Co-Becomings of Companionships: Affective Negotiations With the Couple-Form

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which the couple-form and its normativity take part in the everyday life of companionships that are “other than couple” relationships. I develop the concept of affective negotiation to analyze the processes in which the companionships are experienced, practiced, and acknowledged. I study the affective negotiations particularly in relation to naming practices and comparisons and expectations around the relationship categories. The article is based on 20 semi-structured interviews with individuals who have important life companion(s) that they refer to as, for example, friends, flat-mates, animal companions, and ex-partners, or fields of multiple relationships. I analyze the data using feminist materialist methodologies and affect theories. Trough reading the data with the concept of co-becoming, I develop an understanding of companionships as dynamic processes lived and experienced in everyday life through entangled affective negotiations. I argue that the couple-form takes part in the co-becomings of companionships in multiple and often contradictory ways. The normativity of the couple-form emerges through affective tensions that may limit the possibilities of these co-becomings, for example by troubling the processes of “making sense” of the intimacies. The co-becomings are also world-making practices where new ways of relating are created and imagined; they include the potential to move away from the normative power of the couple-form and materialize in unexpected ways.