Why are increasing numbers of people living alone in the UK and across Northern Europe and the USA? Have we fallen out of love with love? Are couples passé and is parenthood just another lifestyle choice? The July 2008 Brighton Salon featured Dr Jan Macvarish of the University of Kent speaking at The Terraces, Madiera Parade, on Wednesday July 23 at 7pm for 7.30pm.

The turn of the 21st century saw the 'popularity' of living alone and its glamorisation in cultural and media representations occurring simultaneously with the recasting of family life as fraught with abuse, stresses and instability.

Conjugal life has increasingly come to be portrayed as a burden rather than a haven, while living alone appears to offer the simple, reliable and risk-free option. Romance is often criticized as delusory, commercialized or just old-fashioned, while attempts to raise our awareness of the risks of sex and relationships abound. The 'leap of faith' required to form a committed, intimate relationship has relied in the past on strong social sanctions concerning love, masculine and feminine roles and desires, duty and procreation.

In the context of weakened meanings of love, commitment, partnership and children, the affirmation of the individual who protects the self before risking the vagaries of intimate interactions with others has been strengthened. In a more individualized world, what support exists for the formation of lasting relationships and do we still need them anyway?

Dr Jan Macvarish is a researcher and lecturer at the School of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Research, University of Kent, Canterbury. Her interests lie in the sociology of interpersonal relationships and family life. Her PhD thesis explored the contemporary tendency for increasing numbers of people to live alone and the way in which singleness is culturally represented in the 21st century. She has also conducted research into teenage pregnancy and young parenthood and is currently developing a study looking at the experiences of first-time parents of all ages.

Rob Clowes chaired.

The Sean Bell Review

Sociologist Dr Jan Macvarrish addressed the July Brighton Salon on a brilliant summer evening at The Terraces on the sea front. During the course of the discussion she said that it probably isn't a good idea to use the word intimacy any more to describe some relationships between people, because the meaning of the word had changed.

To repose the question in the manner of the Sex in the City character: "Have we fallen out of love with love?

Jan, a researcher at the University of Kent, is concerned with the family and new forms of relationships and the increasing trend toward more and more people living on their own, especially women who have not been married and would not ever have children. She has interviewed a number of single women in the course of her studies and is very struck by how very much attitudes and ways if living have changed over a relatively short period of time.

There never was a golden age of family or friendship, Jan asserted, but at least nowadays people were much freer to live how they wanted to and that was a good thing. However, the celebration of female single living that was often displayed in Sex in the City was offset by the Bridget Jones character that tried to enjoy being a 'freemale' (as the Daily Mail would call it), but still wanted a relationship.

Jan gave many examples of how the single life was celebrated these days and described the way questions of lifestyle had become consumerised, or considered as lists of options that one could pick and choose from, as one might pick aspects of life from the shelves of a shop.

Why aren't single men discussed in the positive way that freemales are? The implication is that there is something very positive in the single woman in that she had made a choice to be the way she is. Singletons were seen as sophisticated and learning to live alone a much need skill – think of the glamorised version one sees in the Sheba cat food ad, where the classy lady in her lovely loft spoons out the nosh for her expensive Persian moggy.

Another aspect of Sex etc was the raising in importance of friendships over long-term romantic relationships. The solitary person kept her friends close and her lovers, well, not so close. "Solo sex" was possible for women, and vibrators have been glamorised too, while masturbating men are still just wankers, Jan pointed out.

Domestic life, which is complicated and co-dependent, seemed less attractive to people these days in the way it is discussed and theorised about. Jan thought it was very positive that women were no longer forced in the home or the home and work as a matter of course.

The ideal friend (indeed, it was pointed out later by some of the audience, the ideal man), was a gay man who could call a woman "girlfriend!" as Gok Wan does when he emotionally supports his subjects through their makeovers. In fact the Sam character in Sex etc who has serial sexual encounters without ties has often been interpreted as simply a gay man with a woman's body.

Babies in the Masai culture (featured recently in Tribal Wives) are celebrated in a hopeful way. Babies are no longer romanticised in our society and the problems one experiences as a parent are the medium through which they are discussed. Most aspects of relationships are problematical and considered from their break on the expression of individuality and constraints of freedom that they impose.

A co-dependent relationship of any kind is seen as a minefield of difficulties, which was a pity because, as human beings, what are we if we are not social beings? The social trends and changes are experienced individually and it is difficult to step back from those experiences and to see them clearly. For all the celebration of the freemale, it was still problematic in some ways and people still often felt sorry for them in a certain way. Bridget Jones worried about being eaten by dogs when noone noticed she had died.

One of the interesting responses Jan had during the course of her research was from a single woman in her early 40s. Thiswoman felt that, rather than being the most important person in one person's life, she had become "semi-important" to a number of people.

Many questions were put to Jan and she had obviously had many people there thinking along very many lines. For example, why weren't the spinsters of yesteryear seen as problems during the times when society was more rigid and marriage more expected?

Intimacy itself obviously still existed but had it been devalued or changed much by the perception of it as a potential problem?

It was striking how young students in their freshers' early weeks were gregarious and drank a lot to meet lots of other people while the risk of drink spiking and date rape was uppermost in their minds and its risks heavily publicised.

Masculinity of any kind was seen as a problem by many and so the single man was just not discussed for that reason, perhaps.

Had the institution of the family been so devalued that, although people still live in families, its overarching authority had perhaps disappeared?

Even "tighty whitey" model David Beckham, a model of masculinity, was pretty camp.

The man who was the Marlborough man of the 60s and 70s ads, that American icon of masculinity, had actually died of AIDS. Perhaps what we were seeing was less the death of masculinity, however, and more the crisis of femininity.

Jan pointed out that commitment is something that is now seen as risking failure and that the family had certainly weakened as an institution as was now seen as a sort of lifestyle choice. The spinsters of the past were often unmarried through a lack of choice due to males being killed in wars. Indeed, those of the 1930s who were denied pensions because of their status, but were able to collectively explain their situation and had campaigned to make government change its mind. Today's spinsters were very different, presented as people who made an individual choice but who often had not.

One woman Jan had interviewed had been considered single by her friends but had in fact been having a long-term affair. Another had presented herself as a singleton but her lifestyle was more based on the fact that her only quite good job could not pay for the Persian cat and the lovely loft, so she was living with her dad in a kind of mutual position of care. It is much more positive to describe yourself as a singleton who has made a choice than a spinster who lives with your dad.

Even Beckham, Jan said, is still a married man with kids, whatever else. The many questions of perception of the changes in women's position in society had been approached by the media in certain ways that did not really describe how lives were actually lived. Having been interviewed on singletons many times by journalists because of her work, Jan said that whatever she said, however subtly she tried to draw the picture of what she had found, the feature nearly always centred on how great it was to female and free –although the Daily Mail could often contradict itself on this question by running an unhappy singleton story in the same week!

Remarkably, to the students in the room, Jan was able to say that there had been almost no cases of drink-spiking date rape in many years, despite the perception among young people that it was rife.

Some in the Salon said there was an obsession with categorising people as types these days, in the manner of a Victorian naturalist that seemed not to describe people how they really were.

Jan finished by pointing out that in Britain there were no real attempts to uphold the family theoretically as a matter of urgent need or self-interest as there had been in the US, but that these attempts had been unsuccessful even there. Whatever the positive aspects of the portrayal of single women, many were still seen as some sort of failure. The labels or categories such as yummy, slummy and even green mummies were part of the cosumerisation of people's lifestyle choices.

The Brighton Salon would like to thank Dr Jan Macvarrish for a fascinating introduction. Personally, I felt that her point about obtaining a distance from one's own immediate experience of society as an individual was crucial. When we can all listen to people who have researched these sorts of subjects and then discuss their findings in public, I think that, whatever one's personal position, it allows one to step back and consider these very subjective questions more objectively.

To read Jan's work see: http://www.socresonline.org.uk/11/3/macvarish.html

Sean Bell, Salon Diarist