SOCI1001 Term Essay

Name: Lam Ka Wing

UID: 3035792559

Word Count: 2061

Essay question:

Discuss the transformation of modern intimacy in contemporary society in terms of

changing dynamics in marriage, family and couple relationships. 

Over the past decades, intimate relationships have transformed from pre-modern to
modern society. With the generation change, the perceptions of the younger
generation toward intimacy are much different from the older generation. To explore
further into its transformation, we should first define what intimacy is. It is stated that
intimacy implies a close interpersonal relationship with one another physically and
mentally, while some may exist life-long, and some may not (Muniruzzaman, 2017).
Intimacy plays a vital role in shaping our interpersonal skills when dealing with
people. The relationship build-up may involve feelings of liking, hatred and even
sexuality. As human beings are always within groups, we are all experiencing
socialization during our growth. At different social stages, intimate relationships can
be attained, such as lifetime family members since birth, partners when becoming an
adult, stepping onto marriage if lucky, finally forming a new family if having
offspring. In the following paragraphs, this essay will explore the transformation of
modern intimacy in contemporary society in terms of changing dynamics in marriage,
family and couple relationships, and slightly discuss the underlying reasons and
impacts of such changes. 

First of all, family is the closest group in our life journey as we are all born in a
family, which is the social institution for us to receive education. Then, what
constitutes a family? Sociologists usually denote that a family consists of people
playing different roles such as father, mother, son and daughter. Each role has its
expected responsibility, such as parents are obliged to socialize and take care of their
children until they reach maturity. Moreover, family are groups of people who share
material, emotions and economic resources. Kinship exists as a social bond based on
common ancestry within a family. The concept of family can be explained by
sociological theories including symbolic interactionism, critical sociology and
functionalism. Symbolic interactionism denotes that families are groups in which
through interactions in daily life, a sense of belongings and emotional ties are
developed over a long period of time. Critical sociology indicates that the economic
structures and relations of powers determine the configurations of families. In
addition, functionalists state that families provide socialization for the young and
prepare them for their future social roles, thus are indispensable for personal growth
and development (Little & McGivern, 2012). 

To explore family transformation, I would take Chinese traditional families as an

example to illustrate the contrast with modern nuclear families. Collectivism was
emphasized in the old days whereas individualism is more prevalent nowadays.
Collectivism is emphasized in a way that living generations of a family live under the
same roof, which is called extended family. Moreover, the Chinese family structure is
hierarchical as we are taught to respect elders under any circumstances. The younger
are expected to obey what the elderly told (Upton-McLaughli, 2013). However, in
today’s China, since the one-child policy implementation, the birth rate has declined
consistently, only nuclear families can be formed under such a policy. The shrinking
of family size can be indicated by statistics that the observed average family size was
4.78 in 1973 and 4.43 in 1982 after the launch of one-child policy (Zeng, 1986). In
modern society, people tend to live with their own family instead of living with the
elderly. The extended family with married brothers living together has become rare
and the “empty-nest” elderly family has become increasingly ubiquitous. With the
changes in lifestyles and people’s values as well as improvement of living conditions,
the large families that used to be prevailing in the countryside are promptly
disappearing. 

For the gender roles in Chinese families, there is also an explicit transformation
compared to the old days. In the past, a theory of gender roles was well-defined by
sociologist Talcott Parsons in which male and female were assigned to respective
family tasks. “Men are breadwinners while women are homemakers.” For instance,
women are responsible for taking care of emotional needs of family members and
doing household chores while men are working outside to earn money as the
economic pillar (Crossman, 2019). In addition, under patriarchy, traditional families
are male-oriented in which female is only the appendage of male. Such a mindset is
deep-rooted in most traditional Chinese families. Nonetheless, in today’s society, the
gender roles are blurred as women's status is rising in recent years. With higher
education levels, female labor force participation is surging under gender equality
advocated in modern society. Gender roles can be interchanged whereas male are
willing to take the responsibility for childbearing nowadays. The male chauvinism is
no longer welcomed by females and not emphasized strongly within the family.
Family tasks can be distributed based on a person’s ability and specialty instead of
their gender (Evason, 2015). Such a phenomenon reflects that gender equality is quite
well-achieved in a positive way, altering the tradition of family division of labor. 

Next, the couple’s relationship is going to be explained sociologically. The intimate

love between couples has come to legitimize a range of institutions, ideologies and
policies. Carter (2015) denoted that couple love has different forms including
‘romantic love’- a whirlwind, one-and-only type of love- ‘companionate love’-
intimate yet caring - ‘confluent love’- causal and in flux- and ‘liquid love’- temporary,
happiness-oriented. In short, romantic relationships can be categorized into different
types while there is a transformation of couple relationships over decades. 

In the pre-modern society, committed relationships are the mainstream as a couple

relationship is usually associated with marriage in the long term, preferably
monogamous and heterosexual relationships. Besides, sex education advocates sexual
intercourse after marriage. On the other hand, in modern society, causal relationships
(which is called confluent love) are more prevailing as modern people seek for
pleasure in love. Some theorists denote that under the increasingly individualized,
democratic world, it may lead to two outcomes for intimate love which is temporary
or random as more formal relationship processes are skipped. For example, statistics
indicate an increasing rate of sexual intercourse before marriage in China: the
percentage of the population involving in pre-marital intercourse has surged from
40% in 1994 to 71.4% in 2012 according to a general health report. This shows that a
majority of Chinese young people no longer regard virginity before marriage
mandatory under an open-minded social atmosphere (Evason, 2015). However, there
is a generational divide around this value. Intimate sexual intercourse just for
pleasure-seeking is not encouraged by the social institutions.

Regarding queering relationships, it is a taboo in traditional society, particularly the

culturally conservative Chinese society. As heterosexual relationship is the
mainstream of a couple form, homosexual relationships are marginalized and even
stigmatized as unethical. To illustrate, the media often pictures gays and lesbians as
abnormal and criminal, such as gays are usually victims of drug abuse (Wang, 2017).
Also, the religions including Judaism and Christianity have standardized heterosexual,
marital and reproductive couples as normative. These factors contribute to the
stereotypes and prejudice towards homosexual love. As a result, it is struggling for
homosexuals to “come out of the closet”. However, the social acceptance of queer
nowadays is on the rise, especially among the educated, younger and less religious
respondents. Take United States as an example, a study indicates that the social
acceptance of homosexuals has increased to 72% today, a skyrocketing change
compared to 46% in 1994 and 51% in 2002 (Bhatia, 2020). This seems that the public
perception on couple relationships is no longer limited to heteronormativity.

The next step for a couple is marriage. What is marriage? Sociologists usually define
marriage as a legally recognized social contract that is based on mutual rights and
obligations between two people, traditionally based on a sexual relationship, and
implying a permanence of the union.  Its definition varies in different perspectives,
such as whether a formal legal union is required (think of common-law marriage), or
whether more than two people can be involved (consider polygamy) (Little &
McGivern, 2012). Marriage is widely considered as the foundation of family. The
social norm is that the couple will produce children after marriage, that wise children
born out of marriage are often stigmatized as illegitimacy. Same as the couple
relationship, people’s attitudes towards marriage have changed a lot over the years.

In pre-modern society, marriage is often regarded as a step towards adulthood.

Arranged marriage usually refers to the involvement of elders to pair up the
youngsters, for instance, marriage is contracted based on social status or economic
circumstance instead of mutual sexual attraction in pre-modern Europe (Giddens,
1992). The partners know little about each other and they are merely married for the
new relationship of two families. However, in modern society, love marriage is a
personal choice as the social norm has changed to independent choice of marital
status. People can choose their partners whom they fall in love with. They experience
the process of dating so that they have a relatively comprehensive understanding of
each other before stepping into marriage. 

Besides, in pre-modern society, compassionate love depicts that commitment and

responsibility are emphasized to form a family. To illustrate, in the era of golden age
families, the divorce rate is low. In the last century, family values are strong. People
are expected to marry and reproduce children to fulfill the elders' expectations.
Therefore, people usually date for the purpose of marriage and the ultimate purpose is
to reproduce offspring. For centuries, reproduction has been a biological act that
creates kinship and families (Eliap, 2003). On the other hand, in modern society,
although family values remain strong with close contact with families, marriage has
become less common and people are marrying later in life. In other words, the
marriage rate has been declining. It can be ascribed to diverse social factors, including
women's independence and increased education level, financial stress, etc. Critics
such as celibates even argue that marriage is an outdated tradition that is unnecessary,
it is a personal choice instead. While it is commonly acknowledged that couples often
marry for love, marriage involves many external factors such as financial stress,
family expectations, social status etc. In line with this, more young people prefer a
couple relationship that don’t require family recognition rather than a legally married
relationship, supposedly reflected in decreasing marriage rates and the rise of
cohabitation. At the same time, even married people are no longer bound to stay
together if the relationship doesn’t work (Giddens, 1992). The rise of divorce rate
creates more single parent households and blended families. It reflects that the
commitment of marriage nowadays is not as prolonged as the old generations. 

In addition, while queer marriage equality seldom mentioned in the pre-modern

society, it is advocated in nowadays society. Legalization of same-sex marriage is no
longer to be uncommon. Although many social and religious conservatives hold
traditional belief that the composition of marriage must be a man and a woman by
citing religious scripture and the basics of human reproduction as support (Little &
McGivern, 2012), the global trend is shifting to the acceptance of sexuality
differences.  As the social atmosphere becomes more open-minded, same-sex
marriage is successfully achieved in most civilized Western countries. For example,
the Civil Marriage Act legalized same sex marriage in Canada on July 20, 2005 (Little
& McGivern, 2012). Even for the relatively conservative Asian countries, Taiwan, as
the first Asian country to launch the same-sex marriage policy, is a prominent
example to illustrate the surging social acceptance of queer marriage. With the queer
seeking for legal marriage rights, it is foreseeable that same-sex marriage can be
legalized and accepted as social norms. 

From the above discussions, we can see that the couple, marriage and families'
intimacy transformation over decades are intertwined and interrelated as people are
moving from one life stage to another. Their attitudes towards family concepts since
they were born influence their intimate relationship with other individuals later on.
Though under the globalized world, people are much influenced by powerful Western
culture in a sense that present trends of human intimacy like confluent love, liquid
love, pure relationship, plastic sexuality are more visible in nowadays society. At the
same time, divorce rate is escalating and abnormal family structures such as
stepfamilies, gay and lesbian households emerge as a new wave. Such transformations
create social problems like teen pregnancy and family violence. Finally, we can say
that the negative impacts must not be overlooked by the government and social
support should be given in view of the consequences triggered. 

References

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Carter, J. 2015. The Curious Absence of Love Stories in Women’s Talk. The
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Crossman, A. 2019. The Definition of Marriage in Sociology. ThoughtCo.

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