Intimacy and Ageing: New Relationships in Later Life by Torbjörn Bildtgård, Peter Öberg (review)

As I write, the task of checking the page proofs for the third edition of Family Ties & Aging (Connidis & Barnett, 2019) awaits, the end of a 2-year process of revising the second edition which has included reading a broad array of research and writing. As before, I am impressed by the broader and more inclusive range of questions that have been explored since the last edition. And yet the study of family ties and aging continues to pay disproportionate attention to the relationships of older persons with their children and grandchildren (the age range of most researchers) and to the impact of losing a spouse through divorce or death, with marked concern for the subsequent place of children and grandchildren in the lives of their now unattached elders. Despite increased attention to the intimate lives of older persons beyond long-term marriage among different-sex spouses, divorce, and widowhood, the topic of intimacy in later life has received relatively short shrift.

In their highly readable and well organized book, Intimacy and Ageing: New Relationships in Later Life, Torbjörn Bildtgård and Peter Öberg present a compelling historical and theoretical framework for understanding their empirically backed observation that old people are leading increasingly diverse and active intimate lives initiated later in life. As prior creators of the changes they are now negotiating, old people are far more accurately portrayed as major players in transforming intimacy than as conservative traditionalists who oppose it. The authors show that the move away from marriage, the appeal of staying single, the draw of cohabiting and living apart together (LAT), the importance of sex combined with love to intimate ties begun in later life, and the heterogeneity and complexity of relationships – past and present – are current realities of intimacy in older age.

Bildtgård and Öberg present a perspective designed to address the structural pre-conditions for late-life, cross-sex intimate relationships in Western societies, discussing the strengths and weaknesses of multiple approaches and their unique applicability to the intimate ties of older persons. The authors skillfully combine elements of the life course perspective, the emergence of the third age made possible by longer healthier lives, the impact of consumer society, the transformation of intimacy that followed separating sex and procreation from marriage, the individualisation promoted by women earning their own incomes and by individual-based welfare state policies, and the changing nature of time in older age. Older persons negotiate intimate ties at a life stage with distinctive features including the absence of paid work and children, and the paradoxical nature of time—there is more free time and less time left— influences the choices they make about whether to have an intimate relationship and about how to engage in that relationship once chosen.

For those who get to experience the sweet spot of time after retirement and launching children but before debilitationg frailty or illness, there is new latitude in the options for intimacy. Bildtgård and Öberg fill a void regarding the sources and implications of divorce culture for later life intimacy, and highlight two of its effects: divorce creates two single persons but widowhood produces only one, and divorce results in a less gender-skewed pool of older unattached persons. After an absorbing discussion of international data and research on intimate ties in older age, Bildtgård and Öberg focus on the experience of Swedes 60–90 years of age. With survey data from a national sample of 1,225 persons and interview data from 28 persons who were interested in or (mostly) already engaged in a new relationship at the age of 60 or older, the authors weave together quantitative and qualitative results, and use case studies to bring findings, concepts, and insights to life.

Applying the concept of linked lives, the authors explore the implications of other family ties, particularly adult children, for engaging in new intimate...