In this article, we seek to establish the importance of living together apart (LTA), where ex-partners continue to co-reside following relationship breakdown. Although LTA is commonplace, it has been almost completely overlooked by family sociology and social policy. Because LTA is conceptually unrecognised, there is little empirical information and because there is so little information, it remains conceptually unrecognised. In this article, we attempt to break out from this loop. First, we place LTA within the context of partnership change. Second, we estimate the quantitative magnitude and qualitative significance of LTA in Britain. We use a survey concerned with owner-occupier LTA to indicate population characteristics and aggregate behaviour. This is accompanied by qualitative analysis of Mumsnet forums on LTA, to develop insight into understandings and relationships. Drawing on these findings, we argue that LTA is both a significant household form and important relationship type.

This chapter will centrally address the second aim of the collection – to explore innovative theoretical approaches to understanding personal life. It will also seek to disrupt 'normative' idealisations – those made by individualisation theorists. We start with a story about Christina, a working-class wife, mother and part-time employee living in what was a coal-mining village near Barnsley. She felt conflicting desires for self-improvement through developing a career and for emotional fulfilment as a good mother. Christina's responses were sometimes reflexive, sometimes habitual and sometimes taking tradition for granted. She rarely took decisions just thinking about herself, rather, her choices were set within emotional relationships with her husband, her dead mother and above all her children. She also faced imbalances of power with employers, while her own resources were limited. Her agency was both constrained and 'bonded', formed through ties with others. How are we to understand this story? Individualisation theory, with its emphasis on individual projects and its romanticised view of autonomous agency, does not seem a good place to start. Rather we develop the notion of bricolage as a theory of social action. People respond to new and changing situations by consciously, and unconsciously, adapting to what is easily available to them and has the most social fit. Tradition, what has gone before, becomes both a resource and legitimation device for what happens in the future. We exemplify this approach through two further case studies of same-sex weddings and marital-naming practices. By piecing together data and examples from past and present, we present a grounded theoretical approach for understanding contemporary intimate life.

Marital surname change is a striking example of the survival of tradition. A practice emerging from patriarchal history has become embedded in an age of detraditionalisation and women’s emancipation. Is the tradition of women’s marital name change just some sort of inertia or drag, which will slowly disappear as modernity progresses, or does this tradition fulfil more contemporary roles? Are women and men just dupes to tradition, or alternatively do they use tradition to further their aims? We examine how different approaches – individualisation theory, new institutionalism, and bricolage – might tackle these questions. This examination is set within a comparative analysis of marital surname change in Britain and Norway, using small qualitative samples. We find that while individualisation and new institutionalism offer partial explanations, bricolage offers a more adaptable viewpoint.

This chapter uses the case study of cohabitation to further examine the invention of tradition in family practice. Cohabitation, until quite recently both rare and socially deviant, is now widespread and generally seen as entirely normal. This rapid change depended on the invention of common law marriage and the creation of an equally invented academic history of cohabitation. Rather than a constant struggle in ‘experiments in living’, cohabitants found legitimacy and normalcy through invented tradition.

By exploring the wider supporting literature in the light of the previous chapters, this final chapter aims to situate the preceding discussions within its context. We take forward the notions of bricolage, agency, and tradition, combined, to present a new and alternative framework for understanding change and continuity in personal life.

This book presents a new approach to understanding contemporary personal life, taking account of how people build their lives through a bricolage of ‘tradition’ and ‘modern’. The authors examine how tradition is used and adapted, invented and re-invented; how meaning can leak from past to present; the ways in which people’s agencies differ as they make decisions; and the process of bricolage in making new arrangements. These themes are illustrated through a variety of case studies, ranging from personal life in the 1950s, young women and marriage, the rise of cohabitation, female name change, living apart together, and creating weddings. Centrally the authors emphasise the re-traditionalisation involved in de-traditionalisation and the connectedness involved in individualised processes of relationship change.

This chapter examines the notion of ‘traditional society’ and the linked notions of revolutionary change in personal life and the ‘queering of society’. Noting the problems with ‘unmarking the ordinary’, it does this using historical data from Britain in 1949–50 on attitudes and practices around sex and marriage. While a minority might be described as ‘traditional’, notably clergymen, equally a contrasting minority could be seen as ‘individualisers’. But the majority used tradition pragmatically in the light of circumstances.

This book presents a new approach to understanding contemporary personal life, taking account of how people build their lives through a bricolage of ‘tradition’ and ‘modern’. The authors examine how t

This chapter focusses on the continuing practice of female name change after heterosexual marriage. It aims to understand how this anachronistic practice is made to seem and become natural and what the significance is of this for families in the UK. Partly this is a taken-for-granted assumption where tradition lies outside conscious scrutiny and if scrutinised can often evoke incomprehension, anger, and conflict. But also people actively use female name change as a handy tool in displaying family. In these ways meaning 'leaks' from a patriarchal past to contemporary marriages.