HOW DISTANCE AFFECT RELATIONSHIP.

Processes of individualisation and globalisation do distance us from each other physically and emotionally. The effects of transience and the results of consumerism can make maintaining lasting relationships difficult. However, people still need and want to care for and depend on others. Distance makes caring intimacy difficult, but being apart changes how care is offered, it does not make it redundant.2Dual-career, dual-residence distance relationships can challenge pessimistic views of the “frailty of human bonds” (Bauman, 2003) within consumer capitalism. A distance relationship is one where couples spend much of their time apart, usually working in different towns during the week and travelling to reunite at weekends. In the past husbands may have gone away to work, fishing or to sea, for example. The contemporary distance relationships studied here differ because they are dual-career couples that have emerged as women have entered paid employment and especially as they have entered the professions. Typically, the couples have specialized jobs which make it difficult for them to both find employment in the same town. Instead of a family home to which the husband returns, each couple has their own house or flat, and most take turns visiting each other. The distance is crucial in these relationships, which may involve both translocal and transnational caring (Baldassar et al., 2007 :3-6), as partners shift in relation to each other and to family and friends. Whatever their circumlocutions they provide evidence that current emotional life is not entirely about self-gratification, that lack of proximity is not always disconnecting and, that within a world in which fluidity and plasticity are celebrated, things that move us (geographically and emotionally) might be positively perceived. Appreciation of auto­nomy is not an inevitable rejection of caring and people are creative in rethinking and reorganizing mutual care within the constraints that they face.
3Theoretical discussions of the constraints that globalisation and individualisation processes impose on mutual caring are evaluated in the first section of the paper. These processes are thought to disrupt the stability and nurturance of traditional communal bonds. The second section of the paper acknowledges some distancing, but also deals with the possibilities offered by doing intimacy differently. Distance relationships, as investigated in an Economic and Social Research Council (UK) funded study, serve as an example. The third section discusses how distance relationships encourage a rethinking of what constitutes satisfaction and its relation to less gendered forms of mutual caring. Primarily, the limitations of talking are weighed against the pleasures that mobility offers. In these distance relationships less physical, more abstract forms of caring have to be relied on, but such emotional support is no doubt central to all relationships. Such emotional care may be less tangible than situated, physical forms of care but is rooted in maintaining connection to the embodied particularity of others.