The aim of this book has been to show that it is now becoming possible to live, love and form a family without sex, without children, without a shared home, without a (male or female) partner, without a working husband, without a heterosexual orientation and without a ‘biological’ sexual body. As we have seen, the presence of the Millennial generation and the Web 2.0 culture and environment greatly helps.

The force of the Millennials, the positive qualities of young people who have grown up in a globalised, changing and reflexive world, has overturned many commonplaces and stereotypes (Greenberg and Weber, 2008; Taylor and Keeter, 2010; Rainer and Rainer, 2011; Stanton and Hess, 2012). Millennials are more accepting than were older generations of non-traditional family arrangements, from mothers of young children working outside the home, to adults living together without being married. And the Millennials are also distinctive in their social values; they stand out in their acceptance of homosexuality, interracial dating and expanded roles for women and immigrants (Taylor and Keeter, 2010).

The main question that has motivated much of the thinking behind this book is the following: are changing gender identities and roles influencing planning choices among couples, the processes of family formation and models of fatherhood and motherhood, and, if so, how and in what ways? We have also tried to describe how the changes in relationships and family life fit into the bigger pattern of cultural change in the last few decades, trying to understand the reciprocal interconnection between the cultures of the past and contemporary generations. The interplay between past and present raises the crucial question of how the ‘new’ digital and Millennial modernity relates to and interacts with the ‘old’: how institutions, norms, rules and structures of modernity coexist and interpenetrate the new.

Conceptualising contemporary modernity (see, eg, Lyotard, 1979; Giddens, 1990, 1991; Bauman, 1992; Beck, 1992; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2001; Taylor-Gooby, 2005; Beck and Grande, 2010), it becomes more and more crucial to consider the interplay, tensions and contradictions between modernity's ‘imperative of stability and order’, including the expression of collective identities and interests, and the fragmentation, individualisation and fluidity of contemporary (gender) identities.