Of salsa and singlemuslim.com: Ethnographic insights about identity shifts and changed self-concepts in middle- aged women’s post-separation/divorce transitions

Sociologies of intimate life have debated whether contemporary intimacies are moving beyond the family, as people eschew the conventional cohabiting couple and pursue friendships or non-conventional partnerships. This paper draws from two separate ethnographic studies of middle-aged women’s lives after the breakdown of marriages and intimate relationships, one focusing on the middle class, White British women and the other on working class, British Asian Muslim women. Our studies nuance these discussions by considering the imperviousness of these framings to inequalities across age, race/ethnicity and class. We detail the baby steps onto the dating scene taken by middle-aged women post-divorce or separation and describe their engagement with public socio-sexual spaces. The meanings of singledom in middle age were complex. For women in both studies, the gains of independence sat awkwardly with what was imagined necessary for future intimacies, and the couple was described with both ambivalence and longing. We explore how race/ethnicity and class informed what independence from previous entanglements meant, how desire was expressed and how hopes for future good partners were conceptualised. The paper offers comparative insights into the continuities and changes in contemporary relationships focusing on the intersections between age, gender and heterosexuality in two different settings.