Paper short abstract:

This talk aims to give an insight in (romantic) couple relationships beyond marriage with a special focus on the interrelation of space and practices of intimacy, based on a discussion of the literature and recent statistical data as well as on findings from a field study in Tokyo.

Paper long abstract:

In an era where more and more people are living alone and getting married at a later age or not at all, it becomes necessary to look at personal relationships beyond marriage. While marriage and changes in marriage behaviour have been examined intensively and from various perspectives in the last decades, (intimate) personal relationships beyond marriage and their meaning for individuals and their lives in contemporary Japanese society have received far less attention. Based on a discussion of the literature and recent statistical data from the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research as well as on findings from a field study in Tokyo conducted in 2010, this talk aims to give an insight in personal relationships beyond marriage with a focus on intimate couple relationships.

In public discourse young adults are often said to consider intimate couple relationships as troublesome (mendokusai) and therefore tend to avoid them. However, my findings from the field study in Tokyo clearly disprove this assumption for the majority of the interviewees. Many of them had lived or lived various forms of intimate romantic relationships (dates, affaires, sexual relationships or couple relationships with and without cohabitation). Others were longing for intimate relationships but were facing various kinds of obstacles, which detain them from realising their romantic dreams. I will argue that a spatial perspective can be very gainful for a better understanding of (difficulties in) intimate couple relationships in contemporary Japanese society, where gender-segregated working places and living with one's parents are standard while cohabitation is uncommon. The talk will address the following questions: Which influences have these and other spatial factors on the constitution, the every-day and biographical 'doing' (Jurczyk 2009) as well as the institutionalisation of couple relationships? What kind of meaning do (non-)places (Augé 1995) like love hotels and dating spots bear? What kind of meaning do (physical, virtual) co-presence and (geographical, emotional) proximity have? How are space and various 'practices of intimacy' (Jamieson 2011) interrelated in the Japanese context?