The challenges thrown up in previous chapters about families in society and the boundaries that may be constructed and confronted are taken even further in this final part. As the title of this book suggests, families should not necessarily be seen as the only or central arena for personal or intimate relationships. The boundaries between familial and friendship relationships may be changing. Some of the preceding chapters presaged such change, such as the importance of friendships to women in the fifties or to those affected by dementia. These themes are developed further in the next four chapters which give a more central place conceptually and empirically to ‘non-family’ living.

The first chapter, by Jamieson, focuses on practices of intimacy, moving the book from an analysis of families to relationships more widely. She notes that there are contradictory claims about the meaning and significance of intimacy and that there has been attention to boundaries in the conceptualisation of intimacy as well as in how it is practised. Typically, two main boundaries have been identified: boundaries between the familial and non-familial, although these are becoming increasingly blurred; and exclusionary boundaries between intimates (traditionally typified as couples) and the wider community, although again this boundary may be contested. Jamieson contends that not all practices of intimacy require exclusionary boundaries and that boundaries have been overemphasised in the conceptualisation of intimacy. However, she does not suggest doing away with the concept for analytical purposes, especially since there is considerable evidence that boundary work in relationships is often about power and hierarchies.

The second chapter concentrates on solo living as a way of understanding families, relationships and households. Wasoff, Jamieson and Smith provide quite detailed empirical analysis of who is living alone in the UK – the ‘stocks’ – and who is moving in and out of solo living – the ‘flows’. The evidence suggests increasing levels of solo living at all stages of the lifecourse, indicative perhaps of a redrawing of the boundary between family and household and a reshaping of the boundaries of different lifecourse stages. However, the evidence also suggests that transitions between solo living and living with others is commonplace, so that the boundaries between solo living and family living are frequently crossed.