Paper short abstract:

Sustaining love at midlife requires everyday negotiations with values of individualism, speed, and youthfulness. This paper suggests rhythmanalysis as a framework to investigate the political potential of enduring midlife love as an act of refusal to upgrade and as doing relationships differently.

Paper long abstract:

The political potential of love is often sought in relation to revolutionary or unruly practices of intimacy, such as non-monogamous relationships, collective childrearing, or communal property. Marginality is here perceived as a site of oppression as well as a site of survival, creativity and transgression. This paper investigates the political potential of love in what might seem an unexpected place, namely enduring love at midlife. It discusses how sustaining love at midlife requires everyday negotiations with societal values of individualism, speed, and youthfulness which either conflict or resonate with, for instance, work, parenting, or leisure temporalities. Temporalities that are particularly tangible around midlife when questions of the good life tend to occur, including: ‘have I made the right choices?’ ‘Am I happy?’ ‘Is this all there is?’. To capture enduring midlife love ethnographically this paper proposes rhythmanalysis to investigate the complex temporal underpinnings of late-modern, everyday, intimate life. How do people at midlife negotiate temporal complexities at the levels of daily life (e.g. love, work, household rhythms) and life course (e.g. changing rhythms of the ageing body, care for ageing parents, parenthood, increased work responsibilities)? Approaching love as phenomenological and socio-political at once, this analytical framework allows to investigate the political potential of enduring midlife love as an act of refusal to upgrade and to do relationships differently in a time when people and things have become increasingly disposable.