Never Married Women

Four: Intimacy

F OUR / Intitnacy "Our family is the most important thing in the world!" My mother used to say that to me at least three times a day. But I was never sure of that. In fact, after eighty-four years of trying to learn those lines, I've given them up. Instead I tell people what I really feel-that the ones who hold me up when I stumble are the ones I let into my heart. If they are of my blood, fine. If they aren't, that's fine too. Uanuary 1984] 90 / Intimacy Enthronement of the family has made the construction of intimate interdependence among unrelated or unmarried people difficult but, happily, not impossible. Friends outside the family, particularly in Western, industrial, and postindustrial cultures, have proved to be vigorous competitors with relatives throughout the life-course for the attention and loyalty of a family member.1 Despite the normatively prescribed "inside track" enjoyed by relatives, friends have played as large a role in the emotional and social lives of the women I interviewed as have family members. Indeed, a sizable minority of the women-19 women, or 38 percentreported that friends eclipsed family members in intimacy and importance to them, once adulthood was reached. Most of these women noted their greater "investment" in friends than in family with guilt, unease, or defensiveness. Their obvious discomfort in acknowledging their preference for friends over family documents a central point of Michele Barrett and Mary McIntosh, that such a preference constitutes heterodoxy: It [the family] is indeed a major agency for caring, but in monopolizing care it has made it harder to undertake other forms of care. It is indeed a unit of sharing, but in demanding sharing within it has made other relations tend to become more mercenary. It is indeed a place of intimacy, but in privileging the intimacy of close kin it has made the outside world cold and friendless, and made it harder to sustain relations of security and trust except with kin. Caring, sharing, and loving would be more widespread if the family did not claim them for its own.2 Intimacy / 91 During my interviews, I soon became aware of the central significance of these women's friendships. Photographs of friends were on display in the women's living rooms, and they made many references to friends in response to my questions about work, travel , play, and retirement plans. Although some of the women were uncomfortable discussing the priority they assigned friends in their lives, they were uninhibited in detailing the emotional depth and variety of these relationships. In reviewing studies of elderly women who had never married, gerontologists Rita Braito and Donna Anderson have speculated that such women might cluster into two categories: the socially isolated and the socially active.3 With a single exception, the women I interviewed fell into the latter group, perhaps because I did not include institutionalized women in my sample but relied on the referrals of clergy, human service workers, community leaders, students, friends, and the women I was interviewing to find the names of more women to include. The women I interviewed reported that dyads, two-person bonds, were their most prevalent and most significant form of friendship. According to sociologist George Simmel, dyadic relationships are, for structural reason, the true sites of intimacy. He suggested that the basis of intimacy is the knowledge of participants that a relationship is unique, fragile, and transient. Each member of a dyad realizes his or her indispensability to the relationship and recognizes that a dyad abandoned can never be extended or replaced.4 Although most of the women's important friendships were dyadic in nature, the majority of these women reported commitment over time to both dyads and group friendships . Most common was a pattern in which a woman sustained a primary, daily, and long-term friendship with one other person, usually another woman, while at the same time joining a circle of two to five other friends at least weekly or twice weekly, either in a 92 / Intimacy group or in pairs. In the second most common pattern, a woman invested exclusively in a strong, dyadic bond. A third friendship constellation was triadic, in which a woman maintained close relationships in a threesome. A few women relied wholly on their family members for social and emotional intimacy, but only one woman reported no close friends or family members. These relationships were characterized by the three elements that psychologists...