a low social background and/or economically challenged situation, as well as a low level of educational attainment, makes the ‘strategic adaptation’ (Giele and Elder 1998: 9–10; Elder and Giele 2009: 14), or changes in biographical paradigms, even more difficult.
The following case is an example of how ‘lives are linked’ (Elder 1994), and how the occurrence or absence of certain events in one's life course can significantly affect the timing of and events in another's life course. The fewer the instruments for a ‘strategic adaptation’, the greater the postponement of the moment of leaving home. The case of Ana, ‘the eternal bride’, illustrates this quite well.
Ana4 is 29 years old, and for the last 11 she has been Nuno's girlfriend. Some people ask her, ‘So Ana, when's the wedding? Just dating, dating … ’, but she replies, ‘You have to date while you can’.
Ana's parents overprotected her in her professional, relationship and residential careers. They did this by separating school and work – they wanted her to only start looking for a job after she finished school. As is typical in lower social classes, it was Ana's father who got her her first job, where she has spent the last 8 years. They also did it by controlling her love life as much as they could. Ana has had only one boyfriend, Nuno. This relationship did not emancipate her from her family; on the contrary. Finally, when it comes to residential choices and expectations, although Ana has spent most of her life living in a rented apartment, she has clear and strong aspirations to buy her own.
The difficult synchronisation of Ana's and Nuno's professional situations has been very important to the postponement of the moment of leaving home. Before Nuno managed to recover from a long period of unemployment, Ana's company was restructured and she went from full-time to part-time work against her will. This has naturally prevented them from getting a mortgage. This is why her friends call Ana the ‘eternal bride’.
Finding this conjoint optimal point is sometimes a strategy forced on one of the partners, in order to overcome the exaggerated postponement of residential autonomy. ‘Standby’ situations seem to be especially uncomfortable for women. For instance, Susana5 told me: ‘Then Paulo didn't want to get married’ and I said: ‘I have a job, you have a job, we have the house, we have everything, why don't you want to get married? What are we doing then? Dating all our lives?’; and Leonor shared that she had to pressure her boyfriend to move in at once: ‘I said: what's the deal? When do you want to move in? It's in or out, not in and out. I want concrete things!’
Breaking the chain of inertia
On the probability of success of consensual union (and future marriage), Stanley et al. underline the centrality of the concept of inertia to the understanding of romantic relationships in early adulthood (2011: 243). They state that the longer and more stable the relationship, the harder it is to end it. In the present research, this inertia refers to young adults who face situations of low relationship satisfaction, but are unable to end the relationship.
There is a strong interdependency between the various spheres of life. A rupture in one of them will create a precedent and open a window of opportunity to change many other things in life that were at the same level of dissatisfaction. Escaping ‘normal biography’ in one respect opens up an opportunity for a new life plan, for designing a ‘choice biography’ in a more creative and uninhibited manner. However, creating the precedent takes time, as Maria's case shows us.
Not long after the interview, Maria6 ended her 8-year relationship with Pedro, found a new love and began a new relationship, left home), moved in with her new boyfriend and left her job (where she was very unhappy, albeit on a very stable career path).
In Maria's interview, statements such as ‘I let it pass’, ‘I simply let it go’, ‘I just let things be’, ‘time passed and I did nothing about it’, and ‘I am resigned to what I have’ were very frequent. This was how Maria described her past and present trajectory, by constantly identifying her lack of agency. ‘Life could have led to an accelerated personal growth and a different kind of maturity’ ‘but it didn't’. Maria says she never had to try very hard to get anything.
Maria keeps herself distant from and unengaged in decisions that involve ruptures in her life, but is nevertheless aware of that level of uncertainty. What unifies all these indecisions is a totalising inertia that Maria describes by saying that: ‘the idea is that I am trying to keep all possibilities open and then, when I feel prepared, begin to take all those risks and actually do something about my life!’
Maria somehow had the notion of what was about to happen: ‘all my spheres of life are connected in some way, so if I make profound changes in one, I must be prepared to keep up that pace in the others’. Ending her relationship was ‘not an end’, but clearly a beginning; an event that broke the chain of inertia.7
The relationship protocol
Although implicit, there is a sort of ‘relationship protocol’ that generally prevents one member of the couple from moving on to renting or buying an apartment on his or her own, without discussing it with the partner. The greater the respect for this relationship protocol rule, the longer leaving home is postponed. Making the decision to leave home precipitates a conversation about future plans as a couple. This is because individual decisions that have major consequences for the couple's present and future life are usually discussed and negotiated; failure to do so – that is, disrespecting this rule – can imply an early breakup.
It was the beginning of the end. The decision to buy an apartment on his own irreversibly and profoundly changed António's relationship with Madalena. ‘And now I am going to tell you how not to ruin a relationship’, he began his story.
His ‘smart’ relationship with money and his need for exterior signs of success led him to think about buying an apartment. ‘At that time I thought it was about time to buy an apartment. At home everything was fine, but I really just felt the need to do it.’ Madalena was excluded from the search for and selection and decoration of the apartment. António included his mum instead and gave her a key to get in when she wanted, with total freedom to decorate and change things around. António himself now retrospectively recognises that ‘it's as though my apartment is my mother's’. He didn't interpret Madalena's detachment from the decisions made about the house until the end of the relationship was presented to him. ‘I don't feel the house as my own’, Madalena told him, while breaking up.
Heartbreaks and breakups, speeding up residential autonomy
In the majority of southern European countries residential emancipation mostly results from a conjugal project, marriage or consensual union (Nico 2011), but paradoxically is also frequently a consequence of a breakup or heartbreak. In these cases the breakup opens an enormous window of opportunity for individual action, namely for the reformulation of the original life plan and the recycling of old dreams and projects. Creativity for the design of new plans is also activated.
This pattern is gendered. In women, the end of the relationship is used as a reason and pretext to move on to ‘life plan B’, be it already defined or improvised in the rebound from the breakup. It is used as an opportunity to change the biographical paradigm. These reactions to the unexpected or disruptive love-related event can be integrated into what Thomson defined as the ‘emergence of a specifically female individualisation’ (2009: 34). While women live these moments as ‘reset’ moments in their transitions to adulthood, men tend to use them as ‘pauses’ in their ‘life plan A's’.
Just turned 26, Sara was at a vulnerable moment in terms of the path her life was taking. Although she had no regrets about her recent life choices, she was unsure whether she was on the ‘right track’. ‘Because I see the time passing by; I am now 26 years old – terrible!! And I don't see many changes in my life, you know?’
Sara's socialisation was based on strong work and consumption ethics and conciliated with an investment in higher education. Sara's mother used to say: ‘Again? What do you do to your money? You have to figure out something to do. I know someone who needs her house cleaned. Have you thought about that?’ Yet at the same time she would say: ‘No, no, no, I'm the one who pays for college stuff!’
At a certain point in her life, Sara converted what could have been considered a ‘normal biography’ into a ‘standard biography’. ‘I felt like changing my life!’ In her opinion, after the breakup was the right time to change. After all, this relationship was the last thing linking her to a lifestyle with which she no longer identified. The support from her family was not total. Sara said that her father would have been more supportive of her decision to leave home if she had had a stable job at the time; but she felt there was no time to be wasted. She said: ‘I think it was the consequence of the end of that relationship. I just thought: “This cycle has ended here. Now things really have to change!”’ Leaving home was the consolidation of a social mobility based on social and educational capital. ‘It had to do with the fact that I wasn't myself in that place anymore’. The end of the relationship broke the last link to that lifestyle.
Matilde8 is yet another example of changing biographical paradigms upon the rebound from a heartbreak. Having had a long-term relationship with Rui, she had developed expectations about leaving home to live with him as soon as they both entered the labour market. When Rui told her about his (individual) desire to go abroad to work, she was disappointed and heartbroken. After the relationship ended, she immediately re-prioritised her transitions to adulthood, precipitating her residential autonomy and homeownership.
Out of the closet, into a new home
Although studies on transitions to adulthood are not usually exclusively dedicated to determining the differences between the trajectories of young heterosexual and young homosexual individuals, some have pointed out that ‘coming out’ is an important turning point in the life course (Thomson 2007: 102), and that young homosexual people tend to leave home earlier than their heterosexual peers (Heath and Cleaver 2003: 24–5).
Two tendencies can be found: (i) leaving home to avoid coming out to the family – strategic autonomy; and (ii) leaving home after or because the individual came out to the family – reactive autonomy. In our interviews, only male strategic autonomy was found. The following case illustrates this autonomy, even in a family of origin with the potential to receive the revelation with understanding and empathy, open dialogue and high levels of wellbeing. Parents don't ask, Luís doesn't tell.
I had the idea that I didn't want to wait for anyone in order to fulfil this project of mine. Because I never know if it is going to happen or not, and the way things are going, the most probable thing is that I will never have that type of conjugal project. So let's get this out of the way quickly. I don't want to be at my parents’ home until I'm 50.
Luís goes on to explain: ‘being gay automatically gets you out of that [conjugal] race. And this opportunity to leave the race … It doesn't mean you have to make it your banner, but it becomes a part of your self-presentation. So other people won't expect you to be in that race anyway. The great thing is that they don't know what to expect. And that's great!! I don't have a stereotype to follow!’
In other words, there is no ‘standard homosexual biography’. Standard biography is heteronormative. So for Luís there is no choice but to choose. For him this is ‘great’!
Tiago illustrates a different pattern. He had already left home twice, each time related to different stages of his homosexual identity and life, but all hidden behind educational or work-related motives. The first time, he officially left to study, but it was really to live his sexuality more freely; he wanted ‘freedom’. The second, he officially left to be closer to work, but the real motive was to be able to move in with his boyfriend and have a stable relationship.
Conclusions
It would be wrong to limit conclusions about the important link between conjugality and leaving-home processes to the well-established evidence that the countries where the age at which people leave home is higher are the ones where more young people leave home to get married or live in consensual union. To do so would be to omit all the modifying potential that affection, love and sexuality has in the trajectories towards adulthood in particular and the life course in general, and would categorise love as an event that only has sociological implications because of its demographic consequences; this would be to exclude all the love-related events like ruptures, inertias, start-overs, heartbreaks and so on, by not affording them the status of independent variable that they deserve.
This article seeks to demonstrate that to omit this kind of analysis is to lose relevant information that contributes to the understanding of sequences, timings and processes of transitions to adulthood. Such omissions occur because love-related events suffer from the same methodological contempt as turning points. The apparent singularity of the events contrasts with the recognition of their potential for explaining social action, structure and change. It is necessary to reject this contempt. The study's greatest limitation concerns comparability and theorisation, all the more so in that both the topics of this qualitative study are themselves seen as either extremely unstandardised and/or intimate, or sociologically useless. This lack of comparability inevitably makes theorisation about family formation processes, interdependency of spheres of life and processes of residential autonomy more difficult.
Only by subjecting the study of (romantic) turning points to comparison-friendly data-collection and organisation instruments can this limitation be tackled. Where collection is concerned, instruments such as the life calendar, which collect data on turning points, but also on the correct sequence of these and other events, are one of the possible ways to standardise data and make it more comparable (Nico 2015a). Organisation requires the coding of the three phases of a turning point in a life course: what or in what life sphere is the turning point; what or in what life sphere is the consequence; what characterises the process in between (in terms of the positive or negative feature of the effect, the limitation of the effect or its dispersal across many different spheres of life, the immediacy or delayed action of the effect; and lastly, was there was a slowing down or speeding up effect(s)?
Three main conclusions can be drawn from this research. One is related to the centrality of and orientations towards conjugality. Love careers are not necessarily conjugal. Due to their beginning, end or type of development, many romantic relationships have important consequences for the life course during the period of the transition to adulthood. In order to achieve a holistic understanding of the life course, information that permits an analysis of love careers must therefore be collected. Only thus can love fulfil its analytical dignity. Doing this allowed us to identify the importance of relationship breakups to the re-directioning of life courses, and especially in the case of women, to the early beginning of the process of leaving home.
The second conclusion refers to the importance of relationship protocols, but also to their eventual variability across different territories. Qualitative data on national specificity have permitted increasing layers of understanding of the importance of conjugality in the process of leaving home, but comparative data is still lacking. Data on the cultural variability of these relationship protocols, the link between these protocols and each country's housing market, and the cultural embeddedness of a common economic fund as a prerequisite to enter conjugality, are needed. The effects of being homosexual on the timing and process of transitioning to adulthood must also be better explored and included in extensive research.
A third conclusion refers to the apparent genderisation of the effect of love-related turning points. Kimmel states that the period of transition to adulthood is the most gendered in the whole process of human development (2008: 41 quoted by Reifman 2011: 23). Where the relationship between interrupted love careers and the anticipation of leaving-home processes is concerned, this genderisation is quite significant. The analysis of love careers confirmed the increased individual reflexivity presented by women, their greater capacity for ‘strategic adaptation’ (Elder 1994), and their better skills in recycling old projects and putting life-plan B's into practice. Women thus demonstrate a much greater tendency to mobilise these negative love-related events in positive and constructive manners, as ideal pretexts for changing their biographical paradigm, thereby accelerating individual or individualistic transitions towards adulthood.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
ORCID
Magda Nicohttp://orcid.org/0000-0002-4803-1119
Notes on contributor
Magda Nico is a Sociologist specialising in Life Course research and methods, Family and Youth. She holds a MS in Family and Society (2005), a Post-Graduation on Data Analysis in Social Sciences (2008) and a PhD in Sociology (2011) from ISCTE-IUL. Her PhD topic was Transitions to Adulthood in Europe and Portugal in the Life Course Perspective, she has published on themes such as Individualized Housing Careers in a Familistic Society (Sociological Research Online), Critical Approach on De-standardization of the Life Course during the Transition to Adulthood (Journal of Youth Studies), Generational Changes, Gaps and Conflicts: a view from the South (Youth Perspectives) and Cultural and Biographical Illusions in European Youth Studies (book chapter in Critical Youth Studies for the 21st Century). She is one of the co-coordinators of the Family and Life Course research lines of the Portuguese Association of Sociology. Magda is also the Portuguese representative in the ‘Pool of European Youth Researchers’ of the European Commission/Council of Europe Youth Partnership, for which she has published several reports and policy papers. She is also a researcher in the Measuring Youth Well Being project (FP7).
Footnotes
Related to the dichotomy of homeownership vs. renting, the issues of accessibility and affordability, the existence of youth housing policies, etc.
That is, leaving home to study in a distant location, but remaining financially dependent on the family.
Nonetheless, it was also due to the holistic character of this analysis and the word limit of this article, that only few and short quotations were presented here. Complete transcript of the interviews can be made available upon contacting me.
Ana, 29 years old, lives with her parents in a rented home, has a boyfriend, and is a part-time in the handling sector in the airport. Her father is a mechanic, her mother a stay-at-home mum.
30 years old, secondary education, backoffice employee.
At the time of the interview, Maria, 25 years old, lives with her father, has a boyfriend and a university degree and is a market analyst.
From this point in the story onwards, Maria could be coded as ‘heartbreaks and breakups, speeding up residential autonomy’.
Matilde, 28 years old, lives on her own, her mother is a seamstress and her father has a small business. She has a university degree, works as an auditor and does not currently have a boyfriend.