The Evolution of Unmarried Couples Among Young Romanians. A Comparative Investigation: Romania/France, Practices, Representations and Values
The Evolution of Unmarried Couples Among Young Romanians. A Comparative Investigation: Romania/France, Practices, Representations and Values

Summary/Abstract: For more than thirty years the complex landscape of the "new" contemporary conjugalities is in the heart of the international reflections on the family and the private life, reflections which try to seize in depth the meanings, the expectations and the reference values which organize the life couple today. What is it in Romania? Following a totalitarian regime imposing the model of a legitime nuclear family, the post communist period knows deep conversions of the representations and the practices concerning the private life. These transformations, obviously more visible to the youngest, concern at the same moment the development of the free union, the progressive emergence of the democratic values, the slow but deep transformations of the institution of marriage itself. We still arrange nevertheless few researches and data which report these transformations. This communication presents the results of the first sociological investigation dedicated to the unmarried couple in Romania. This qualitative inquiry based on near hundred of interviews allows revealing in depth the actual conversions of the contemporary conjugality. We try so to observe how redefines today the category of the couple, and in particular the way that the representations, the practices and the values integrate the question of the gender equality, and how the current transformations testify of the inscription of Romania in a certain direction of the evolution of the contemporary modernity. This work joins in a comparative perspective Romania - France with which the object is to seize the convergences and the differences between the countries.

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