Romantic turning points and patterns of leavinghome: contributions from qualitative research in asouthern European countryMagda Nico

Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), Centro de Investigação e Estudos de Sociologia(CIES-IUL), Lisboa, Portugal

ABSTRACTThe process and timing of leaving home in Europe has been gaining academicattention the past decades. This is so because this demographic and transitionalevent provides evidence about the cultural and structural heterogeneity inEurope. Types and timing of conjugality and differences about housingmarkets, together with cultural contexts and values, are usually given asconjoint causes for the mentioned heterogeneity. But the effects of love-related events in the process and timing of leaving home do not begin orend at conjugal unions. Ruptures, heartbreaks, disputes and conjugalorientations have strong consequences in the trajectories towards adulthood.These effects can only be grasped through qualitative research, capable ofgiving love and affection the analytical protagonist role they deserve. Onlyaccumulation of comparison-friendly qualitative knowledge on romantictrajectories can allow the study of the heterogeneity of conjugal trajectories.In this research, 52 Portuguese young adults were inquired by biographicalinterviews and life calendars. Holistic-form analysis provided evidence that thelove-related events are significant for changes in the residential trajectories.Five cases were chosen to illustrate the three clusters identified: ‘longrelationships and delayed departures’, ‘heartbreaks and breakups, speedingup residential autonomy’ and ‘out of the closet, into a new home’.

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 3 March 2015; Accepted 7 March 2016

KEYWORDS Southern Europe; leaving home; turning points; life course; transitions to adulthood;qualitative research

Introduction

In the two past decades, the process and timing of leaving home in Europehas been attracting increasing academic attention in both youth studiesand life-course research. This is because the demographic and transitionalevent of leaving the parental home is an indicator of social change in the

© 2016 European Sociological Association

CONTACT Magda Nico magdalalanda@gmail.com Centro de Investigação e Estudos de Sociologia(CIES-IUL), Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), Av. das Forças Armadas, 1649-026 Lisboa, Portugal

EUROPEAN SOCIETIES, 2016http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616696.2016.1172718

processes of transition to adulthood (Aassve et al. 2002), and an analytical‘blessing’ that is exceptionally good at indicating structural, cultural andindividual conjoint effects and heterogeneities across Europe (Billari2004). So although literature suggests the process of leaving home isoften the cause or result of work or family transitions, school-to-worktransitions and family formation processes still occupy a hegemonicplace in studies on youth and transitions to adulthood. However, a holisticunderstanding of transitions to adulthood that takes the intertwinednature of every sphere of life into account can only gain from the perspec-tive offered by studying the process of leaving home, as it interacts withthe classic transitional spheres (Nico 2014).

The different types and timings of the beginning of conjugality statuses,the extraordinary disparities between housing markets,1 and also culturalcontexts and values, are usually given as interrelated causes of the hetero-geneity of the different European countries in terms of the age at andprocess by which people leave home. The countries with homeowner-ship-oriented housing markets that offer few opportunities or youth pol-icies for transitional, rented, shared, and/or affordable living arrangementsare predominantly found in Southern Europe. Together with the fact thatmore recent generations of young people do not seem to acquire the econ-omic conditions needed to leave home alone without a romantic partner,this has contributed to an increase in the age at which people have beenleaving home in these countries (in comparison with Nordic or Scandina-vian ones, for instance). Portugal – the context of the present case study –is a clear example of this (Nico and Caetano 2015c). Compared to othercountries, the association of residential semi-autonomy2 to enrolment inhigher education is very limited and does not have a relevant effect onthe age of leaving home. Nonetheless, it has been increasing (Ramos2015), and qualitative research shows that educational paths and achieve-ments also have an important impact on the process – much more thanthe timing – of leaving home. This topic is developed further below.

The tendency to leave home through conjugality rather than individu-ally in southern countries is, however, over-interpreted under the influ-ence of individual, religious and/or cultural values (Nico 2014, 2015a).Because comparative research projects on these matters are hegemonicallyquantitative, the extent to which these alleged social values and orien-tations are actually reflected in young people’s trajectories remains a

1Related to the dichotomy of homeownership vs. renting, the issues of accessibility and affordability, theexistence of youth housing policies, etc.

2That is, leaving home to study in a distant location, but remaining financially dependent on the family.

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‘black box’ (Holdsworth et al. 2002). As the demographic events they are,marriage or entry into a partnership do not provide sufficient informationfor conclusive analysis of the effect of young people’s romantic and cul-tural orientations. This is because the effect of love-related events onthe process and timing of leaving home does not begin with conjugalunions. The consequences that romantic breakups, heartbreaks and dis-putes have for trajectories towards adulthood are substantial, but almostimpossible to research in quantitative terms. This is especially true ofleaving-home processes, particularly in countries like Portugal, whereyoung people apparently still mainly rely on romantic paths to leavetheir parental home (Nico 2011).

This is an important methodological implication of this article. Theeffects of romantic turning points can only be grasped through qualitativeresearch, capable of giving love and affection the analytical protagonistrole they deserve in the overall understanding of transitions to adulthood.They should be grasped, however, through longitudinal lenses, that taketemporality and causality issues seriously and thoroughly. This chrono-logical concern to biographical methods is a step towards the necessarycomparability between qualitative research, namely about such unstandar-dised and/or intimate events. Thus, recognition and accumulation of com-parison-friendly qualitative knowledge on romantic trajectories isnecessary for the study of the heterogeneity across territories and trans-formation across time of conjugal trajectories and orientations. This istrue for many other qualitative research and sociological topics: the intro-duction, in qualitative inquiry mechanisms, of comparability instruments(such as the life calendar).

The present paper presents evidence from research in which 52 youngPortuguese adults were surveyed using biographical interviews and lifecalendars – evidence that contributes to a better understanding of theso-called ‘black box’ (Nico 2011). Holistic-form analysis of these 52cases confirmed that romantic careers and events had a relevant impacton young people’s residential trajectories. Identification of all the romanticturning point events in the respondents’ trajectories revealed three typesof relationship between ‘Love event & Leaving home’. Five individualcases were chosen to illustrate these ideal types, and other cases wereused as brief complementary examples. The three types found are ‘longrelationships & delayed departures’, ‘heartbreaks and breakups & thespeeding-up of residential autonomy’, and ‘out of the closet & into anew home’. These types are used to structure the presentation of theresults. This presentation format was chosen in order to avoid the

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failure ‘of much qualitative work in the postmodern or narrative modes’,which makes the researcher’s ‘interactive research process the centre ofstudy in itself’ and causes him/her to ‘forget what can be learnt fromthe stories which are told’ (Thompson 2004: 254).3 Respecting the factthat turning points are ‘processes’ (Abbott 2001) or ‘stories’ (Becker1994), individual cases are presented and analysed simultaneously,rather than detaching sentences from their narrative and logical sequence– a format that has already been used in several publications (such asLahire 2004 [2002]; Thomson 2009; Henderson et al. 2009 [2007],among many others). This analysis and type of presentation hopefullyhelp reinforce the need to see leaving home as a process and not an‘outcome’.

Falling in and out of love and contemporary processes ofleaving home

Leaving home has quite recently acquired the status of an autonomousindicator of adulthood. In the mid-twentieth century no generationalunit would have attributed that important and autonomous a status to‘living independently’, unless it was somehow related to other markersof adulthood (Hareven and Adams 2004: 363). Leaving home was solelythe means and symbol of a successful transition into a different, sociallyrecognised, socio-demographic sphere of life (such as marriage, parent-hood or the labour market) (Blatterer 2009 [2007]). This occurredwithin a specific socio-economic and historical context that providedthe conditions needed for the transitions to be concentrated in time,with great interdependency and co-occurrence. Some authors call thisperiod a ‘historical anomaly’, for having exceptionally rapid transitionsto adulthood (Fussel and Furstenberg 2005: 59; Furlong and Cartmel2007 [1997]: 56; Mitchell 2007 [2006]: 8). However, since the 1980’sand 1990’s residential autonomy has become a marker of adulthoodthat is valid in itself (as it was at the beginning of the century, for differentreasons). Nowadays, even when leaving home does not represent themeans to accomplish any other transitional event, it is an end in itself,and represents an important transition to adulthood (Goldscheider andGoldscheider 1999: 34). In this sense, the increased importance of residen-tial autonomy in comparison to other transitional markers, such as leaving

3Nonetheless, it was also due to the holistic character of this analysis and the word limit of this article, thatonly few and short quotations were presented here. Complete transcript of the interviews can be madeavailable upon contacting me.

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school, entering the labour market, initiating a conjugal relation or havinga child (Jones 1995: 1), has been stressed since the 1990’s. Its analysis alsoprovides comparative value added, in the sense that at a time of ‘overallsocial and economic convergence in European countries, it is hard tofind social indicators with such striking differences among EU countriesas those related to leaving home’ (Aassve et al. 2002: 259).

Leaving home is one of the events that contribute to the ‘demographi-cally dense’ (Rindfuss 1991) period within the transition to adulthood; butthis period is also particularly dense and rich in turning points that arecapable of converting ‘normal’ into ‘choice’ biographies and vice versa,of re-directing a person’s life in unsuspected or unplanned directions,or of having discrete, accumulated or immediate effects throughout his/her life course. These turning points are an excellent example of thevery essence of life course theory and should not be neglected in researchthat intends to capture life in its movement across time. Some researchprojects have been trying to establish the sociological importance ofthese moments, especially in the early adulthood period (Thomson et al.2002; Thomson 2009, Henderson et al. 2009 [2007]), but many investi-gators have encountered obstacles, particularly in identifying, selecting,collecting and comparing them. Part of the problem with the scientific val-idity of these events has to do with the fact that they are located betweentwo opposite epistemological postures. Where the quantitative and some-what positivist causality paradigm is concerned, some authors argue thatthe study of individual turning points constitutes ‘undoable science’ (Lie-berson 1985), because it is impossible to determine the causal effect ofsuch events with precision. Others, concerned with a comprehensiveunderstanding of life, argue that despite the impossibility of measuringthe effects of these events on a person’s life, ‘we need a quite differentkind of research and theory than we are accustomed to’ (Becker 1994),one that is capable of tackling the stories, history and processes behindindividual trajectories – in the present case, residential ones.

Turning point events, which are complex combinations of personal andsituational attributes, provide new avenues of research (Shanahan andPorfeli 2007: 107–8) with regard to residential trajectories. They areinstruments through which individuals understand their life trajectory(Shanahan and Porfeli 2007: 117), and should therefore be attributedthe status of a legitimate empirical object in the social sciences. It is,however, still necessary to carefully define and circumscribe just what ismeant by ‘turning points’. Turning points are defined less by the improb-able (as chance events are) or negative (as critical points are) nature of the

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event-as-cause, and more by the effect – voluntary or not – they have onthe redirection of the life course. This consequently implies the subjectiveand individual evaluation of the mere existence of that effect. Turningpoints are thus defined by the restructuring effect – voluntary or otherwise– they have on the course of individual lives. The mere existence of aturning point implies its identification by the individual, for they are‘inherently narrative events’ (Abbott 2001: 251) and must be identified ret-rospectively (George 2009: 169). For one reason or the other, these aremoments that redefine the future and create a rupture with the past(George 2009: 169).

The turning points considered in the present research were the roman-tic ones. This choice took account of the results of a larger, quantitativeresearch project on leaving-home processes in Europe, which confirmedthat conjugality was one of the most important predictors of the timingof leaving home on one hand, and the importance of love-related eventsin the redirection of housing projects and autonomy of the Portuguesecase study on the other (Nico 2011).

Methods and data

In order to comply with the proposed definition of turning points, themethodological design employed an important set of criteria, not onlywith regard to data collection, but also to the selection and theoreticalclustering of the turning points and the way in which data are analysedand presented.

The data collection method was designed to suit the concept of ‘turningpoint’, as well as to avoid the danger of the ‘biographical illusion’ high-lighted by Bourdieu (1997 [1993]). To that end data were collected (andconstructed) by a combination of biographical interviews and life calen-dars. This mixed technique was applied to 52 young adults with differentsocial backgrounds, residential situations, gender and educational status.A life grid was filled out in order to both structure the interview andenhance conversation and biographical accounts (Nico and Van derVaart 2012; Nico 2015b).

These individuals were selected and contacted using the snowball strat-egy. Each one was a complete stranger to the researcher and was indicatedby a shared friend or co-worker. The fact that both the interviewer and theinterviewee, who were strangers at the time of the interview, had a sharedacquaintance immediately produced an implicit intermediated trust. Thismade the researcher a ‘particular kind of confidant, the kind that disappears

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after the interview’, to whom secrets can more easily be told, and the ‘recep-tor of words to which not even those the closest to us have access to’ (Lahire2004 [2002]: 33). The interview became a ‘joint construction’ (Clausen1998), in which the known ‘confessional effect’ (Brückner and Mayer1998: 152) provided rich, detailed and profoundly reflexive pieces of infor-mation. This was decisive for the identification of the turning points in theinterviewees’ lives and the explanation of their effects.

This method proved suited to collecting the complexity and detail ofthe story the respondents told when given the opportunity to enunciateand simultaneously elaborate on all the episodes that influenced theirlife courses. Because only the detail testifies to the importance of theevent (Becker 1994: 186), this level of information was fundamental tothe observation and identification of turning points as processes(Abbott 2001) or stories (Becker 1994: 188). Alongside the narratives (bio-graphical interviews recorded and subjected to content analysis), it wasalso important to collect chronologically organised data – a goal thatwas achieved through completing a life calendar, which provides themeans to more precisely analyse the interdependency and sequence ofall the events (demographic or not, important or irrelevant, in the narra-tive account of the respondent’s life course).

The selection of the data relevant to this analysis what done thoughtvarious steps. The first step was the identification of turning pointsacross the life course of each individual. This has primarily to be doneby the interviewee him/herself, due to the very nature of these events.They are ‘inherently narrative events’ (Abbott 2001: 251) that can onlybe self-identified retrospectively, (George 2009: 169). The process wentthrough the following steps:

(1) The researcher identified and filtered the turning points with someeffect on the residential career (N = 39 in 27 trajectories).

(2) These turning points were free-coded according to intimate and lifespheres, and those related to romantic and love experiences (17 outof the 39) were filtered for the present article. The other clusters ofturning points identified were ‘death, grief and illness’ and ‘agencyand reflexivity’ – referring to moments of reflection or re-interpret-ation of the past (McLeod and Almazan 2002: 396).

(3) The 17 romantic turning points identified were coded according to:(a) Their romantic nature. The categories that emerged from the

material were: ‘Long relationships’, ‘heartbreaks and breakups’,and ‘out of the closet’.

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(b) Their residential effect. Here the categories that emerged fromthe material were: ‘delayed departures’, ‘speeded-up departures’,and ‘into a new home’.

(4) The final typology found – which is in principle mutually exclusive,but leaving home is a process, so different types may apply to thesame person at different life moments – links the two preliminarytypes of turning point: ‘Long relationships, delayed departures’,‘Heartbreaks and breakups, speeding up residential autonomy’, and‘Out of the closet, into a new home’.

Love-related events and leaving-home processes

Romantic love is a force for individual change (Person quoted by Thorsell2002: 131) and creates social relations (Torres 1987, 2002). This is truebecause ‘affection is a form of creation par excellence of social life, inboth a metaphorical and a real sense’. The ‘theoretical importance oflove’ is therefore assumed here – that is, love is analysed as an elementof social action and consequently of social structure (Goode 1959: 38).In the present article we consider both the positive and negative (relation-ship breakups, heartbreaks, etc.) sides of love to be a relevant ‘kind ofdriving force for action which, within the context of the values of contem-porary societies, is powerful enough to create new social relations’ (Torres2004: 18). ‘Sociology must not allow positivist myopia to deny’ emotionsand feelings the ‘status of scientific object’ (Lopes 2002: 59).

The importance of the relationship between the family formationprocess and the timing of leaving home in Europe has been widelyaddressed in the literature. It has mainly been analysed using quantitativedata, and the findings have helped explain most of the heterogeneity in thetiming of living home in Europe, since conjugal destinations are associatedwith leaving home at higher ages, and therefore with southern Europeancountries and/or less recent generations (Nico 2011). However, anapproach of this type, based solely on quantitative data and extensivemethodology, is not capable of capturing the intentionality and the impro-visations involved in these moments of synchronisation and de-synchro-nisation of romantic trajectories and leaving-home processes.

The importance of love-related career and performance during thetransition to adulthood comes in two shapes. On one hand, learninghow to begin, maintain and end romantic relationships is undoubtedlyone of the most important skills in the transition to adulthood from the

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personal development point of view (Snyder 2006: 161 quoted by Reifman2011: 20; Regalia et al. 2011: 150–1). On the other, because there is a greatinterdependence between the various careers and spheres of life, the factthat love has that modifying power (Manning et al. 2011: 317) means itinterferes with transitions to adulthood in a holistic manner.

However, neither is the interdependency of spheres of life the sameacross an individual life course, nor is this relationship immune tosocial stratification by sex, social background, or especially education.More highly educated young adults are overrepresented in the group ofindividuals who left home without a romantic partner, renting ratherthan buying an apartment and recording a much higher number ofromantic relationships and longer periods with no relationships. Theseindividuals tend to leave home alone either as a rebound from abreakup (more women), or as a consequence of entering the labourmarket (more men). They present less predictable life sequences, butthe timing of leaving home is more standardised and earlier. On theother hand, young people with lower educational levels are overrepre-sented in the group of individuals who left the family home to live in aconjugal relationship, buying more than renting, recording a more norma-tive life sequence and romantic relationship patterns, but presenting amuch less standardised and much later timing in terms of leavinghome. As mentioned above, the romantic turning points with effects onresidential careers were clustered in three groups. One was ‘Long relation-ships, delayed departures’, where trajectories are characterised by a stronginterdependency between the timing and duration of the process ofleaving home and the circumstances of the relationship maintainedwhile co-residing with parents. The second was ‘Heartbreaks and break-ups, speeding up residential autonomy’. This group, where women areoverrepresented, is characterised by processes of leaving home involvingrebounds from broken relationships and heartbreaks. Breakups have amajor effect on a shift in or reconversion of life plans that include residen-tial autonomy. The third group comprises young people whose residentialautonomy directly had to do with their homosexual orientation and thefact that co-residing with their parents was preventing them from fullyexperiencing and assuming their homosexuality (Table 1).

Long relationships, delayed departures

The main characteristic of this group is that long relationships increase theage at which people leave home – that is, a longer relationship suggests

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individuals with a greater propensity to postpone leaving the parentalhome. This is because in these cases the expectation that the residentialproject will eventually be a conjugal one is stronger for at least one ofthe members of the couple. In this sense, being in a long-term relationshipimplies a smaller window of opportunity for individual action towardsresidential autonomy. This was as frequent for men as for women. Thispropensity to postpone leaving home can occur for various reasons:‘linked lives’, ‘dealing with inertia’, and ‘relationship protocols’.

Lives are linkedThe synchronisation of two individual life courses in a couple’s trajectoryis of key importance, especially for the most traditionally orientated youngpeople: those who intend to leave home through conjugality, particularlymarriage and homeownership. A conjoint optimal point in the two pro-fessional careers is needed for these young people to identify a perfecttiming for leaving home (together). Since professional and personallives have their own ups and downs, often alternately, years may passbefore that double optimum point occurs. Having strong expectations

Table 1. Ideal types of romantic turning point and their residential consequences.

Type

Prevalentsocial

characteristics

Before turning point After turning point

Romanticturning point

Biographicalparadigm

Residentialconsequence

Biographicalparadigm

Longrelationships,delayeddepartures

Women andMen

No turningpoint – toostable arelationship

Relationshipand familyformation asthe centre

Postponedresidentialautonomy

No change

Qualified andNon-qualified

Traditionalfamily values

Heartbreaksandbreakups,speeding upresidentialautonomy

Women Breakup Relationshipand familyformation asthe centre

Anticipatednon-conjugalresidentialautonomy

Identity, leisureand work atthe centre ofthe biography

QualifiedMobileTowardsrenting

Heartbreaks(due tounilateraldecisions)

Out of thecloset, into anew home

Men Decision tolive inaccordancewith sexualorientation

Leisure at thecentre ofthebiography

Anticipatednon-conjugalresidentialautonomy

Identity andfreedom atthe centreof thebiography.

Plans to have arelationship atthe centre ofthe biography

QualifiedBoth traditionand non-tradition-orientedfamilies

Towardsrenting orhomeownership

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of getting married and being a homeowner also helps increase the timespent in pursuit of residential autonomy. The combination of theseaspects with a low social background and/or economically challenged situ-ation, as well as a low level of educational attainment, makes the ‘strategicadaptation’ (Giele and Elder 1998: 9–10; Elder and Giele 2009: 14), orchanges in biographical paradigms, even more difficult.

The following case is an example of how ‘lives are linked’ (Elder 1994),and how the occurrence or absence of certain events in one’s life coursecan significantly affect the timing of and events in another’s life course.The fewer the instruments for a ‘strategic adaptation’, the greater the post-ponement of the moment of leaving home. The case of Ana, ‘the eternalbride’, illustrates this quite well.

Ana4 is 29 years old, and for the last 11 she has been Nuno’s girlfriend. Somepeople ask her, ‘So Ana, when’s the wedding? Just dating, dating… ’, but shereplies, ‘You have to date while you can’.

Ana’s parents overprotected her in her professional, relationship and residentialcareers. They did this by separating school and work – they wanted her to onlystart looking for a job after she finished school. As is typical in lower socialclasses, it was Ana’s father who got her her first job, where she has spent thelast 8 years. They also did it by controlling her love life as much as theycould. Ana has had only one boyfriend, Nuno. This relationship did not eman-cipate her from her family; on the contrary. Finally, when it comes to residentialchoices and expectations, although Ana has spent most of her life living in arented apartment, she has clear and strong aspirations to buy her own.

The difficult synchronisation of Ana’s and Nuno’s professional situationshas been very important to the postponement of the moment of leavinghome. Before Nuno managed to recover from a long period of unemploy-ment, Ana’s company was restructured and she went from full-time topart-time work against her will. This has naturally prevented them fromgetting a mortgage. This is why her friends call Ana the ‘eternal bride’.

Finding this conjoint optimal point is sometimes a strategy forced onone of the partners, in order to overcome the exaggerated postponementof residential autonomy. ‘Standby’ situations seem to be especially uncom-fortable for women. For instance, Susana5 told me: ‘Then Paulo didn’twant to get married’ and I said: ‘I have a job, you have a job, we havethe house, we have everything, why don’t you want to get married?What are we doing then? Dating all our lives?’; and Leonor shared that

4Ana, 29 years old, lives with her parents in a rented home, has a boyfriend, and is a part-time in the hand-ling sector in the airport. Her father is a mechanic, her mother a stay-at-home mum.

530 years old, secondary education, backoffice employee.

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she had to pressure her boyfriend to move in at once: ‘I said: what’s thedeal? When do you want to move in? It’s in or out, not in and out. Iwant concrete things!’

Breaking the chain of inertiaOn the probability of success of consensual union (and future marriage),Stanley et al. underline the centrality of the concept of inertia to the under-standing of romantic relationships in early adulthood (2011: 243). Theystate that the longer and more stable the relationship, the harder it is toend it. In the present research, this inertia refers to young adults whoface situations of low relationship satisfaction, but are unable to end therelationship.

There is a strong interdependency between the various spheres of life. Arupture in one of them will create a precedent and open a window ofopportunity to change many other things in life that were at the samelevel of dissatisfaction. Escaping ‘normal biography’ in one respectopens up an opportunity for a new life plan, for designing a ‘choice bio-graphy’ in a more creative and uninhibited manner. However, creatingthe precedent takes time, as Maria’s case shows us.

Not long after the interview, Maria6 ended her 8-year relationship with Pedro,found a new love and began a new relationship, left home), moved in with hernew boyfriend and left her job (where she was very unhappy, albeit on a verystable career path).

In Maria’s interview, statements such as ‘I let it pass’, ‘I simply let it go’, ‘I justlet things be’, ‘time passed and I did nothing about it’, and ‘I am resigned towhat I have’ were very frequent. This was how Maria described her past andpresent trajectory, by constantly identifying her lack of agency. ‘Life couldhave led to an accelerated personal growth and a different kind of maturity’‘but it didn’t’. Maria says she never had to try very hard to get anything.

Maria keeps herself distant from and unengaged in decisions that involve rup-tures in her life, but is nevertheless aware of that level of uncertainty. Whatunifies all these indecisions is a totalising inertia that Maria describes bysaying that: ‘the idea is that I am trying to keep all possibilities open andthen, when I feel prepared, begin to take all those risks and actually do some-thing about my life!’Maria somehow had the notion of what was about to happen: ‘all my spheresof life are connected in some way, so if I make profound changes in one,I must be prepared to keep up that pace in the others’. Ending her relationship

6At the time of the interview, Maria, 25 years old, lives with her father, has a boyfriend and a universitydegree and is a market analyst.

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was ‘not an end’, but clearly a beginning; an event that broke the chain ofinertia.7

The relationship protocolAlthough implicit, there is a sort of ‘relationship protocol’ that generallyprevents one member of the couple from moving on to renting orbuying an apartment on his or her own, without discussing it with thepartner. The greater the respect for this relationship protocol rule, thelonger leaving home is postponed. Making the decision to leave home pre-cipitates a conversation about future plans as a couple. This is becauseindividual decisions that have major consequences for the couple’spresent and future life are usually discussed and negotiated; failure todo so – that is, disrespecting this rule – can imply an early breakup.

It was the beginning of the end. The decision to buy an apartment on his ownirreversibly and profoundly changed António’s relationship with Madalena.‘And now I am going to tell you how not to ruin a relationship’, he beganhis story.

His ‘smart’ relationship with money and his need for exterior signs of successled him to think about buying an apartment. ‘At that time I thought it wasabout time to buy an apartment. At home everything was fine, but I reallyjust felt the need to do it.’Madalena was excluded from the search for and selec-tion and decoration of the apartment. António included his mum instead andgave her a key to get in when she wanted, with total freedom to decorate andchange things around. António himself now retrospectively recognises that‘it’s as though my apartment is my mother’s’. He didn’t interpret Madalena’sdetachment from the decisions made about the house until the end of therelationship was presented to him. ‘I don’t feel the house as my own’, Madalenatold him, while breaking up.

Heartbreaks and breakups, speeding up residential autonomy

In the majority of southern European countries residential emancipationmostly results from a conjugal project, marriage or consensual union(Nico 2011), but paradoxically is also frequently a consequence of abreakup or heartbreak. In these cases the breakup opens an enormouswindow of opportunity for individual action, namely for the reformula-tion of the original life plan and the recycling of old dreams and projects.Creativity for the design of new plans is also activated.

7From this point in the story onwards, Maria could be coded as ‘heartbreaks and breakups, speeding upresidential autonomy’.

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This pattern is gendered. In women, the end of the relationship is usedas a reason and pretext to move on to ‘life plan B’, be it already defined orimprovised in the rebound from the breakup. It is used as an opportunityto change the biographical paradigm. These reactions to the unexpected ordisruptive love-related event can be integrated into what Thomsondefined as the ‘emergence of a specifically female individualisation’(2009: 34). While women live these moments as ‘reset’ moments intheir transitions to adulthood, men tend to use them as ‘pauses’ in their‘life plan A’s’.

Just turned 26, Sara was at a vulnerable moment in terms of the path her lifewas taking. Although she had no regrets about her recent life choices, shewas unsure whether she was on the ‘right track’. ‘Because I see the timepassing by; I am now 26 years old – terrible!! And I don’t see many changesin my life, you know?’

Sara’s socialisation was based on strong work and consumption ethics and con-ciliated with an investment in higher education. Sara’s mother used to say:‘Again? What do you do to your money? You have to figure out somethingto do. I know someone who needs her house cleaned. Have you thoughtabout that?’ Yet at the same time she would say: ‘No, no, no, I’m the onewho pays for college stuff!’

At a certain point in her life, Sara converted what could have been considered a‘normal biography’ into a ‘standard biography’. ‘I felt like changing my life!’ Inher opinion, after the breakup was the right time to change. After all, thisrelationship was the last thing linking her to a lifestyle with which she nolonger identified. The support from her family was not total. Sara said thather father would have been more supportive of her decision to leave home ifshe had had a stable job at the time; but she felt there was no time to bewasted. She said: ‘I think it was the consequence of the end of that relationship.I just thought: “This cycle has ended here. Now things really have to change!”’Leaving home was the consolidation of a social mobility based on social andeducational capital. ‘It had to do with the fact that I wasn’t myself in thatplace anymore’. The end of the relationship broke the last link to that lifestyle.

Matilde8 is yet another example of changing biographical paradigms uponthe rebound from a heartbreak. Having had a long-term relationship withRui, she had developed expectations about leaving home to live with himas soon as they both entered the labour market. When Rui told her abouthis (individual) desire to go abroad to work, she was disappointed andheartbroken. After the relationship ended, she immediately re-prioritised

8Matilde, 28 years old, lives on her own, her mother is a seamstress and her father has a small business. Shehas a university degree, works as an auditor and does not currently have a boyfriend.

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her transitions to adulthood, precipitating her residential autonomy andhomeownership.

Out of the closet, into a new home

Although studies on transitions to adulthood are not usually exclusivelydedicated to determining the differences between the trajectories ofyoung heterosexual and young homosexual individuals, some havepointed out that ‘coming out’ is an important turning point in the lifecourse (Thomson 2007: 102), and that young homosexual people tendto leave home earlier than their heterosexual peers (Heath and Cleaver2003: 24–5).

Two tendencies can be found: (i) leaving home to avoid coming out tothe family – strategic autonomy; and (ii) leaving home after or because theindividual came out to the family – reactive autonomy. In our interviews,only male strategic autonomy was found. The following case illustratesthis autonomy, even in a family of origin with the potential to receivethe revelation with understanding and empathy, open dialogue and highlevels of wellbeing. Parents don’t ask, Luís doesn’t tell.

I had the idea that I didn’t want to wait for anyone in order to fulfil this projectof mine. Because I never know if it is going to happen or not, and the way thingsare going, the most probable thing is that I will never have that type of conjugalproject. So let’s get this out of the way quickly. I don’t want to be at my parents’home until I’m 50.

Luís goes on to explain: ‘being gay automatically gets you out of that [conjugal]race. And this opportunity to leave the race… It doesn’t mean you have tomake it your banner, but it becomes a part of your self-presentation. Soother people won’t expect you to be in that race anyway. The great thing isthat they don’t know what to expect. And that’s great!! I don’t have a stereotypeto follow!’

In other words, there is no ‘standard homosexual biography’. Standard biogra-phy is heteronormative. So for Luís there is no choice but to choose. For himthis is ‘great’!

Tiago illustrates a different pattern. He had already left home twice, eachtime related to different stages of his homosexual identity and life, but allhidden behind educational or work-related motives. The first time, he offi-cially left to study, but it was really to live his sexuality more freely; hewanted ‘freedom’. The second, he officially left to be closer to work, butthe real motive was to be able to move in with his boyfriend and have astable relationship.

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Conclusions

It would be wrong to limit conclusions about the important link betweenconjugality and leaving-home processes to the well-established evidencethat the countries where the age at which people leave home is higherare the ones where more young people leave home to get married orlive in consensual union. To do so would be to omit all the modifyingpotential that affection, love and sexuality has in the trajectoriestowards adulthood in particular and the life course in general, andwould categorise love as an event that only has sociological implicationsbecause of its demographic consequences; this would be to exclude allthe love-related events like ruptures, inertias, start-overs, heartbreaksand so on, by not affording them the status of independent variable thatthey deserve.

This article seeks to demonstrate that to omit this kind of analysis isto lose relevant information that contributes to the understanding ofsequences, timings and processes of transitions to adulthood. Suchomissions occur because love-related events suffer from the same meth-odological contempt as turning points. The apparent singularity of theevents contrasts with the recognition of their potential for explainingsocial action, structure and change. It is necessary to reject this con-tempt. The study’s greatest limitation concerns comparability andtheorisation, all the more so in that both the topics of this qualitativestudy are themselves seen as either extremely unstandardised and/orintimate, or sociologically useless. This lack of comparability inevitablymakes theorisation about family formation processes, interdependencyof spheres of life and processes of residential autonomy more difficult.

Only by subjecting the study of (romantic) turning points to compari-son-friendly data-collection and organisation instruments can this limit-ation be tackled. Where collection is concerned, instruments such as thelife calendar, which collect data on turning points, but also on thecorrect sequence of these and other events, are one of the possible waysto standardise data and make it more comparable (Nico 2015a). Organis-ation requires the coding of the three phases of a turning point in a lifecourse: what or in what life sphere is the turning point; what or in whatlife sphere is the consequence; what characterises the process inbetween (in terms of the positive or negative feature of the effect, the limit-ation of the effect or its dispersal across many different spheres of life, theimmediacy or delayed action of the effect; and lastly, was there was aslowing down or speeding up effect(s)?

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Three main conclusions can be drawn from this research. One is relatedto the centrality of and orientations towards conjugality. Love careers arenot necessarily conjugal. Due to their beginning, end or type of develop-ment, many romantic relationships have important consequences for thelife course during the period of the transition to adulthood. In order toachieve a holistic understanding of the life course, information thatpermits an analysis of love careers must therefore be collected. Onlythus can love fulfil its analytical dignity. Doing this allowed us to identifythe importance of relationship breakups to the re-directioning of lifecourses, and especially in the case of women, to the early beginning ofthe process of leaving home.

The second conclusion refers to the importance of relationship proto-cols, but also to their eventual variability across different territories. Quali-tative data on national specificity have permitted increasing layers ofunderstanding of the importance of conjugality in the process of leavinghome, but comparative data is still lacking. Data on the cultural variabilityof these relationship protocols, the link between these protocols and eachcountry’s housing market, and the cultural embeddedness of a commoneconomic fund as a prerequisite to enter conjugality, are needed. Theeffects of being homosexual on the timing and process of transitioningto adulthood must also be better explored and included in extensiveresearch.

A third conclusion refers to the apparent genderisation of the effect oflove-related turning points. Kimmel states that the period of transitionto adulthood is the most gendered in the whole process of human devel-opment (2008: 41 quoted by Reifman 2011: 23). Where the relationshipbetween interrupted love careers and the anticipation of leaving-homeprocesses is concerned, this genderisation is quite significant. The analy-sis of love careers confirmed the increased individual reflexivity pre-sented by women, their greater capacity for ‘strategic adaptation’(Elder 1994), and their better skills in recycling old projects andputting life-plan B’s into practice. Women thus demonstrate a muchgreater tendency to mobilise these negative love-related events in posi-tive and constructive manners, as ideal pretexts for changing their bio-graphical paradigm, thereby accelerating individual or individualistictransitions towards adulthood.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

EUROPEAN SOCIETIES 17

Funding

This work is supported by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia [Grant no. BPD/76580/2011].

ORCID

Magda Nico http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4803-1119

Notes on contributor

Magda Nico is a Sociologist specialising in Life Course research and methods, Familyand Youth. She holds a MS in Family and Society (2005), a Post-Graduation on DataAnalysis in Social Sciences (2008) and a PhD in Sociology (2011) from ISCTE-IUL.Her PhD topic was Transitions to Adulthood in Europe and Portugal in the LifeCourse Perspective, she has published on themes such as Individualized HousingCareers in a Familistic Society (Sociological Research Online), Critical Approachon De-standardization of the Life Course during the Transition to Adulthood(Journal of Youth Studies), Generational Changes, Gaps and Conflicts: a view fromthe South (Youth Perspectives) and Cultural and Biographical Illusions in EuropeanYouth Studies (book chapter in Critical Youth Studies for the 21st Century). She isone of the co-coordinators of the Family and Life Course research lines of the Portu-guese Association of Sociology. Magda is also the Portuguese representative in the‘Pool of European Youth Researchers’ of the European Commission/Council ofEurope Youth Partnership, for which she has published several reports and policypapers. She is also a researcher in the Measuring Youth Well Being project (FP7).

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