In my master's thesis, I deal with postmodern forms of intimacy among young people. In doing so, I mainly focus on heteronormativity and mononormativity, which I try to remove from their central role in the concept of intimacy. I want to emphasize above all the colorfulness of sexual orientation and raise awareness of the occurrence of many forms of intimate relationships in which especially young people participate today. Finally, I discuss the absurdity of the binary dichotomy of intimacy and the resulting stigma, and present the thoughts of author Ferrer (2018b) about one of the most important new love discourses.
The presented theories were not chosen randomly. Instead I wanted to bring attention to those aspects of intimacy that I think are overlooked in the field of research into the intimate lives of young people. With this in mind, I extracted conceptions of intimacy which are less represented in research from the persons own narratives.
I included 6 people in the purposive sample, to whom I assigned the statistically most common names in Slovenia in 2020. I conducted semi-structured interviews and deductively coded the obtained data. The results show the diversity of conceptions of intimate relationships. In the case of two single interviewees a difference in the perception of the concept of being single was revealed. Julija enjoys her freedom immensely, so when the time comes, she also wants a designer relationship. Meanwhile, Hana has a lot of traditional intimate beliefs and values and needs a partner by her side so that she can be actualized. Ema never questioned her heterosexual orientation until she met her now wife. Luka felt that he was gay from an early age, yet he was nonetheless in a relationship with a girl for 4 years. He is now married to a boy with whom they have a designer relationship. Neither Mia nor Zala have ever questioned their sexual orientation, but we can detect a departure from the currently dominant discourse of intimacy with both of them. With Zala, especially through the perception of the concept of cheating, and with Mia, among other things, through BDSM practices.
As a result, I think it is important to be aware of the limitation of intimacy by mono- and heteronormativity, as they persistently hide the fluidity, hybridity and singularity of intimate relationships.
With all this, I wonder why we still tend to engage in only one form of partnership, if more and more often, at least among young people, I perceive the diversity and individuality of intimacy.
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