A Sociological Analysis of Depression in China by I-Hsin Hsiao

Author:I-Hsin Hsiao
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789811564710
Publisher: Springer Singapore

4.1.3 Democratization of Intimate Relations

The relationship between husbands and wives has also undergone transformation in neoliberal globalization. In Chap. 2, cases showed that there is an increasingly high divorce rate because husband and wife live in different places. In addition to that change, there have been changes in the ways of communication between husband and wife. As Giddens (1992) pointed out, the spousal relationship in contemporary society places more emphasis on communication and the feelings of the spouse than in traditional societies; the intimate relationship between couples is more democratized. However, the “democratization of intimate relations” does not guarantee the continuity of happy marriage—couples are likely to divorce at any time. The reason is that two individualistic individuals take the sustaining of individual rights, rather than commitment, as the principle for fostering intimate relations (Giddens 1991). In Giddens’ view, good communication based on mutual respect for each other’s rights and interests is the source of conjugal security in the modern era which lacks ontological security.

Giddens (1992) believed that the basic rules, rational reflection and equal negotiation in the public domain have also infused into the private sphere in contemporary society, setting up an important principle for the subject to develop interpersonal relations and leading to a “democratization of intimate relations”. In this era, the main contents of intimate relationships are no longer confined to “romantic feelings or possessive desires such as love, possession, jealousy and loss, because these feelings or desires also imply unequal, bonded or symbiotic relationships. To maintain intimate ties, individuals have to negotiate about less romantic things such as freedom, negotiation, mobility, the demand for professionalism and economic equality. They have also to maintain a delicate balance between freedom and commitment” (He 2011). For this reason, Giddens put forward the concept of “Pure Relationship” to capture contemporary people’s view of love. It is an “internally referential” social relationship with modern interpersonal relationship. It is “based on the satisfaction and compensation that the relationship itself can provide, namely, it is the relationship that both parties are willing to accept after they evaluate their own experience in this relationship. This is very different from the traditional marriage relationship imbued with considerations of various interests, including status, wealth, family background and reputation, and also different from the modern love that is full of self-projection and mutual dependence” (He 2011). However, the “democratization of intimate relations” cannot guarantee everlasting affection, and the divorce rate remains high. The paradox brought by the individualization of love in contemporary society, as described by Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (1994), lies in the couple’s oscillation between the “quest for personal self-realization” and “conjugal happiness”. Many conflicts exist between the two individualized people when they maintain the balance between “self-rights/self-realization” and “rights and interests of both parties/realization of both parties” in the era of modernity which emphasizes self-rights and self-realization. This is common for contemporary couples.

Although Beck and Giddens are not Marxists, what they have outlined illustrates the logic of capitalism. Illouz (2007) believed that the intimate relationship

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